  Rad Pike, who died suddenly at the age of 75 on August 31, 1979, was one of the most friendly and helpful people I met during my Campobello Island work.
Rad Sits at the Head of a Magnificent Oriental Rug in His Lubec Home
A member of a prominent Lubec, Maine family, Rad had a doctorate in plant science, a master's degree in horticulture, and served as associate curator of the herbarium at the University of New Hampshire's botany department. An expert on the flora of Campobello and neighboring Washington County, Maine, he acted as naturalist for the Roosevelt Park from 1975 until his death. Before that he served as the park's executive secretary for five years.
Rad assisted me by giving me a place to stay in his Lubec home during several of my week-long trips to the area, by offering advice on what plants and natural areas on the island would be most appropriate and photogenic, by suggesting names of people who could help me or who might be interesting subjects to photograph or interview, and generally by being a very good friend.
Each evening he was in Lubec, Rad held a cocktail hour in the beautiful, rambling, old house in which he and his sister and three brothers were born and raised. Especially during the summer, but often at other times as well, people from town, other parts of Maine, or other states would attend the informal get-togethers. The conversation was always interesting, animated, and enjoyable, if not downright controversial and, occasionally, outrageous.
Located in Maine's poorest county, Lubec is a small community with severe economic problems. Between World War I and World War II there were as many as eighteen sardine-canning factories in the town. Now there are only two. At the turn of the century there was daily steamship service to Boston and the summer colony on Campobello provided a brisk trade. Now the waterfront and business area is mostly boarded up and much of the town is in decay.
Commenting on the fact that many people leave a dying community for more prosperous areas, Rad once told me, "Some people say, 'The best people left Lubec a long time ago.' Others say, 'No, the best people stayed.' "
Rad Pike certainly was one of the best and, luckily for me and everyone else who knew him, he stayed.
"The island is not unique botanically," Rad explained, "I don't suppose there's a thing that grows on Campobello that is unique to Campobello. You have to set people straight on that immediately.
"The environment of the Bay of Fundy, in which Campobello is situated, is unique because of the fog and the low temperatures. Temperature at night is rarely over fifty degrees, and there's a great deal of fog and humidity in the air. It makes mountain-top conditions exist at sea level, which is a very interesting thing. So it means many plants grow well on Campobello that you wouldn't expect to strike until you got much farther north or on mountain tops.
"I doubt there are many parts of the world where you would find that situation. Some of the conditions you find there you wouldn't find until you got to Labrador, probably; certainly, Newfoundland, and these are accessible and those are not.
"We have tremendous areas of sphagnum bog with many, many species of sphagnum and lichens and mosses. We have the type of bog that doesn't necessarily grow out of a pond. Most people thing of bogs as growing from ponds. Our biggest bogs over there did not grow from ponds. Probably started in the woods, because there are remains of forest at the base of the big bog at the Duck Pond.
"The bog is higher in the middle than it is at the edges. You usually don't get this until you get into the northern bogs. The bog is still expanding into the nearby woods in certain directions. There are trees growing in the bogs whose height might not be more than a few feet above the surface, yet their roots go down very low and they might be hundreds of years old. No one's quite sure. They look like bushes; three, four, five feet tall at the most; black spruces ordinarily. The branches take root as the moss comes up so the roots are superficial but, of course, there's very little nourishment in sphagnum. You dig one of them up and take the tree and put it in normal soil and in a few years it'll start growing the normal amount.
"The big bog is fourteen feet deep, and the carbon 14 sample from the bottom of the bog is seven thousand years old, which is a very rapid rate of accumulation. They were figured usually a foot a thousand years. Well, this has been two feet a thousand years.
"You can see the trees being overcome. There's one particular place where it's very obvious the sphagnum is still expanding into the adjoining woods. 'T' isn't all around, because there's a difference in the land elevation.
"The Roosevelt Park bought this land to protect the Roosevelt place. They weren't aware of the unique biological interest that was involved.
"In setting up our drives through the park we tried to follow the old carriage roads that the summer people had. They still wind, and we've tried to keep them at ground level without having them built up. There's one that goes down either side of the island. It's not possible for them to be connected, except way back; but not down at the end, thank heavens, so we won't run into the thing they run into in many European parks where people merely take an automobile circuit of the thing and call it square.
"These two drives we've made are the skeletons from which we will have many walking paths. Among other things, we hope to completely circumnavigate the shoreline.
"There's a great deal of driftwood. This is one of the beauties of a shore like that. It happened just a few winters back that a most unusual storm we had put a lot of driftwood just where we wanted it to block the access to the beach at Lower Duck Pond. That storm removed some land that had been there for a long, long while. There used to be fishermen's camps there. The storm last winter took at least ten feet off it.
While Rad's description of the island, particularly the Roosevelt Park's natural area, is interesting, the only valid way to appreciate Campobello is to walk over it and let it fill your senses to capacity with its beauty.
| 
