I took a bus to Brooklin. Not Brooklyn, New York, which has hundreds of buses, but Brooklin, Maine, which has one. My challenge was to get from Bangor, where I live, to my family’s home at the end of Naskeag Point, without using a car. It CAN be done. Here’s how.
You have to get up early, and get to the Odlin Road park-and-ride lot by 5:30 on a Friday morning. The Jackson Lab bus runs five days a week, year-round. It transports employees to and from the Jackson Lab facilities in Ellsworth and Bar Harbor. But it’s also open to the general public, and they will drop you off anywhere along the route. It leaves promptly at 5:30 and seconds later hits Interstate 395 and is on its way.
To get to Brooklin, you have to take this bus to Ellsworth and get off somewhere close to downtown to meet a second bus. It runs only on Fridays, but also year-round, and serves Surry, Blue Hill, Deer Isle, Stonington, Sedgwick, and Brooklin. The cost for the whole one-way trip from Bangor is nine dollars.
Both buses are run by Downeast Transportation, based in Ellsworth. A complete schedule of their routes is available at the Bangor Transit Center, and online.
But the bus doesn’t stop at the Transit Center. I called the day before to make sure that both buses carry bicycles and to verify the schedule, and at 4:55 Friday morning, I set off by bicycle from my house in the dark. I had timed the ride a few days earlier and confirmed that I could do it in a comfortable 20-25 minutes without busting my aging butt. The sky was brightening when I wheeled into the park-and-ride. The bus was already there. I guess someone had told the driver to expect me, because she made a note on a clipboard and said she could drop me off at the Mill Mall in Ellsworth, where a short bike ride would take me to City Hall to meet the second bus.
The first bus was about half-full, about fifteen passengers. A few brought blankets. It was a quiet ride. The sun came up around quarter to six. At 6:03 I disembarked at the Mill Mall, right in front of Sylvie’s Café. “Open at 4:30 AM” said the sign in the window. I enjoyed a smashing breakfast and listened to a group of truck drivers at another table discuss various routes they took between Maine and Florida. At the lumberyard across the street, people were already moving stuff around with forklifts. The day had begun.
My bus left at 7:20. I didn’t need a ticket or a transfer or anything. It was all very informal. I paid the cash fare in Bangor, and the driver in Ellsworth knew I was coming. Not surprising, really, since I was the only passenger.
“You do know we go to Stonington first, right?” the driver said. I replied that I did, and that I was in no hurry. It was a fine day for a scenic tour of the Blue Hill peninsula, overcast but clear. The view from Caterpillar Hill, virtually unchanged since my childhood, stretched to the horizon, the Deer Isle bridge in the foreground illuminated by a ray of sunlight.
An older woman and man got on in Stonington. They were regulars; the driver knew them by name and picked them up at their houses. He picked up another two passengers in North Deer Isle, and after a short delay for a jackknifed truck, he dropped me at the Brooklin General Store right on schedule at 9:20. I had another three miles to go, but that’s why I have a bicycle.
This may seem like a long and convoluted way to get to a destination that’s only an hour and a half away by car, but nine bucks is less than the cost of gas to get there, not to mention all the costs associated with car ownership. When my family moved to Blue Hill in my tenth year, we were called “straphangers” – people who rode buses and hung onto straps – and it was not a term of endearment. Public buses were foreign and therefore suspicious, From Away.
The bus seems to be used primarily by senior citizens on the peninsula to get to Ellsworth and back, though the driver said he sometimes picks up kids going to school. It makes a return trip in the afternoon, reversing the morning route. Thus a person could board the bus in Brooklin at 9:20, spend a few hours in Ellsworth, and be home by early afternoon.
Though public transportation in this rural area may be skeletal, that this service exists at all is something of a minor miracle. And it is imperative that those of us who believe in the future of public transportation use what’s here in the present, however infrequent or inconvenient. It may take longer and require some planning, but it demonstrates demand, and paves the way for more and better transportation options down the road.
