This past weekend I was asked to speak at a “Creativity and Innovation Conference,” focused on “How We Started – From Idea to Impact,” organized and hosted by students at Middlebury College.
It was a beautiful fall day down in the little valley beneath the Green Mountains that cradles the Vermont town and the college named for it. It turned out that this conference was held a weekend before my 40th college reunion, so the topic of where one ends up after starting out on a path from college has a certain September-ish resonance.
I started my story toward the end of my time in college, after I had turned in my senior thesis in April and had no other responsibilities until graduation in early June. I had recently read Kerouac and imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, decided to hitchhike across the country. I stuck my thumb out on the Massachusetts Turnpike and the first car that stopped was going to L.A. Since I was going to San Francisco-actually Berkeley where I had a friend -I jumped in.
It turned out that Kevin, who was driving the car, was following an 18-wheel truck, in which his pals, Bob and Terry, were barreling down the road ahead of us. Their plan was to drive straight through to L.A., with each of us rotating through the passenger seat of the truck to help keep Bob awake, the only qualified driver of the big rig. The high and low point of the journey occurred while I was in the truck with Bob on an interstate interchange in southern Indiana-having just crawled into the sleeper berth at 2:30 a.m.-when Bob took the turn too fast on a sheen of black ice and the truck jack-knifed and flipped over on its side. I was fine, but Bob was doubled over in pain when the state police arrived a few minutes later to rush us to the nearest emergency room. Attendants wheeled Bob into the hospital in Terre Haut and a few moments later, when no one was looking, Bob jumped up and said “Let’s get out of here,” and we ran to the nearest door where he hailed a cab. We jumped in and sped away because, as Bob later said, there was no way he could explain the ownership of the rig or its contents. Let us just say that I learned very different things about the world during that four-day cross-country trip than I had learned in the prior four years of college.
When I graduated a few months later, I decided to move to California. The expression then was, “Turn the country up on end and everything loose rolls into California.” I must have fit the bill. I taught school for two years in a little gold mining town up in the Sierra foothills and then got a job cruising timber for Southern Pacific Land Company. SP, as it was known to loggers in the area, had been deeded every other square mile of the Tahoe National Forest in exchange for building the railroad through the mountains the previous century, and they were about to cash in on it. Still, I could not believe that someone would pay you to walk through stunningly beautiful old growth forests just to count trees, mammoth as they were.
But I began to miss the cranky quirkiness of New England. It seemed that the first question everyone asked you in California was always, “Where are you from?” because everyone was from somewhere else on their way to some other future. The rootlessness that had seemed so intoxicating when I had arrived had begun to wear thin. So with no direction home, as Dylan had sung in “Like a Rolling Stone,” I drove back across the country in the late fall to the one state in New England where there were still vast unsettled acreages with more trees than people.
By happenstance I ended up in Washington County, with a job as a caretaker on a hundred acres of land in Township Number Seven, just north of Steuben, the southernmost unnamed township in Maine. I went to work on a chainsaw crew with a neighbor who owned a skipjack-a six wheel drive stripped down woods truck-and we went to work that winter cutting four-foot pulpwood for Handy Pinkham. When the woods roads thawed during mud season, I dug clams on the flats around Pigeon Hill Bay and then in the summer raked blueberries on the barrens for the Jasper Wyman, the baron of his family’s blueberry company.
After two years of this annual cycle of pulp cutting, clam digging and blueberry raking, I decided I wanted to stay in Maine and figure out a way to make a real living. In contrast to my neighbors, I had the luxury of getting out of poverty via further education. More than anything else I wanted to work in the North Maine Woods-I had read Thoreau at that point and wanted to cruise timber in the vast Allagash region, north of Moosehead and west of Katahdin.
Nothing doing; there was a housing recession on due to the dislocations following the first Arab oil embargo. However, there was an ad on the bulletin board at the forestry school looking for someone to collect baseline ecological data on twelve Maine islands owned by a volunteer group called The Nature Conservancy. It is hard to imagine that the largest environmental group in Maine at that point in 1975 had no full time employees. I got the job because I knew a couple of lobstermen from my days back in Washington County who would get me to the first group of islands off Petit Manan Point. I thought it would be a fun way to spend the summer between the two years of forestry school, but foolishly thought, “If you’ve seen one spruce covered granite island, you’ve seen them all.”
The first island I went to changed my life. Flint Island, a spectacularly wild and beautiful 175-acre island east of Petit Manan, was home to a pair of bald eagles, a pod of harbor seals and several stands of rare Arctic flowers, as I was to document during my three days of careful observation of everything thing I could identify or collect.
On the last day of my fieldwork, I stumbled across the remnants of an old stone foundation in the dense interior of the island. Someone had once lived in this wild inhospitable place, which had since been completely reclaimed by nature. Who were they, how had they made a living and why did they leave? These questions kept repeating themselves to me in the years ahead as I went to more and more islands and found similar traces of a way of life that had seemingly just receded into the trees.
It is not that I actually had an epiphany on Flint Island, but that stone foundation kept haunting me until I could formulate the question that thankfully a lot more people are now asking themselves, “What does it take to sustain an island way of life?”
Philip Conkling is the president of the Island Institute.