`Shore Path’ short history for walkers > Bar Harbor landmark star of photographs

THE SHORE PATH, Bar Harbor, Maine, text and photographs by Steve Perrin, Earthling Press, Bar Harbor, 2000, 90 pages, $8.95.

Steve Perrin’s picture book “The Shore Path” offers a sure passageway to one of Bar Harbor’s scenic gems.

The author has focused his lens on a half-mile-long waterfront path that winds its way around Maine’s rugged coastline between Bar Harbor’s lively downtown and the waters of Frenchman Bay.

He has captured some of its cultural and scenic qualities through photographs taken during Maine’s dramatic seasons, at various times of day, in all kinds of weather.

The small-scale book contains a 12-page history of the shore path which Perrin says was born after the Civil War when a steamboat wharf was built in Bar Harbor. Those hundreds of passengers who came to visit Mount Desert Island first beat a path from the wharf along the shore, Perrin wrote.

The history talks about the group that maintains the path, about the path’s natural history, and about those “cottagers” who owned grand homes along the coast and in town and who helped make the shore path a reality.

The path today is walked by thousands of people every year, mostly during July and August, during peak vacation season.

“It’s a people’s path. … It’s one of Bar Harbor’s great institutions,” said Perrin in an interview.

Perrin snapped photographs of the path in a period of just over a year spanning the summer of 1998 to the fall of 1999. The images link the present path — its visitors, flora and fauna — to vestiges of its past including the mammoth cruise ship Queen Elizabeth 2 and historic inns and homes.

Images include barefoot kids clambering over historic cannons on the town park on a summer day; the majestic four-masted schooner Margaret Todd docked at high tide, with a whisper of wind tickling the ship’s flags and a lobster boat headed out to sea, slicing a modest wake along the way; Maine’s summer fog swallowing a local island and muting colorful code flags adorning a fleet of sailboats from the New York Yacht Club.

In nature scenes, Perrin has captured similar vantage points in all four seasons such as verdant summer foliage and barren winter branches.

For those who have not experienced the Bar Harbor shore in the winter, Perrin’s book provides a window to an ice-capped, snow-covered coast and a glimpse of the town beach blanketed in snow.

A closer look at the shore line is offered through snapshots of tide pools with rockweed and periwinkles and apple blossoms and rugosa roses along the path.

Epic sunsets, moonrises and early-morning shots of the sun rising over marine waters leave lasting impressions. Through photography and text on a simple subject — a half-mile-long trail — Perrin weaves together onto one path, the natural, geologic, historic and cultural elements that create the shore path experience.

The window into Bar Harbor’s path makes an excellent souvenir or gift.

“The Shore Path” is available at Mr. Paperback in Ellsworth and bookstores on Mount Desert Island.

Perrin, a professional photographer and Bar Harbor resident, has written “Acadia: The Soul of a National Park” and is working on a book about people’s relationship with nature called “Mind and Planet.”