Sunday, July 5, 1998Trials on the trails
By AUTHOR
Staff WriterCopyright © 1999 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
We'd been pedaling off-road for little more than a mile when the gravelly, double-tracked trail suddenly jutted upward and gapped for 30 feet. No bridge. Across the Great Works Stream in Kittery, we could see our course resume at the granite abutment and disappear into the leafy canopy.
Photographer Greg Rec, still astride his bike, looked warily at the breach. ''Maybe if you got a real good start . . .'' he joked, peering down at the unfordable river.
The old railroad trestle had been out for years. Strong enough to carry the great steam engines of the Portland, Saco and Portsmouth Railroad for nearly a century, it had collapsed under the weight of neglect and time.
We knew all this before we set out, yet we nurtured hope for a crossing, believing that someone before us had felled a tree or quarried stones and dropped them in a hopscotch pattern across the river. No such luck.
Walled off by a dense forest of pine and pointed fir to the west, we doubled back to poke out another possible eastward route beneath the heavy power lines that skirted the trail we followed. There I nearly ran over a Tonka-sized painted turtle in the middle of the sandy path. He blinked at us, hesitated, put one step forward, marked an inch of progress. By day's end he might make it to the Great Works.
I turned to Greg. ''Well,'' I said. ''I guess we've found our totem for the rest of the ride.''
Neither of us could guess at the time just how prophetic those words would be. The 47-mile ride I'd calculated to last six hours would more than double in duration, as the trail frequently disappeared beneath deep, stagnant pools of water, left us stymied as it crossed the Maine Turnpike, and sent us chasing any number of dead ends and wrong turns.
The paper trail
The Eastern Trail exists in that ephemeral realm of maps and atlases. You can follow the route from Kittery to South Portland, tracing the trail along Route 236 on to the short corridor around Witchtrot Hill in South Berwick. From there it picks up the old Eastern Division line - an abandoned railway - and follows it northeast through Kennebunk, Biddeford, Saco, Old Orchard Beach and the belly of the Scarborough marsh. At the South Portland line, it picks up another railroad right-of-way to the Fore River, where it connects with the city's paved ''Greenway'' to Bug Light Park.
Like wispy paper streets - those laid out by cartographers, not road-makers - the ET, as it's called, is still in the process of becoming. But for John Andrews, a Saco resident already being hailed as the father of the Eastern Trail, the trail's potential as a recreational corridor and engine for eco-tourism is as real as the mud on his mountain bike's knobby tires.
In Andrews' vision, the ET would connect to the Mountain Division, another proposed rail-and-trail system that would eventually run from Portland to Fryeburg along an abandoned Maine Central line that the state bought in 1997 for $1.1 million.
''Imagine being able to cycle from Kittery, through Portland, and right up to Fryeburg?'' Andrews says. ''It's a dream come true.''
More exciting is the prospect that the Eastern Trail could form a substantial leg of the East Coast Greenway, a proposed recreational trail stretching from Calais to Key West, Fla.
Until recently, Andrews conceded that the engineering studies and the improvements necessary to make the trail a reality were years away. There were at least two rivers where bridges would have to be rebuilt. The Maine Turnpike still had to be traversed. And in the wettest parts of spring, Andrews guessed that much of the trail would be too boggy to pedal through.
Then he got in touch with the National Rails to Trails organization. ''They told me that rather than wait, we should just declare the trail open,'' Andrews said. ''People using it would see the need for improvements and put pressure on local officials to get the job done.''
But before he could declare it open, somebody would have to travel it from point to point.
We probably weren't the right guys for the job. That didn't stop us.
Ready to blaze a trail
Although I've biked most of York County's paved roads, I had to borrow a friend's Cannondale mountain bike for the off-road trip. And Greg guessed he'd ridden about 10 miles on his Gary Fisher rig since coming to Maine a year ago.
Still, the allure of blazing a trail appealed to both of us (never mind that the trail happened to cut through the state's two most populous counties). The opportunity to notch a first, even a modest little first such as this, blinded us to some of the logistical difficulties, like crossing washed-out bridges or a four-lane toll highway.
After failing to cross the Great Works in our trip's first hour, we rejoined the trail near Agamenticus Road in South Berwick. According to our maps, we wouldn't run into any more significant waters until the Nonesuch River in Scarborough.
The operative word is ''significant.'' As we pedaled northward, crossing Knights Pond Road near the North Berwick line, the trail began to get muddy. Mud turned to puddles. Puddles grew to small vernal pools that harbored vast clouds of insects and a bright, brick-red form of algae. On several occasions, we had to jump off the trail and cross to the dry paths beneath the ever-present power lines.
We paid for these detours. While the Eastern Trail was broad and flat, the power line paths were loosely graveled and included pitches that seemed to rise straight up. Only the low gearing of the mountain bikes got us over those humps, our lungs burning and legs spun out.
Our plan was to reach Kennebunk just after 1 p.m., about three hours after starting in Kittery. But by 1:30 p.m., we were still south of North Berwick. At one impassable pool, we hopped off the trail and on to Route 4 at Varney's Crossing, where we stopped for lunch.
