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Ruby Pinders grew up in Maine, spent years building a business with her husband in Vermont, and then came home. As her 77th birthday approached this summer, she traveled to the Giant’s Stairs on Bailey Island to walk beside familiar waters.
“I came back to Maine when the ocean called me back to retire,” Pinders said.
But the relaxing stroll she envisioned was not to be, even with the walking poles she used to steady herself on the dirt and rock path running along the giant stone steps. After going just a short way, she lost momentum and — finding no place to rest — headed back to the car with her niece, Harpswell resident Susan Leo.
“I thought that this would be the best view and a short walk,” Leo said. “But the terrain is a little rough and there’s no place to sit.”
There might have one day been a bench, if Harpswell Parks, Recreation and Community Services Director Katie Neal had succeeded in winning approval to place one along the path as part of a broader effort to make town trails more accessible to people with mobility issues. But that effort recently died amid objections from some of the people who own oceanfront homes and cottages along the trail.
“As I sit on my porch and watch people walk along the path, they often comment to me how beautiful and wonderful it is here and how lucky I am to have this property,” Sarah Haug Murphy told Select Board members at a midsummer meeting. “I readily agree.”
“There are, however, drawbacks to this location,” she continued. “People are occasionally extremely loud, rude and obnoxious. I can hear most conversations of people on the stairs as the breeze carries every word that is uttered — sometimes foul language. There’s often litter when I go out in the morning — cigarette butts, beer cans, half-drunk vodka bottles, sometimes worse.”
“The existence of a bench or benches on the Giant’s Stairs path would only, I feel, exacerbate these problems,” she said.
A majority of Select Board members agreed, voting 2-1 in July to reject the Giant’s Stairs bench plan. Although they endorsed benches at Mitchell Field and other locations, they said no to installing one on the 2.5-acre oceanfront strip Bailey Island resident Capt. William Henry Sinnett donated to the town in 1910.
“Capt. Sinnett was quite specific in his deed. He didn’t want any buildings or any nuisance” on the land, said Select Board member David I. Chipman. After hearing from neighbors who feared a bench would attract more visitors and problems, “I think leaving the trail itself in a somewhat wild state is probably best,” he said.
Board member Matt Gilley cast the lone dissenting vote. Gilley noted that Harpswell has one of the oldest populations in the nation’s oldest state.
“Mobility issues are going to become an issue for probably all of us at some point,” said Gilley, a 41-year-old lobsterman. “I’m the youngest person on this board and I enjoy a chance to sit down every now and then.”
Geologist’s dream or cellphone booth?
The Giant’s Stairs draw visitors from all points of the compass to take in what the town website calls “a geologist’s dream” — once-hot magma that pushed up through a crack in the earth millions of years ago and cooled to form a gigantic stone staircase leading to the Atlantic waters below.
Tana Byam cherishes the memory of scrambling across the rocks while visiting her grandparents on Orr’s Island. “I used to come up and spend summers with them as a little girl,” said Byam, who now lives in South Carolina.
One afternoon, she brought her own children to the playground of her memories. Carefully, she crept down to a stone shelf above the churning waves so her 2-year-old son, Maddox, could begin building memories of his own.
“He told me he was tasting the ocean,” she said with a laugh.
Among Harpswell’s natural trails and preserves, Giant’s Stairs is unusual in the way it invites a steady stream of visitors to walk by the backyards of people who own homes and cottages there.
Even as the town has smoothed and widened the narrow footpath to make it more accessible, officials have tried to strike the balance between making it inviting to visitors but also — per Capt. Sinnett’s wishes — remaining respectful of abutting property owners.
That has become more difficult since Down East magazine in 2016 featured Giant’s Stairs in an article titled “Hidden Maine: 10 Under-the-Radar Spots.”
People who live in the homes lining the trail say that most visitors create no trouble, peacefully enjoying the scenery and leaving no litter or disruption behind.
But as the trail’s popularity has grown, so have the exceptions. One afternoon, Nor Hall and Deb Sandler were lounging on chairs behind the cottage they have enjoyed for decades as people hiked down the path leading from Washington Avenue to the trail. The sound of the visitors’ chit-chat — just feet away and amplified by the granite all around — echoed across their idyll.
“People don’t know that the sound carries right up here,” said Hall, a Carl Jung scholar, psychotherapist and author who divides her time between Minnesota and Bailey Island. “Yesterday, I heard a guy firing his financial adviser.”
The visits aren’t limited to daylight hours. Eager to see the sun rise to the east, increasing numbers of people turn up — and speak up — as early as 4:30 a.m. And that’s not to mention the late-night visits.
Or the people who take advantage of the strong reception at water’s edge to make phone calls. Hall worries that installing a bench will create “a cellular phone booth.”
Not all who live along the trail oppose the bench, which under Neal’s plan would be a simple, unadorned structure designed to fit into the landscape. Pat Baker is a retired elementary school teacher who shares a cottage with her adult sons.
“As a person who struggles with mobility and back issues, I love a bench,” said the 75-year-old. “If a bench was just there and did not stand out like a sore thumb, I would support it.”
It’s not just older people who would benefit, Baker added. Her 13-year-old granddaughter has Down syndrome and, as a result, weak muscle tone. She loves walking downhill to the trail, but “she could not walk back without sitting for a while.”
Her granddaughter does her best to rest on the low, flat rocks that currently provide the only places to sit. But if a bench were in place, “she would be the first person on it.”
The voices of visitors chatting and laughing doesn’t bother Baker. Recently, she joined a celebration of two men announcing their engagement at the water’s edge.
“It’s there for everyone; it’s not mine,” she said of the Giant’s Stairs trail. People using the trail are “more of a gift than an annoyance.”
Next steps for the Stairs
Jake Kovach, of Weymouth, Massachusetts, said his family has been coming to Bailey Island for 40 years. One afternoon, he and his wife, Julia, were leading their 16-month-old son, Aidan, along the path and helping him play safely on the rocks.
Even the young and spry occasionally need a place to rest, Kovach said. “People don’t always know what kind of walk they’re getting into.”
One trailside homeowner, Bill Bly, told Select Board members that efforts to increase access can and should only go so far.
“Unfortunately, we can’t make everything accessible to everyone for every purpose. There are some things in life that just can’t happen,” he said. “So we don’t have a fully ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) accessible trail. And for that, I’m glad because it does cut down on the traffic and it does leave the area looking natural.”
He added that a bench could also invite troublesome visitors. “My concern is — and I’m a criminal defense attorney by trade … you put a place for people to congregate and that’s where they’re going to loiter at.”
Pinders, who turned back from her attempt to navigate the Giant’s Stairs trail, said it wasn’t so long ago that she would have had no trouble with it. “Three years ago, I could have done it with no problem,” said Pinders, who will celebrate her 77th birthday in September.
But surgeries on her back and brain have made it challenging for her to walk and maintain her balance, she said. The day before, she and her family had enjoyed using public seating at Mitchell Field, on the town’s western edge. “We had a picnic on the benches.”
Should the town revisit the idea of doing something similar on the Giant’s Stairs trail?
“One hundred percent,” said Leo, Pinders’ niece. “Multiple benches, actually.”
