Through the hurricane season of late summer and fall, the long Maine winter and the exaggerated, shameless, Wellie-sucking mud of March and April — at least some years — we who live on islands are interrogated regularly by telephone, by text, by Internet, by single-sideband, by any other available means and asked the same question, repeatedly: “How’s the weather?”
Our friends and enemies and relatives and summer neighbors and a few hopeful tradesmen ring us up or type out their oddly public Facebook queries, in hopes of satisfying their natural curiosity, but always with the same subtle and unspoken assumption: It must be really rough out there! I think they sort of hope it’s bordering on the apocalyptic.
My experience over 25 years on Matinicus has led me to the conclusion that there are really only two kinds of weather here; two that matter, anyway: 1. You can leave. 2. You can’t leave.
As I write, I have just received an e-mail in my capacity as Volunteer Community Emergency Management Coordinator Or Something (VCEMCOS) requesting data concerning how Matinicus Island managed during the big snowstorm in February. We managed pretty well, actually, with a couple of brief, isolated power outages but no significant interruption, and two guys with ton trucks working long hours to keep the dirt roads open.
Nobody’s boat went adrift, which is what really counts. A couple of stuck vehicles got pulled, pushed, or shoveled out without much inconvenience, and the kerosene heaters didn’t particularly like it. All in all, we had it easier than most people. Here’s the one catch, though: had any of us wished to leave the island, they’d have been out of luck.
The transportation realities of each island are different, and what is standard procedure on one sparsely inhabited ledge-pile would sound like utter lunacy on another. On Matinicus we have no mail boat, no year-round passenger vessel, no frequent vehicle ferry, and no way for a boat to tie up to our wharf during the lower part of the tide cycle. We do have an airstrip, and regular flights when the weather cooperates, but there is some weather where even the LifeFlight helicopter couldn’t land here.
“Surely one of the fishermen would take somebody in if it became really necessary?,” they ask. In theory yes, but there are some conditions where getting out of the harbor would be more than a lobster boat is worth. “Well, then, call the Coast Guard with their larger boats!” OK, but how do you propose to get yourself out to that large Coast Guard boat?
It’s a very comfortable Alcatraz, with hot chocolate and everything, but when you can’t leave, you can’t leave.
Our county emergency management director calls on the phone and checks in prior to each oncoming storm. “I used to ride my bicycle to work in worse weather than they call a bad storm these days,” observes that public safety professional, who (obviously) I’d best not name in the print. We generally agree. At any rate, he advises us as to the anticipated force of the coming wind with a special measurement system contrived just for us island housewives: the Clothespin Scale.
Of a recent bout of heavy weather, the one that delivered multiple feet of snow to many Maine communities and ripped shingles off nearly every structure in mine, he observed, “This’ll definitely be a four-pinner. Islanders are reminded to deploy four clothespins on each sock, so their laundry might ride out the hurricane. That is all.”
The day before that storm, as it happened, Paul the Phone Man had to fly to the mainland for some TDS Telecom business. Of course, no islander ever travels to the Continent without a visit to a grocery store, so before his flight home he naturally made his way to the Rockland Hannaford. Maybe it was Shaw’s. The thing is, with the expected 75 mph winds and heavy snow, everybody was expecting power failures, so shoppers were buying up all the drinking water, D-cells and beer. Paul was buying water chestnuts and ginger root for some Chinese New Year cooking. I can just imagine the look on the store clerk’s face.
Eva Murray is a freelance writer living on Matinicus.