As I stared across the water at Mount Desert Island, my phone told me that the mountains rising from the sea were due east and that the porch where I sat was 10 feet above sea level. These were facts I could see with my eyes, but modern times require data. For five days we were active with swimming and paddling, hiking and biking, but we started each day on this porch just after sunrise, peacefully sipping coffee, and we returned to it throughout the days to rest and to take in what was happening in the bay.

When the wind was down, the food chain performed a fateful drama on this placid stage: ripples and flashes from herring chasing or being chased, small explosions as seals and cormorants surfaced through a frenzied school. If we were particularly lucky, we’d see an osprey or a bald eagle pluck a fish from the water.

We were there, my wife and I, with half of our nuclear family — two granddaughters and their parents — in what you could call a family trip. It was the second visit here for the six of us, but for me this part of Maine means family. My parents were married here, and my memories go back to when I was a boy the age of my granddaughters, learning how to ride a bicycle and crashing into a barberry bush. Before my wife and I were married, I brought her here to visit my grandparents, and still today I have family who live here.

On a trip like this it’s impossible to not be sentimental, and at my age impossible not to think about continuity. The mountains of Acadia formed over 400 million years ago. The first people were the Wabanaki, and I can imagine their ancestors 10,000 years ago, prying mussels from these rocks at low tide and looking up at the same ridgeline we see today. Sentimental perhaps, but not idealized: When I was a boy, we never saw bald eagles or ospreys, and puffins were mythical birds that existed only in books. Houses were allowed to discharge sewage into the bays, and clams and mussels were relegated to the gulls. I was in high school when Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring,” and it would be decades before eagles and ospreys returned to these shores.

We worry about the world we are leaving to our grandchildren, but the irony is that it is already theirs. My anodyne against despair is to see the world through the eyes of a 3-year-old collecting shells on a beach, or to identify with a 7-year-old when she wishes aloud that she could fly like the gulls overhead. Flying is for dreams, but on the long, flat driveway leading from the main road to the shore, our 7-year-old discovered the trick of balance on her bicycle, once and for all. Back and forth she rode on a path flecked pink with sea sand, the color of dreams.

There is so much beauty in this world that it is hard to take it all in. On the fifth and final morning of our stay, my wife and I sat on the porch with my aunt. She’s 98 and the last of her generation in the family, and although this is her house, it’s not where she lives. Earlier we had packed for our trip back to Vermont with mixed feelings, and then the sudden appearance of a pair of eagles had brightened our moods.

“Yes, they’re here,” my aunt remarked when I told her that one had perched in a tree to watch her mate settle on a nearby boulder and devour a fish.

I can only imagine the weight of a century of memories, but she lives very much in the present. When we circled the house to the porch, she had me pull a weed from the brick walk, and later when we retraced our steps, she stopped to admire the hydrangeas.

“All this rain has been good for gardens. The bulbs this spring were extraordinary, but no one was here to see. I cut some and took them home.”

Back in Vermont, my phone now tells me that my keyboard where I write is 1,340 feet above sea level. My hilltop view is of more hills. Apart from the beautiful imagery and the innocent joy of young girls, I don’t know what wisdom to draw from our recent experience in Maine. The tides rose and fell, and the moon waxed at night. At various times four generations of us sat on the porch and looked at the same mountains my aunt knew as a young woman. Even in this favorable light, it would be foolish to think it is immortality I sense, but it is something very close to it.