Hiraeth – The magic of Acadia

By Kristin Fehlauer

A beautiful Welsh word that I stumbled onto some time ago, “hiraeth” defies a succinct, exact definition. One explanation I found in my research was “a longing for the place where your soul lives.” For me, that can be just one place: Acadia.

Acadia and I are on a first-name basis, but officially, what I’m referring to is Acadia National Park, situated mostly on Mount Desert Island (MDI). My longing for it is constant, although the intensity varies. It is where I feel happiest, most at home: the one place I would choose to be if I could pick anywhere.

Just like hiraeth, I find it hard to define precisely what it is about MDI that captivates me. It is the untold secrets of its forests, the wondering what happens when no humans are around. It is the tragedy of Longfellow’s Evangeline, closely associated with the region, not to mention the largely untold history of the first peoples to live there. It is the constant changing of the sea and its moods.

It is the combination of many types of landscape. I think of the island as tiers of biomes, stacked like a cake. They start quite literally at sea level, with the Atlantic. Then comes the intertidal zone, the beach, the swamps and brooks, the meadows and lakes, the gentle wooded slopes, rising to my favorite: the bald, smooth granite flows that give the island its name. When Samuel de Champlain first spied the rounded hilltops that had been scraped bare by the receding glaciers in 1604, he named the place “L’Isle des Monts-déserts”[1]: the island of barren mountains.

It is the charm of small but by no means backwards seaside villages. Seafood, art galleries, local history museums, pocket-sized libraries, specialty shops, amateur theater, arthouse cinema…plenty to do even for those less enthused about nature.

Probably most importantly, it is part of the story of my family. My grandparents brought my father there on vacation from the time he was very young, then he brought my mother and my sisters and me, and now we bring the next generation. This is also where I’ve had a few non-vacation experiences of my own, including interning one summer at a local music festival and doing a seasonal stint during cruise ship season in one of the shops downtown. The family component is clearly a large part of what makes the island special to me, to the point that I wonder if I am homesick for this place or for my childhood—a time before adult responsibilities and cares made my already limited time on MDI all too fleeting.

With the pandemic this year making travel to the US problematic if not downright impossible, I won’t be heading to MDI until 2021 at the earliest. Until then, I will have to learn to live with the ache of hiraeth.

[1] The pronunciation of “Desert” in the name of the island and one of its major towns, the truncated Mount Desert, is the subject of much debate. Some say it like the English word, some mimic the French stress on the second syllable. I personally pronounce it as in Sahara when I say the name of the island and as in chocolate cake when referring to the town.