Stars over Acadia

It was between 1983 and 1986, a little over forty years ago. The program ran on the summit of Cadillac Mountain and usually started around nine o'clock, after the sunset crowd had driven back down and the parking lot had thinned out to the people who wanted to stay for the dark. I don't remember individual nights anymore, or the faces. I have the mountain, and I have the way I learned to run that hour.

Cadillac is the highest point on the Atlantic coast of the United States, a little over fifteen hundred feet of pink granite on Mount Desert Island. From the top on a clear night the sky comes all the way down to the water. People drove up from Boston and New York and farther to see it, and most of them had never seen that many stars. When their eyes adjusted they went quiet. I was the interpretive ranger standing in front of them, and my job was to help them understand what they were looking at.

At the University of Maine I had read Freeman Tilden's Interpreting Our Heritage, published in 1957. Tilden thought the point of interpretation was to provoke people, to get them looking harder and asking their own questions. He treated facts as building material. I believed him in a classroom. On the summit I found out what it took to do it.

The constellations were the easy part. I named them the way rangers always have, starting with the ones people half remembered from childhood and working toward the ones they didn't know at all. Naming gave the crowd something to hold on to. It also let me hear who was following along and who had drifted off to stare at some other part of the sky, which told me more about the group than anything I'd planned.

Over those years the program turned into audience participation. I asked questions and let the crowd answer, and the children were always the quickest to join in. Once they did, their parents followed. Listening to one person recite facts in the dark is boring, and I believe that now as much as I did then. The stories were what people carried back down the mountain.

The part I prepared hardest for took almost no talking. I kept track of when satellites were due to pass over, so I knew roughly when one would rise over the horizon and which way it would travel. A small point of light moving steadily across stars that don't move is a strange thing to see for the first time. If I had the timing right, I could set it up with one comment and then stop. Someone would find it first and point, and the rest would follow the arm. Some nights the best thing I said was nothing, for as long as it took that light to cross.

Then I would take them back almost four hundred years. In September 1604, Samuel de Champlain sailed along this coast and named the island for its bare summits, l'Isle des Monts-déserts. I asked the crowd to picture the sky over his ship. There was no electric light on this coast or anywhere else in the world. The Milky Way would have run from one edge of the sky to the other with nothing on the horizon to compete with it. A navigator like Champlain worked by some of the same stars we had just named.

After that I turned them toward what had changed. The glow on the horizon from the towns. The haze that softens the faint stars. The lights that weren't there for Champlain and were there for us, standing on a mountain that had looked the same for a very long time while the sky above it slowly got harder to see. More than forty years on, that change has kept going. There are so many satellites overhead now that timing a single pass for a crowd would be beside the point. They cross all night.

I don't remember what I said on any one of those nights. I remember learning to wait. Darkness makes people talk less. The questions came slowly, and when they came they told me who was out there and what they wanted from the evening. A question about one star could tell me more about the crowd than the whole first ten minutes had.

Tasting room staff work from a script too, and most of them need one. There is a pour order, a vineyard to describe, a winemaker's name to get right. On a busy Saturday the script keeps the room from coming apart. The trouble starts when the script becomes the whole job. A couple who drove two hours for one bottle gets the same five minutes as a couple who stopped because the sign was on their way to somewhere else.

The staff who are good at this treat the script the way I treated the constellations. It's the part that gives guests something to hold while the person pouring watches who is following along. They know the rhythm of the afternoon well enough to see a quiet stretch coming, the same way I knew when a satellite was due. They know the story of the ground under the vines before anyone planted it, and they tell it when a guest is curious enough to want it. When someone tastes something for the first time and goes still, they let the pause run.

Owners tend to call that instinct. Most of it is habit, and habits get built the way mine did, one crowd at a time, by watching people before deciding what to tell them.

At the end of those programs the talking usually stopped before I did. People kept looking up after the last thing I said. I learned to finish early and stand off to the side until they were ready to walk back to their cars.

Sources: Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage (University of North Carolina Press, 1957).