The magic spell of summer is quickly broken. For me this happened the other morning driving down the main street of my mainland town when I unconsciously waved at the driver of an oncoming car — two fingers raised above the rim of the steering wheel, island fashion. It was only when the startled faces in the approaching vehicle rubbernecked at a complete stranger waving at them that I remembered, dummy, you are no longer on the island. You could get reported waving at strangers here.
An island community is partly a community of mind that we bring back and forth across an island’s most fundamental boundary. Summer kids, in the best of circumstances, blend into island culture through pickup games of soccer or softball or other simpler forms of play, dragging their parents with them. Island kids visit the summer’s city kids in the winter to visit museums, watch the latest movies and mimic richly textured urban hip-hop fantasies. Sometimes summer love even ripens into the fullness of an island marriage.
In contrast to almost all other islands elsewhere, the most timeless summer rituals on Maine islands involve work — hard work. To participate most fully in an island community, summer kids and summer parents figure out a way to work or otherwise be useful in community activities. This is remarkable when you stop to think about it. Elsewhere in the world, islands are synonymous with leisure — sunbathing, golf, skin diving and things of that sort. No one goes to Hawaii or the Caribbean archipelago, after all, to cut sugarcane or work on a fishing boat or help organize a tag sale for the church. But these are the summer activities that are most prized in Maine island communities, and they convey citizenship across oceans of different experiences.
If you are a nimble teenager, the most prized summer job is to land on the stern of a lobster boat, muscling 40-pound traps around the slippery decks, stuffing reeking bait bags as quickly as hands can fly while keeping your feet free of the mounds of pot warp swirling around your ankles. A sternman or sternwoman on a high-line Maine lobster boat can still earn a good part of his or her tuition at a state college in a summer if the shedders hit by the Fourth of July. But you can also stock shelves or bag groceries at the market or wait tables or clean houses. It doesn’t really matter: as long as you’re working, you’ll fit in.
Not too many years ago the first wave of four teenage boys in our family was hired to paint a summer cottage’s two-tiered wraparound porch with his younger brother. This involved scraping and sanding hundreds of chest-high intricately carved porch spindles and rails before applying the first square inch of paint. The frugal cottage owner had arranged to pay the boys $5 an hour. To say it was a struggle to motivate a pair of youths, then aged 13 and 14, after their first day at the neighbor’s porch is the kind of thing parents say to cover a world of painful memories.
But then the older of the two, Tim, had an idea: he put an ad in the island newspaper offering his services as a computer support person. He got his first call immediately from a recently arrived summer person who could not access his email. Since this person lived in a hard to-find-house down on the shore, he came to our house to drive the computer expert to the scene of his frustration. He was greeted by a 14-year-old who introduced himself with the name that had appeared in the ad, but the guy didn’t get it. “Is your father here?” he wanted to know, not understanding that this father had long since stopped doing computer set-up, once his teenager showed the slightest aptitude.
When the email snafu had been straightened out and another half-dozen satisfied customers had also been spared computer melt down, I learned that Tim was only charging $8 an hour. Since his customers were so clearly relieved to have their problems straightened out and there was no one else they could turn to, I told him he could have charged a small fortune. But Tim said the problems were not difficult to fix — they required no special skills and he didn’t feel right charging more. Besides, earning anything more than $5 an hour was enough to qualify for early retirement from the summer porch job where his younger brother was stuck for another three weeks. Any work will do.
This summer the last two teenagers are working on the docks at the lobster co-op shoveling bait. They get up at 4:30 in the morning and are on the docks by 5 when the first boats come alongside. The first day they shoveled over four tons of herring into bait barrels; the next day seven tons. One was so tired that he didn’t notice that two herring had slid down into his boot and worked into a rich paste by the end of his work day. He stripped his clothes off, took an outdoor shower and left everything pretty much in a pile on the back deck. The next morning when he came down to suit up, he found a mink busily retrieving bits of fish gurry from his boots.
As long as Maine islanders, summer and year-round, continue to celebrate the shared rituals of hard work, the future of these remarkable communities is at least partly secure.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.