''Nice day for a bike ride,'' said the pizza man at Allard's Market.
''Sure is,'' I said, watching Greg pluck a wood tick from his calf.
The rest of the day we fared a little better. The trail dried up east of the Pratt-Whitney plant in North Berwick, where the railroad bed remained intact. Here it took little imagination to visualize the ET as it existed in the 1840s, when the Portland, Saco and Portsmouth Railroad carved the state's second railroad out of Maine's still-dense pine forest. The line was leased to both the Boston and Maine Railroad and the Eastern Railroad until 1873, when the B&M cut a parallel line through York and Cumberland County.
Eventually, B&M bought out its competitor, and by the 1940s it had discontinued the Eastern Division, which became a corridor for an underground natural gas pipeline.
Now the ties and rails are gone, but the trail was covered with fist-sized stones that knocked us back and forth as we rode. Our adventure nearly ended prematurely when, as the trail rose 15 feet above a brackish pond, I failed to hold my line and skidded over the edge.
But luck finally broke my way. Somehow, the big knobbies bit into the side of the embankment about halfway down, and there my slide ended. A little worse for wear, we struggled to Kennebunk and reached the trail head near the Maine Turnpike around 4:30 p.m. - more than six hours after leaving Kittery. Exhausted, we headed home, planning to complete the trek the next day.
Bikes and big business
Had we been tourists, we could have stayed at either of two hotels that gird the turnpike near the Eastern Trail crossing in Kennebunk. With a short, two-mile ride, we could have availed ourselves of the town's fine restaurants. And that's why cyclists aren't the only ones excited by the trail's prospects.
Proponents say the Eastern Trail could be a new economic engine for the area's tourist business.
''Cyclo-tourists aren't doing it because they're cheap,'' says Bill Heath, a Kennebunk cyclist and member of southern Maine's regional transportation advisory committee. ''They're cycling because they enjoy the experience. Studies show that they'll spend as much money from their pockets as tourists who come by car.''
Heath points to Vermont, whose cyclo-tourism industry reels in $14 million a year - more than that state's maple syrup business.
''Everybody feels, because the way the world is going, that they need to be interested in bicycle tourism,'' says Dave Moulton, director of the Ogunquit Chamber of Commerce. ''Our group would want me to be a part of any discussions about the Eastern Trail.''
Towns are also lining up behind Andrews' vision. Every community along the route has formally adopted the project and committed staff resources to make the trail a reality. The Southern Maine Regional Planning Office is on board too and this year budgeted $4,000 to get a more formal organization off the ground. Later this month, the first meeting of the Eastern Trail Alliance will be held to elect representatives from each town and city on the route and begin planning.
Back on the trails
If the first leg of the trip seemed fraught with problems, the second leg almost never got under way. The Maine Turnpike toll-taker wouldn't let us ride up the Exit 3 ramp to find our trail head. But after a half-hour of searching Kennebunk side streets, we chanced on to Emmons Road, which quickly turned to gravel, and then to a logging path. It crossed the trail near the Kennebunk River.
Although a bridge here was out too, we were able to ford the riffles easily. And for the next six or seven miles to Biddeford, the trail was in perfect condition. We saw two great blue herons lift ponderously from trailside ponds. We jumped families of dusting grouse in Arundel. I swear I saw a fox. No woodchuck moves that quickly, I insisted.
In Biddeford, the Eastern Division converges with the active Boston and Maine line, now owned by Guilford Transportation. So we rode side streets to Saco, where we picked up the gas line corridor off Moody Street. Again we had uninterrupted, uncommonly easy riding through the Old Orchard Beach pine barrens, across Mill Brook and through the Scarborough salt marsh.
On the northern side of Black Point Road, the Eastern Division became Eastern Road, home to a number of contemporary high-end subdivisions where the houses are all grand and yet oddly interchangeable - where only the differing shades of pastels distinguish neighbor from neighbor. Suburbia gave way to a dirt trail again, which we rode until we came to the Nonesuch River. Again, granite abutments rose on either side of the water but without the span we needed to cross.
Once again, we were saved by the power lines. An access road traveled beneath them from the Eastern Trail to Route One, just across the street from the Humpty Dumpty Potato Chip plant. From then on, we dashed on a makeshift course of roads and trails that Andrews had proposed for us, noting that some of the right-of-ways ''might not be worked out.''
Innumerable wrong turns and a jaunt across the moon-like landscape of the South Portland dump set us back behind schedule again. But in some ways, this was fortuitous; we completed the final handful of miles along the South Portland Greenway and arrived at Bug Light just as the sky overhead began to darken. It was against the luminous backdrop of golds and oranges that we lifted our bikes on to the breaker at the foot of the light.
Seagulls wheeled overhead. A man in blue jeans sipped from a perspiring brown bottle. A woman combed the spit of sand below for sea glass. We took a picture for posterity and loaded our gear in the car.