The Night Bar Harbor Burned

This one belongs to a boy of three. His name was Lance Tapley, and for years afterward he dreamed it, the same dream over and over. He kept sliding into something dark and burning, he said, claustrophobic like a tomb, alive like a furnace. Nobody knows what lit the fire of nineteen forty-seven. Maybe it was a cranberry picker's cigarette, maybe the sun through a piece of broken glass at the dump. It smouldered underground before it ever showed itself, and then, in the third week of October, the wind got up. Between Hulls Cove and Bar Harbor ran Millionaires Row, summer houses as big as hotels. A Bar Harbor man named Morris Gilley told the Boston Globe it was just plain hell. All those grand estates, he said, were one big ball of fire, three miles of it. The road north was blocked. So the town went to the water. After dark the people walked down Main Street to the town pier, and that little boy's grandmother pushed his grandfather's wheelchair. And here came the lobstermen. They came out of Prospect Harbor and Winter Harbor, across the bay in a sixty-knot wind, risking the boats that were all they had. They took about four hundred people off that pier. By nine o'clock an Army bulldozer had shoved a path through the wreckage on Route Three, and seven hundred cars started the slow crawl to Ellsworth. The boy went by bus. The tops of the tall trees caught on both sides of the road, and pieces of fire came falling all around, and he twisted out of his mother's lap and squeezed under the seat to hide. Very few died in that fire, and that's the wonder of it. One was an old man who went back to his house for his cat. Nobody saw him alive again. It took sixty-seven mansions, a hundred and seventy other homes and five grand hotels. It raced down this coast nearly to Otter Point. And when it ran out of island, it blew itself out over the ocean. The town boys had the ruins to themselves after that. Up on Hamilton Hill stood the bones of an old estate, with a tiled swimming pool. It had portholes set in its sides, where folks had once sat in a room under the ground and watched the swimmers. The boys played there. A dry pool in the burned woods, and a boy with his face up to the glass, looking in at nothing but sky.