More than 30 years ago after moving to the remote eastern coast of Maine, a visiting friend wanted to know if Washington County supported an active traditional music scene. Amid all the evident privations of life thereabouts, she evidently conjured up a cultural brew of guitar and banjo pickers like those of rural Appalachia or fiddle and pipe players of Cape Breton who must inhabit smoky roadhouses along the forbidding coastline. But I was unaware of even a single sea chantey singer, and could only tune into Big Country radio packaged in Nashville that beamed into eastern Maine from Bangor to offer a sample of what my neighbors listened to in their F-150s or over the whine of their lobster boat engines on their daily rounds.
Thirty years ago artisans and craftsmen played a major role in the renaissance of the Old Port in Portland where they occupied derelict but elegant old brick buildings and began attracting an audience for their canvases, pottery, poetry, music and other arcane arts. At the time, many young artists lived on Peaks Island and commuted back and forth because island housing was then cheap and only a 20 minute boat ride away from the Old Port. But that center could not hold, and in no time the artsy Old Port ambience attracted entrepreneurs and developers who priced most of the artists out of their lofts
Thirty years later, we are beginning to understand a little more of what a “creative economy” means to hundreds of more remote places along the Maine coast and throughout the hinterlands. We are beginning to recognize that remote places like islands and coastal fishing villages symbiotically stimulate creative economies and vice versa. Such remote places attract people who, like most of Maine’s small town inhabitants, are suspicious of change and resist it as rock resists water. You might say that in Maine isolation and creativity go hand in hand.
The fact is that in a state with a population a little over a million, in which all of the rest of New England could fit, and with 495 small towns and 10 million acres of unorganized territories, we are remote, not just geographically but culturally. Our remoteness brands us, just as our individuality characterizes us. We don’t listen much to what other places, states or regions have to say — not that we are necessarily disinterested, they are just too far away to understand or sometimes even to matter. It is also harder to find and develop your craft or art with a din of opinion in your ears or a welter of conflicting images to cloud your inner vision. So we go our own way(s). And within this simple truth lies the wellspring of our endlessly multiplied individual creativities.
Rather than looking to distant cultural or economic centers, we learn to pay attention to local detail; to train ourselves to identify the universal in the particular. We glimpse timelessness in the pigment of a weathered mussel shell and transcendence in its opalescent interior. We apprentice ourselves in order to shape and bend wood that will ease the entry of a flared bow in a foul tide or conform a hull’s tumblehome to a sea rolling toward shore.
Our artists and creators work not just with canvas or cedar over oak, but with composites and fabricated steel to form complex reverse angles that give new meaning to the symmetries of enclosed spaces. Others work with beach stone and shore granite to make immutable the graceful forms of a coastline both hardened by cold and smoothed by rote. The narrowed eye of both the painter and the photographer are stopped down to frame the evanescent quality of light refracting off water or the looming mirages on a shimmering horizon.
It is now fashionable for politicians to speak of the creative economy — and rightly so, for the collective works of this kind of economy will stand the test of time, even if its financial returns will not build new mansions on the shore. A society that embraces its artists and designers, its craftsmen and women, its boat builders and metal fabricators, its welders, poets and mystics, its banner makers and architects, its sign makers and novelists — that is a society worth joining and supporting to the utmost of our individual means.
And in the process, we all become stewards of the most special qualities of our remote places — free to all of us for the partaking. Of all our humbling and remote landscapes, our islands and the open sea beyond provide for many who have gone before us and the legions who will surely follow, the most constant and constantly refreshed inspiration; they give us purchase and platform to see into the inner nature of things; to make from their edgy restlessness endless new forms and synaptically charged insights. In the end, islands, more than any other places, provide us with the sharpest glimpse and glint of renewed creation.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.