I will step down officially on July 1from my role at the Island Institute, but I won’t be going far—12 miles out to Lanes Island on Vinalhaven for starters. Ever since my first visit to a Maine island in 1975, islands have never been far from my mind and will not be far away in the future. Looking ahead, I can offer a few lessons from what I learned from Maine’s islands and islanders that I will take with me wherever I go.
Islands give the world something increasingly rare and wonderful—a place you can listen to yourself think. Islands provide isolation and isolation gives you time and space to think. Your thoughts are your companions. In such circumstances, you become more yourself because there are fewer interruptions and distractions. Other landscapes provide isolation; deserts, mountains, the far sea, ice fields, for instance.
But inherent in the island landscape is the ritual of circumspection—of walking around till you come back to where you started. There is a roundedness to island thinking. And the good news is you don’t need your own island to do this; you can bring your island along with you anywhere you go once you have had even a glimpse.
By virtue of listening to yourself think, little sparks of creativity, like fireflies, light up the mind. Not just for artists and poets—but also for the important day-to-day pursuits of island life: rigging a seine to catch a bigger school of fish, or baiting a trawl so it won’t snarl (at you) or imagining the shape of the tumblehome in your vessel to carry more weight aft. Little things most people never notice. Local knowledge. Fine scale. Finest kind.
Incredibly, the converse of this proposition is also true; if isolation allows you to disconnect in order to listen to yourself think, islands confront you with the reality that all things are connected. You are connected to your neighbors because you cannot escape them; you are connected to nature’s cycles because they exact terrible penalties on those who are ignorant of her wiles. You are connected to your community because your community will support you and occasionally rescue you. You are connected to the world because the earth is a tiny island surrounded by illimitable oceans of space. Islands are not a place to be a hermit.
When you have the time and place to think, you begin to organize what you know into stories. Stories are the original Internet, and the oral traditions in island culture are the means by which information is traded on the ferry and hard won local knowledge is passed down from one generation to the next. Story telling merges into the truths we need to share.
An appreciation of island history runs rampant in native culture. Island historical societies collect our native wildflowers that bloom over and over again and press them between the pages of our memory. New stories volunteer themselves all the time like weeds; you just need to listen to the wind. Catch a whisper and begin to tell your own story.
Island schools are where a community’s hopes are entrusted. If there is no school, there is no future because there is no hope for the future. Island students give shape to their hopes in boatbuilding classes, in a hothouse where they raise greens for school lunches and in the infinite spaces between each pair of ears where ideas arc across an unlikely synapse to make a new completely individual connection with time, place and space. See the world while you carry your island in your pocket like a heart rock and come back next year or next generation to the place where you began your journey. Returning is like the day following the night. Hope is that island.
Here on Maine’s islands, old and new worlds intersect. For the last century the wealth has been in the water. It still is, although the marine world is changing more quickly than the air around us. It is nearly unfathomable to think that the product of what we burn in every engine is the same as the invisible breath we exhale, and yet it is not as benign. How could carbon dioxide change the world? Ask any lobsterman who can now can land shedders in every month of the year because the waters are warmer year round. The good book says build not on sand, but on rock foundations. Good advice. Because islands are on the front lines of climate change, it is good to build back from the edge of the sea; the higher the better. If you can see the ocean, the ocean can see you. The future is here; time to prepare.
Our wealth is also in the wind. In the century before our most profligate 20th century, Maine sails ran full and by when the wind took our products, and captains and their families all around the world and back home again. Sometimes these voyages ended in tragedy, but more often in new riches and new perspectives, connected to a larger, rounded world. Today, the gigiwatts of power in the Gulf of Maine are a high wind looking for a sail. Catch it.
As incredible as it now seems to me after 30 years, the islands of Maine have filled nearly every nook and cranny of my life—like a tide that kept rising and for the patience, instruction and kindnesses that islanders have offered me along the way, I am unspeakably grateful.
Although the world is big, it is also round, like an island—the island where you were born or the one you carry around in your mind. As I now turn to the ever-rising eastern sun, there is roundedness that is becoming.
Philip Conkling is founder of the Island Institute.