Back on dry land. This morning we decided to ingest a little culture along with our breakfast (wild Maine blueberry jam is a substance I could eat with a shovel), and visited the brand spanking new Abbe Museum in downtown Bar Harbor. The Abbe was founded in 1928 by Dr. Robert Abbe, a New York surgeon with a lifelong interest in the Native American peoples of New England. The original museum, which still stands today, was located at Sieur de Monts Spring, just inside Acadia National Park, but it was rather small and open only during the summer. The new facility, which opened in 2001, is right in the middle of town, open year-round, and a wonderful way to rest one's aching limbs while learning about the Wabanaki, the original inhabitants of Maine. Wabanaki, which means "people of the dawn", is a term that refers to the Maliseet, Micmac, Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy tribes, whose tribal territory once stretched north to the St. Lawrence River, south and east to the Atlantic coast, and west to Lake Champlain. Ravaged by European diseases, caught in the crossfire of France and England's titanic 18th-century struggle for world dominance, then forced off what was left of their land by resource-hungry Americans high on their manifest destiny, the Wabanaki's population plunged down as low as six thousand souls (from an estimated pre-European level of close to a hundred thousand). The story of their survival against all odds is told masterfully by the main ongoing exhibit "The Four Mollys", which chronicles the lives of four Wabanaki women named Molly, one from each of the past four centuries. Another great touch by the museum was the timeline, a staple of any historical museum. Only instead of starting with the distant past and working forward to the present, the designers of the museum started with the Wabanaki's present, and worked backwards through time - what a clever way to emphasize the living continuity of the tribes, rather than bury them under centuries upon centuries of archaeology. The Greeks should consider such a tack! And an unexpected treat: a screening of the silent 1930 film "The Silent Enemy", a remarkably sensitive portrayal of a Ojibway (the northern cousins of the Wabanaki) community driven by hunger to undertake a grueling march north in search of game, starring an all-Native American cast. Even the museum's gift shop was like another gallery, continuing a centuries-long tradition of displaying (and selling) the arts of native craftswomen. Mount Desert Island used to have a summer population of Wabanaki, who used to come to the island to fish and beat the summer heat; when the Americans finally turned Bar Harbor into a playground for the wealthy, the Native American men sold their skills as hunting, fishing, and camping guides, while the women wove and sold sweetgrass baskets. The Wabanaki presence in Bar Harbor is just a shadow of the old "Indian Camps", and most stores downtown now hawk moose t-shirts and blueberry pancake syrup, but at least in the Abbe Museum store you can still find (and buy, if you have the money! (we didn't)) authentic sweetgrass art - baskets, mock ears of corn, even little acorns and teacups!

The rest of the day was devoted to hiking. First we explored Bar Island, which is accessible from the town at low tide, and affords fantastic views of the waterfront and the mountains of Acadia National Park behind it. A funny thing - a giant amphibious truck was stuck on the bar when we crossed it. By the time we returned from the island, the massive truck had attracted a small crowd of curious onlookers, who treated the vehicle as if it had crash-landed from Mars. Come to think of it, it did look somewhat alien...

Finally, we drove into the park and trudged down the Coastal Path, which is a mostly horizontal trail that hugs the granite cliffs of MDI's eastern shores. Our quarry was the elusive Monument Cove, site of an odd rock formation caused by the erosion of the surrounding stone, resulting in a free-standing obelisk jutting out from the ground. No one marks this minor wonder on a map, probably because it's so difficult to get to - the cove's walls are steep, and the approaches somewhat dangerous - so I figured we'd just start heading down the path and hope we find it by accident. And we did, completely by chance! Sometimes the Zen way is the way to go.