Islandport Press, 2008
Softcover, 171 pages, $16.95
A summer idyll
Once upon a time, many years ago, I visited an island, a small rise of sand and palm trees off the east coast of Panama. At high tide the island barely measured two acres. I had not known how small it was before we got there. It was so contained I could feel its pulse, its aliveness, all the minute reaches of it as it expanded and shrank with the tide. The island grew larger every day, a quantity not reckoned by any worldly span, only in the measurement of my mind.
“Islands,” F. Benjamin Carr writes, attract people, in part, because they promise freedom from tyranny of time.” And so he writes about idyllic Bustins lying in a quiet corner of Casco Bay, just a mile or two offshore from the shopping mecca of Freeport-and a world utterly different.
Bustins features more than 100 homes, some more than a century old, boasts its own ferry service, has no electricity, no businesses, one road, and almost no vehicles.
Carr began his long love affair with the island as a child, when his parents rented a cottage. He has owned a cottage himself now for decades. A retired school principal, he writes about Bustins’ earliest days, its early owners, its one- time year-round residents to the present as a summer retreat and tourist destination. It is a remarkably individual history among Maine’s many islands, through years of forming an island association, deciding against electrifying, moving slowly to accept a modern technological world.
Carr and his wife, both part of the educational system, feel freed as they dash off to “their” island for the summer. They meet evenings with other semi-islanders, sometimes passing around a book of poetry, each reading a portion out loud…”memorable evenings…even though we knew we shared the island with others, we always considered it ‘our’.”
In his research on Bustins’ history from the 19th century on, we see the gradual development of the island as a summer community, with the selling and building of lots, the home reflecting the island’s early farming community. Rusticators-as every Maine island’s summer residents were called-came to recognize the habits of neighbors. Friendships developed, prompting the establishment of a six-hole golf course. Entertainment was in short supply until cottagers began to organize events. And yet, the separateness that abides within the soul of one choosing islandness is a fiercely protected thing.
“We feel gratitude,” Carr muses, that we can be on an island that to most seems a century or more removed from the bustle and the growth, the world-with-us of Portland and the mainland. Our protectiveness for Bustins has everything to do with wanting to preserve a refuge, a place where we know and are known, a precious place to go when we become world-weary. A century after they discovered Maine, we maintain the tradition pioneered by the rusticators.”
The Carrs have stepped into the modern age with solar panels on their roof that provide the powering of a few lights, a small television, and “those symbols of age, a laptop computer and a cell phone.” Retired, they lengthen their seasonal stay.
Far from being isolated from the world, island life, we can see, also embraces a touch-the-world atmosphere on its own terms.