To the editor:

By now you may have had your fill of comment on Rusty Warren’s column in the February 2003 WWF, but the letter from John L. Clouse of Potomac, Maryland (April WWF) stimulated some thoughts on this which I submit for your review. I apologize for the length of this letter.

I have spent almost every one of my 61 summers in Maine, either on the Isle of Springs or on Isle au Haut. My grandfather was born in Portland and his family came, in the 1860s, to the town of Tremont from Martha’s Vineyard. My father loved Maine and her waters more than life itself. There are dozens of other connections and affections (including having had Roger Duncan as my stern but effective 9th grade English teacher). Yet I know full well I am not – never have been – a native but a summer visitor. I live in Vermont 11 months of the year, and the attitude here is not much different: “If your grandparents weren’t born here, you’re a stranger.” I guess I just don’t belong anywhere.

I would like to submit that we can belong where we are, if we behave right. I believe much of the attitude to which Rusty Warren gives such articulate voice, and with which a dark side of me agrees, is (1) really aimed at those who manifest their insecurities by being obnoxious and demanding (the proverbial Ugly American); and (2) based on a lurking xenophobia that we all harbor, to some degree: a paradoxical love-hate thing with people from elsewhere. I cannot count how often I have chuckled at seeing well-togged yachting folks or kayakers with their backpacks and cameras wandering wide-eyed on the main road on Isle au Haut looking for … what? A video store? (ain’t none); a supermarket? (ain’t none); a clothing store? (ain’t none); a taxi? Yet the Tinas and the Bens and the Sallys who work in the tiny general store are always unfailingly polite to these visitors who ask the same questions over and over (is there a bathroom? where does Linda Greenlaw live? is there a gifte shoppe?), and I adamantly believe their politeness is deeply ingrained and authentic and unconscious. I feel my own veneer of politeness failing, but I know why. The visitors’ questions would elicit sarcastic answers from me because I am “in the know.” Except I’m really not. I’m a fake, a visitor myself, just like the kayakers or the wandering weekenders from The Keeper’s House with their canary-yellow Orvis slacks and their L.L. Bean cross-trainers. And back in Vermont, notwithstanding my faux-native status, I find myself ranting about the tour buses that create gridlock and the leaf peepers and the hordes of skiers who crowd this town ten months a year. As if I belong.

Each one of us has an ancestor who first set tentative foot on some piece of turf we now call home – including, I submit, Native Americans (their forebears just got here earlier). We’re all immigrants. Let’s try to imagine what our towns or islands would be like if the visitors dried up, if all the flatlanders never came back, and the gift shops and galleries and small bookstores and B&Bs of Woodstock or Stonington closed forever (ask yourself: could they make it?). Then we could all be happily rid of those awful foreigners. I don’t like boors and rubes either, but I can’t insist on purity and perfection. It’s a little like the master race theory: it never quite works. What “works” are heterogeneity and constant change. They make us uncomfortable, those two things, but the march of time drags them along and drops them here and there like glacial erratics.

Still, I am sure there are those who would be glad (or think they’d be) to see the last of the outlanders – to see those “from away” stay away. And where would I fit? In the view of some generous Isle au Haut natives, I might fit into a gray area and be allowed to return every year. In the view of others I’d be banned like every other out-of-stater. It’s all relative.

In closing, let me cite the next letter, the one from Barbara Carey, who, as it happens, hails from my original hometown of Belmont, Massachusetts (I am not entirely rootless). She brilliantly articulates a credo that I will try to adopt: leave the “attitude of authoritative familiarity behind,” Mr. or Mrs. Out-of-Stater. Enjoy Maine for what it is, leave nothing but your footprints, and don’t try to pretend you belong. Try the Golden Rule. The natives know who’s who, always have, always will.

I am going to haul out this letter from time to time to remind myself, on a peaceful afternoon, to be polite to lost people who wander into our short, dusty island driveway asking where “downtown” is, or if they can anchor in “our” cove (the one I personally asked the glacier to carve out) so they can refill their water tanks.

There, but for the grade of God, go I. Everyone’s a stranger somewhere.

Arthur E. Norton

Woodstock, VT; Isle au Haut