The true hospitality of island life opens itself up to visitors in winter, since islanders are generally happy to see strangers once the frenzy of the summer is a distant and painless memory. And who in Maine doesn’t love to share with a hapless visitor the communal experience of northern New England privation?
Last month I drove around to Bass Harbor to catch a ferry across to Swan’s Island with Sandy Thomas, the Institute’s head of programs, to meet with the school board and other islanders. We had been invited over to discuss strategies for keeping Candyce Dunham and her family on-island after her Island Fellowship ends this summer. On Swan’s Island, with a year-round population of 350, Candyce has re-established a community music program in which 110 islanders are enrolled. She gives lessons in voice, piano, violin, percussion, harp and bagpipes. Her husband, Ben, a carpenter, builds harps and is the coach of the basketball team that had just won its first game, against steep odds.
The school was closed because a pipe had burst in the frigid weather and flooded several rooms, and so the entire school board had assembled in the nicely renovated town library. We agreed to focus on a joint funding strategy involving the school, the town and the Institute, each partner trying to raise a third of the cost. With such an enormous community embrace of Candyce’s program, it wasn’t a question of if, but only how, to find the funds to keep a program going that binds so many islanders together.
A few weeks later I took the ferry across the bay to Vinalhaven, to attend an evening comprehensive planning meeting and to share a chowder supper with a dozen community members before the meeting. Temperatures that day and evening had hovered in unspeakably negative regions of the Celsius scale while the wind was north-northwest and cold as a bitten dog. Nate Michaud, the Institute’s Community Outreach officer, had pointed out that attendance at any island get-together is enhanced by food, and thus the resourceful Nate had ordered a fish chowder from The Haven, an island institution. He had invited a collection of citizens from the town office, the school, the land trust, planning board and electric power co-op.
We touched on many topics over The Haven’s thick chowder, which was accompanied by fresh baked bread from the new Atlantic bakery in Rockland. Most important, the Vinalhaven girls’ basketball team had won a thrilling game that afternoon in the last seconds, sending them to the state tournament. That set the old-timers, Phil Crossman and Bob Candage, to reminiscing of their championship days not so long ago. The construction of the island’s $13 million new K-12 school is behind schedule, but George Joseph, the superintendent who has navigated this project around other dangerous shoals, is still hopeful the move will be completed by April. The head of the land trust, Lucy McCarthy, was concerned after seeing ATV tracks on Folly Pond, the town’s water supply. Eric Davis, a selectman and lobsterman, reported that the lobstermen who fished “up inside” had done well this season, while those who fished “outside” had not had an outstanding season. But everyone was still pretty happy with the price.
Although I can’t remember what other topics we covered, I do remember thinking it would be pretty hard to assemble a comparable turn out of a town’s civic leadership in most mainland towns, the fish chowder notwithstanding.
That evening, there was a spirited meeting of the Comprehensive Planning group to act on the final draft of the recommendations of the natural resources subcommittee. Phil Crossman chaired the session. Lucy McCarthy presented her committee’s recommendations based on detailed maps prepared by the College of the Atlantic as assisted by a new Island fellow, Kerry O’Donnell. Charlotte Goodhuse, chair of the Planning Board, and Bob Candage, moderator of Vinalhaven’s town meeting, commented on what might or might not pass muster at town meeting as each recommendation came before the group for an up or down vote. Small town democracy at its Solomonic best.
I awoke early the next morning and looked out over Carver’s Harbor from the second floor of the Tidewater Motel. The sun had not yet risen but the gathering light of dawn was suffused through the vapors of sea smoke that obscured the harbor. Only the antennae of the lobster boats emerged from the vapor, as if some giant arthropods lurked beneath. Powder Keg Island at the mouth of the harbor had only the tops of its spiky spruce to show as they floated on the cold ether. Across the harbor on a little knoll I saw the peak of the house Timothy Lane built in 1857 with just the slightest bit of sunlight beginning to reflect off its clapboards and I thought to myself, this is why islanders live here.