Verona Island may not look like an island when you cross over the suspension bridge spanning the Penobscot River near Bucksport at the head of Penobscot Bay, but like many other parts of the Maine coast, Verona was once an island. Motorists now get a better look at the island as traffic slows to a crawl to accommodate the repair of this elegant but decaying structure that is part of Route 1. Within the next two years the State of Maine will need to find many more tens of millions of dollars to replace this bridge, which is in a more serious state of disrepair than anyone had imagined when the work began this year.
Likewise the narrow but lovely arching bridge over Eggemoggin Reach that connects Deer Isle and Stonington to Sedgwick, designed by the same bridge architect as Verona’s bridge and completed in 1937, will need to be rebuilt for a very large sum of money. Bridges, it turns out, have a lifetime and the Deer Isle-Stonington Bridge is now well beyond its golden years.
The list of islands that have joined the mainland is actually quite large. Most were bridged during the 19th century when iron and steel made such bridge building practical; earlier wooden bridges were costly to maintain at public expense and easily destroyed by the forces of nature. Most islands that joined the mainland in the 20th century were close in, separated by mudflats that were relatively easy and inexpensive to span by a causeway. Mackworth Island off Portland and Rackliff in St. George come to mind.
The last large island community to join the mainland was Beals Island, which was connected to Jonesport by a bridge over Moosabec Reach in 1957 – so it probably has another few decades before anyone will need to give serious thought about rebuilding it. In the late 1950s some Chebeague Islanders lobbied for connecting themselves via a bridge to Cousins Island that itself had been bridged to the mainland, but the true islanders prevailed. Although Chebeague is deeply and rightly concerned for its future given the rampant escalation of property values, the islanders have only to look across the way to the cheek-by-jowl development on the shoreline of Cousins and Littlejohn’s Islands to see what their present community would have looked like had they voted for convenience over islandness.
The last large island to be annexed to the mainland was Sears Island, which was connected by a hastily constructed causeway to Searsport in the late 1970s as part of a Department of Transportation proposal to build a new international cargo port there. Maine’s third cargo port was ultimately constructed across from Sears Island on the mainland at Mack Point after economic and environmental concerns forced state leaders to back away from a $70 million development proposal. Now that the State of Maine owns Sears Island, its long-term economic value may be as an island rather than as a relatively nondescript peninsula of the mainland.
The enormous public expense of rebuilding bridges to islands got me to thinking what would happen if mainland islanders were given the choice of rejoining the archipelago. What would happen if, say, the $25 or $50 million of rebuilding a major bridge were invested in the local school, library, fire station, theater or other community institutions? Would any communities vote to become islands again and put up with the hassles and inconveniences of ferries instead? It’s of course impossible to say, and the Department of Transportation is not likely to hold a local referendum on the question any time soon.
But still, it’s intriguing to consider. For one thing, it makes you stop and think about what the values of island communities actually are, and what is lost when a place adopts a more convenient and cosmopolitan lifestyle. Convenience, after all, is a two-edged sword. For most Americans, a more convenient life-style usually means we spend more of our time in front of a TV. A faster lifestyle usually means we sacrifice time spent with family and friends. Convenience food has come to mean that we will be getting fatter.
Of course, all these trade-offs with convenience exist in island communities, but they are resolved differently. Inconvenience forces you to spend more time waiting with your neighbors and family for the boat; inconvenience means you lug more stuff, but you also think more about what you’re lugging around and whether you really need it. Island communities have some of highest literacy rates in Maine and some of the highest circulations per capita of library books in the state, even though they have as many TVs as mainland communities. This is not just pure happenstance; it is the island life – some might call it the island curse – but there it is for all to see.
When someone first suggested 20 years ago that it might make sense to tear down some of the state’s dams, the notion was dismissed as impractical and foolhardy. Now dams are coming down, not just in Maine, but across the country as the value of unobstructed waterways exceeds the value that originally justified the dams’ construction. I don’t expect that there will be a rush to take bridges down anytime soon, but the time when the values of island life exceed the value of convenience could be out there in our future.
Philip W. Conkling is president of the Island Institute.