LONG ISLAND — Locals say there are 250 year-round residents on this Casco Bay island.
“I think they’re being very optimistic,” says Melanie Floyd, an island native whose parents and grandparents have ties to the island. “It’s more like 200,” she says.
The sun is bright, but an unrelenting wind makes the air feel much colder than the mid-teens registered on the thermometer. Floyd gives a visitor a tour of the island in her car. She’s newly back on the island, after graduating in December from the University of Maine at Farmington.
Though the island seems deserted—no doubt everyone is hunkering down due to the brutal cold spell—Floyd, 22, isn’t retreating. She’s poised to start her career, because she lives a short commute away from Maine’s largest—and arguably its most culturally vibrant and economically thriving—city.
She’s banking on the proximity of that city for her employment future.
Floyd majored in creative writing and English in college, and thanks to the AP credits earned in high school, she graduated a semester early. That school was Portland High School.
“A lot of us [islanders] go to Portland High,” she said. “It’s closest.”
The 45-minute ferry ride with three other Long Island students gave them an opportunity to finish homework assignments, she said.
“It happened a lot more on the morning boat,” she said with a laugh, confessing that the trip back to the island saw more chatting than work.
Floyd has hardly lived a life cut off from the world. She played on the high school’s club rugby team, which meant she often had to stay in the city with friends’ families because she would miss the last ferry of the day.
The summer before her freshman year in high school, she traveled through England, Wales and Ireland with 40 other Maine students as part of a youth ambassador program.
“It was a nice trip,” she remembers.
She’s also traveled to California to visit a cousin and to Kansas to see a friend from high school.
At UMaine Farmington, Floyd co-hosted with her sister Valerie a show on the campus radio station, playing rock music from various eras.
In recent summers, she worked at the Niblic, a gift/convenience store on nearby Chebeague Island, where Floyd’s mother works as a mail carrier. Her father is a lobsterman. She’s worked on the boat, but with a laugh, confesses to not liking it much, and being a little prone to seasickness. The family lives on the shore among a cluster of houses some distance from the harbor where the Casco Bay Lines boat stops.
That ferry connection is the key to her employment future. She hopes to land a job in Portland or the surrounding area.
“I’ve been looking at a lot of marketing and communication jobs,” she said. “But it doesn’t scare me to go outside my field.”
While in college, she completed an apprenticeship with renowned Farmington-area writer Bill Roorbach, helping him improve his online presence. She also helped him with a writing group he led for area high school students.
On this cold winter day, Long Island looks isolated, maybe even bleak. Would she be disappointed to be living on the island years from now?
After a moment’s thought: “I’d be OK with that. The community down here—I’ve just grown so attached to it,” even though the close quarters are “more annoying” than enriching, at times.
“I like having the balance between the small town and city of Portland,” Floyd said, summarizing her perspective. And that’s exactly what she has—the best of both extremes of Maine.