Until the recent economic seizure, most Americans would change houses and communities about as often as Hollywood stars change partners. When I got my first mortgage, the broker trying to interest me in the then new product of an adjustable rate mortgage, assured me that if I were like most homeowners, I’d only stay in the house five years before moving on-in time to beat the big rate jump.
But summer houses are different; they remain a nostalgic constancy in the face of the pressures of the American Diaspora as we relentlessly sift about for bigger opportunities, better jobs and self improvement. We will sacrifice most all our vacation time and scrimp in other areas of family finance to maintain a connection with the most modest camp in the Maine woods or the rambling shingle-style “cottage” with a saltwater view. Vacationing in Maine used to be called “rusticating,” because the early visitors appreciated Maine’s simple rustic charms. And nowhere was life supposedly more simple than island life. Ah!, the simple island life.
If there were ever such a thing as a simple island life, it ended several centuries ago. Everywhere, island life is immensely complicated; from connecting with ferries and mailboats (or worse, the boatyard that has been storing and readying your cranky large or small vessel for its annual summer splash-down), to reestablishing the island water system, dispersing the mouse scat, and preparing the island garden for those expensive summer salads-all requires Eisenhower-like focus on logistics.
I married into a summer island family that had been perfecting its rituals for some three decades before I appeared. Four sons later, with a re-blended family and well into our third generation as summer folk (reminded, as we are, occasionally by islanders that “summah people; some ahrn’t), the rituals survive even as the work ethic thins.
Like many earnest New Englanders-especially adopted New Englanders, who often burn brighter than natives-my in-laws have always believed that summer places are where you go to work your brains out when you are not working at your real job. Idle hands are not for this workshop. Caulking windows, painting clapboards, and mowing vast seas of Timothy grass and red fescue is good for the soul, said Emerson to his descendants, but I suspect many of them decamped from New England long ago. Recently my wife discovered a hammock in the attic that reminded her of childhood reveries. “Why don’t we set the hammock up outside,” she asked? “Why would we want to do that,” was the rejoinder from the elders, “Someone might use it.” Amid these quotidian tasks, each summer also requires the consummation of at least one Big Family Project-rebuilding a deck, installing an outdoor shower, and when all else fails, moving large granite boulders-believe me, I do not exaggerate-to a stone garden, all duly filmed by pater familias so we can watch ourselves work Next Summer!
During Memorial Day open-up this year, we arrived to find that half of last autumn’s newly installed roof had blown off in the screeching gales of winter, although thankfully the ice and snow shield underneath had held out most, if not all, out the torrential spring rains.
A few weekends later, we were startled to interrupt a large female raccoon scaling an aging drainpipe halfway on her way to the top of the second story soffet overhang, where she performed a perfect 5-7 layback move, scrambled onto the pitched roof, and descended into our fieldstone chimney to feed her hungry kits. You might think, as we do, that islands are feral enough without this addition to local fauna courtesy of a rod and gun club brainstorm some decades earlier; alas, the coons have outlasted the hunters. But perhaps the raccoons are an improvement over last spring’s furtive mink that had taken up residence in the basement until the size of the nestlings and fish on which they fed on grew too large to be pulled through the gaps in the foundation.
Nothing, however, is so eternally feral on islands as the old field that provides the most redeeming feature of an island summer house-the spiritually renewing views of the infinite moods of the sea. I had never appreciated the real meaning of the words my mother would regularly hurl at me to “go spruce yourself up,” until trying to keep ahead of the annual growth of cat spruce in an old pasture. I learned the phrase derives from New England hill farms where generations of our forbearers went to pull up recalcitrant spruce seedlings, which would otherwise rapidly choke out their increasingly ragged-looking pastures-never mind your window on the eternal. You can date summer people’s island experience by how loathe they are to cut a tree; newcomers from urban civilizations have little idea how vigorous island spruce can be and how relentlessly they will obscure the seascape.
The annual rituals of aerating the dug well that may have gone wormy during its winter and spring inactivity, the shoring up of the horse-hair plaster from which field mice have borrowed nest linings, the application of borax to the sills to discourage the voracious appetites of carpenter ants-all of these summer activities serve to remind us of the ultimate triumph of the nature of islands over our increasingly frail holding actions.
Meanwhile, while feral nature runs rampant outdoors; inside, nothing must change. Each driftwood sculpture, each artfully arranged exhibit of the children’s sea glass, each artifact from the island flea market is displayed as if they were a museum pieces, and indeed they are. We may fail to see the dust around them, but we can carefully curate our memories.
Philip Conkling is the president of the Island Institute.