Each year, Islesboro Central School’s Creative Writing Contest is organized around a central theme, to be explored in the prose and poetry submitted by students. After this year’s theme – “truth” – had been announced, I searched for examples to make this abstract concept more real to students. They asked whether stretching or embellishing the truth makes it a lie, or just an exaggeration, as in the many “fish that got away” stories they’ve heard from family and neighbors. This is not an exclusively contemporary consideration; woven throughout histories of Islesboro, both oral and written, are fish stories that straddle the borders between truth, myth and outright fiction.
The abundance of fish in the waters surrounding the Islesboro of a hundred years ago is scarcely comprehensible to our modern minds. Salmon berths dotted the island’s east side, where boats could offload the hundreds of fish their nets had scooped up. Plentiful cod and haddock, caught on trawls and handlined, were split, salted and dried for winter food as well as export. Flounder were so numerous and large that they were referred to as “barn doors” – and, allegedly, used as such on Islesboro farms.
One salmon fisherman of that era, Joshua Dodge – reportedly a religious man – interrupted his contemplation of the Bible’s account of Jesus and Peter one day to haul his net. It came up literally filled to overflowing, the fish straining the net to the point of bursting. When Dodge docked with a catch that was exceptionally large even by the standards of the day, John Bowden, the town pauper, was on hand to greet him. “Them are nice fish, Mr. Dodge,” Bowden commented, to which Dodge generously replied, “Johnny, I will give you one!” “Oh no,” Bowden countered, “I shall dirty my clothes if I take one home.”
During Prohibition, illegal liquor was stashed all over Islesboro, from modest supplies for private consumption to warehouses holding large smuggled shipments. One unnamed islander was dipping fish out of his weir at Crow Cove when a U.S. Coast Guard vessel approached him, on the lookout for bootleg hooch. Though not himself a smuggler, the man had brought along a quart of rum to fortify himself against the rigors of dipping fish. Thinking quickly, he slit open a large codfish and stuffed the rum inside. The Coast Guardsman found the quart bottle, but the fisherman cleverly claimed that the fish must have swallowed it elsewhere, before being caught. Either believing this story (or, more likely, sensing the difficulty of disproving it), the Coast Guard confiscated the rum and called the matter closed.
Illustrating another strain of fish tale – i.e., “the one that got away” – is the story of Megophias (“big snake”), a humpbacked creature sighted in the coastal waters of Penobscot Bay. Mostly reported near Gloucester, but also in Maine waters, Megophias was seen by nearly 200 people near Lynn, Massachusetts, during the summers of 1817 and 1818. The vast majority of accounts agreed on the creature’s appearance: smooth skin, ten or more humps on its back, flat head and rapid, undulating motion through the water. How many mysterious sightings in the waters off Islesboro have been in reality reappearances of Megophia is a matter of conjecture.
Another legend concerns the flying fish of Islesboro. The first account of this phenomenon to reach my ears involved the late Agatha and Joe Cabannis. Driving peacefully home one evening on Islesboro’s main road, their composure was shattered when a large mackerel fell out of the sky directly onto the hood of their moving car. After stopping to collect their wits, the story goes, they picked up the fish and took it home for dinner.
Subsequent accounts from several nature walkers have described hiking in the stillness of the woods, gradually becoming aware of a flapping noise breaking the quiet and suddenly finding a fish flopping frantically at their feet. None of them, reportedly, have picked up the fish and taken them home for dinner.
Although believed by many to be fish mysteriously endowed with the gift of flight, still more believe the fish are live prey snatched out of the sea by osprey and eagles, but who manage to wriggle loose while being carried aloft. Since the bird in question might be flying over woods, water or someone’s yard, the possibilities for these startling sudden fish appearances are widespread.
My favorite flying fish story involves a certain Islesboro cat named Millie Many Toes. Millie’s quiet, reserved exterior belies fierce hunting prowess. She often brings little nocturnal snacks home to enjoy nibbling and nuzzling beneath her owners’ bed, and the crunch, crunch, crunch of little bones is not an unusual sound to hear in the wee hours. Late one night Millie began agitatedly meowing, something she rarely does. Her owners awoke to a flapping noise under the bed and carefully took a look, only to find a ten-inch pogy flailing around in desperation. The owners prudently elected not to try to take this latest trophy away from Millie, only wondering to themselves how she’d managed to get it through the cat door, up the stairs, and under the bed. The next morning the sole remaining trace of the hapless pogy was a single fin, fastidiously placed on the guest room floor.