When he climbed back up the ramp to his truck this morning, I asked him about his peculiar racket. He’s on call year-round, he said, with regular morning office hours on the float during high season. While I’d been watching, he’d attempted a minor underwater repair with a wrecking bar on a jammed boat rudder, but he couldn’t get it free. The fisherman chugged resignedly off to the beach to wait for low tide, when he swore he’d use a sledge hammer on it if he had to.

According to news reports, the Obama family vacationed just a few miles north of here a couple of days ago, in Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island. They hiked, biked, sailed, visited the gelato shop, and did all the touristy things available in that lovely park. Today we’re also in Acadia National Park, but on Isle au Haut, a different island about half of which was donated to the Park Service some years ago by its summer-resident owners. You can’t drive to get here; it’s accessible by only boat or float plane. A rugged six miles long and two miles wide and scoured by continental ice sheets, it’s crisscrossed by trails and circled by a partly paved ring road. Gelato shops? Forget it! While in the Mount Desert part of the park you’re surrounded by hundreds of other vacationers – the President must have inflamed his right arm shaking hands – we’ve met only four people so far: a pair of young hiking entomologists from Iowa and another, older, pair of yachting electronics engineers from Amherst, Massachusetts, riding mountain bikes. Clearly, a more cerebral set of vacationers favors this spruce-covered offshore island.

Samuel de Champlain explored this coast in 1604, five years before paddling into what’s now Lake Champlain. He gave the island its name. It had been the summer resort of the Abenaki for unknown generations before that, and wasn’t colonized by Europeans until 1789, after the Revolutionary War, which made it safe for United States citizens. Those rugged early settlers, English and Scottish, lived by sheep farming, fishing, and boat-building. The island population, never more than 275, dwindled after gasoline engines made fishing from the mainland more convenient. It’s now down to about 75, with a surprisingly small number of summer residents.

We rode out here this morning with Bob Wilson, the host of a popular New Hampshire Public Television show called Roadside Stories. In it, he stands beside roads in New Hampshire with big signs reading, “Stop and Tell me a Story.” People do; a film crew records the conversation, and the footage is edited into the on-air version. Today Bob and I combined our two shows. He hiked with me while I made remarks about the island’s history, the views, and the trail; and he carried small cardboard versions of his big signs. But for a while we saw no other people.

The trail itself reinforced the suspicion that we might not meet any. Narrow, steep, and leading occasionally over ledges that required scrambling, it reminded me of “Acres of Clams,” an old settler’s song about the Pacific Northwest: “I found it enveloped in fog, and covered all over with timber, thick as hair on the back of a dog.” Bob appeared to be carrying his signs for nothing.

About halfway through our planned hike, I lowered myself backwards down a steep spot and happened to grab a handful of dark spruce duff. A few seconds later I was surprised to feel a sting between two of my fingers, and found a very upset rust-colored carpenter ant chewing furiously at my hide. “Hmm, ferrugineus,” I thought. “I didn’t know they did that.” Without stopping to consider that she, not I, was the injured party, I dispatched her and went on.

A few minutes later she was avenged. Bob and I had paused to chat beside a granite ledge, and heard voices behind us in the brush. Somebody was catching us up. Bob instantly perched on the ledge, smiling broadly and displaying his sign, and our two young entomologists appeared. Bob engaged them skillfully in conversation. This was his part of the show, so I stepped back out of camera range to watch a master at work.

Suddenly my left ankle came alive. I jumped, and looked down to see several dozen red carpenter ants swarming up my trouser leg. I could tell that a similar number were taking the inside route. Bob probably will always suspect that I was simply upstaging him – the camera did indeed swing my way – but a dramatic stunt was the farthest thing from my mind. If the camera and the lady hadn’t been there, I’d have shed the pants, but I managed to get rid of the ants in a minute or so with only a few bites. It kills me to think the footage will be on Bob’s show instead of mine.

Eventually we reached the south end of the island and headed back on a woods road, through boggy ground swarming with deer flies, to our boat at Duck Harbor. The mail boat had just dropped off about a dozen day hikers and a few overnight campers. The two young island rangers were collecting flotsam from the beach – this is the least littered national park I’ve ever seen – and the tide was dropping. It was time to motor ashore through the lobster boats and windjammers, fire up the truck, and cross three states (as Robert Frost says) “under the sunset far into Vermont.”