I have been to the Hamptons, where the Range Rovers clog the parking lot of the gourmet grocery store. I have been to Malibu, where the waves roll to the shore wearing a tight crust of surfers. I have been to Cape Cod, where in July one could more easily hand-split an atom than find a parking space. With all due respect to my fellow man, this summer I wanted a different experience with the ocean. I thought of the lonely lighthouse keepers, how all they had to worry about was making sure the lantern was lit, not whether or not their towel was touching someone else’s. I wanted privacy, though not complete privacy. I asked my friend Karl to come with me to the lighthouse.

Maine operates on a very simple algebraic equation: The harder a place is to get to, the less likely people will be to go there. I suppose on some level I must have understood this when I reviewed my itinerary. The layover in Boston was long enough to take a taxi into the city, have crab cakes at the Ritz-Carlton, and do some fast but ambitious shopping. Back at the airport, we were loaded into a bus and driven across the tarmac for so long that the bus driver said, “Surprise! I’m driving you to Bangor!” He was joking, of course, but the plane, when we finally reached it, was smaller than the bus.

Wherever your plane lands in Maine, chances are good it will not be anywhere near the place you actually want to be. Make peace with the map. The job of the average road in Maine is not to provide the shortest distance between two points. The road twists and coils back around on itself, to give you one quick glimpse of the ocean and then send you careening back into the mossy woods, to take you over every tiny stone bridge so that you might have the chance to see a flock of loons settling in on the bay. It’s this kind of beautiful, mysterious driving that reminds us that the point of life is not the destination but the journey itself. By the time we arrived, I felt incredibly grateful for all...