With April Fool’s Day just around the corner I’ve been thinking about some of the hijinks that are part of Islesford’s oral history.
In the 1940s, when Irving Spurling used a horse and wagon to deliver ice and coal around the island, a group of pranksters took his wagon apart and reassembled it on the roof of the coal dock, now the Islesford Dock Restaurant. Changing the location of a large, needed item seems to be a good theme for a joke around here. There is just something about the imagined response that makes us smile.
In the late ’70s, someone took Richie Stanley’s skiff and hung it from one of the Palmer’s maple trees. In the early morning as he was headed down the road for a long day of fishing he found his skiff was definitely not at the dock where he’d left it.
My husband told me a story, from his father’s childhood, of someone sneaking in and tying a rope to the leg of Cora and Chummy Spurling’s bed. They were an older couple, with no children, who lived in the house that now belongs to Jim and Sallye Parrish. The rope was fed out through the window to the ground below, where the hoaxers waited for the bedroom lights to go out. They yanked on the rope as the couple retired, moving the bed across the floor.
Those were the days when a jokester might nail a large can or small bucket just below the water line on the bow of a skiff, causing an unsuspecting fisherman to wonder why his rowing was suddenly so ineffective.
Captain Ted Spurling, Sr., from whom I inherited this column, was known to be quite mischievous. In the summer, when Jack Tyson or Warren Rice captained the Islesford Ferry as a tour boat, they would come by Ted’s lobster boat so passengers could catch a glimpse of a “real lobsterman” at work. Ted complied by wearing a red bandana on his head and coming up from below with a knife in his teeth or guzzling (water) from a crockery jug.
His daughter Serena showed me a photograph of her father aboard his boat from the late ’70s. He was not wearing a red bandana, but he was busy placing rubber boots upside down in a large barrel, creating the impression of a sternman stuck headfirst in the bait.
His wife Cara said he didn’t like too much solemnity.
Almost 20 years ago a handful of people claimed to have spotted a male cardinal, rare at the time on the island. Everyone was on the lookout to see it for themselves. My sister-in-law Karen and I were quick to buy a fake cardinal and wire it to an apple tree near the Neighborhood House. We never witnessed any results from our prank, but we sure crack ourselves up thinking about it even now.
Rick Alley recalls walking up the road one morning and hearing my husband Bruce swearing and yelling, and going nowhere, fast. Someone had jacked up his truck in the night and placed blocks under it so the rear wheels didn’t quite touch the ground.
Another time Bruce came in from a long day of fishing and someone had tied an old toilet to his truck and hidden it in the weeds. As he pulled away from the co-op, the toilet followed him up the road.
Once in a while the tides are turned on the prankster as when Dan Fernald was out fishing with Bruce Damon. He snuck a couple of sculpin eyes into Bruce’s coffee mug, expecting to surprise him. Bruce took a big swig of coffee, swallowed it down and then spat the two eyeballs out without saying a word.
Perhaps the most well-known island joke played to date is when Chris Costello and Jim Bright dressed a punched female lobster in a Barbie doll outfit and placed it in one of Mark Fernald’s traps. Mark got such a kick out of it he released the lobster in her full regalia, hoping she’d find her way to another fisherman’s trap. She was actually caught ten times and came to be known as the “Barbie Lobster.”
Not only is she part of the island’s oral history, but her story made its way to the AP wire service in 2003, making the prank Google-able. The news story even inspired Charles Ipcar and Amos Jessup to write a ballad about it. (Dick Atlee’s link with the story and the ballad: http://dickatlee.com/poetry/lobster_barbie.html)
It’s the first week in March, in what looks to be a long and messy mud season. Stress is running high as we prepare for our annual town meeting on the 16th, and “the sequestration” is promising to cause all kinds of trouble. It seems to me it’s a perfect time for a ballad worthy prank to take our minds off all this seriousness.