ISLESBORO — Busy summers with lots of hard work, quiet winters that offer time for recreation and reflection—it’s the rhythm of island life and it suits Dan Tutor just fine.
Tutor, 29, is a sixth-generation Islesboro resident on his mother’s side. He isn’t stuck on the island by chance or circumstance, he explains over a latte at the café at the community center. No, he has chosen to live here, and knows just how rich his life is because of this place.
“I’ve always had roots here and they’re sort of inextricable,” he said.
Admittedly a bit of a hermit, Tutor relishes the time he is able to spend improving the land around the cabin he shares with his fiancé, Kim Lockrow, developing the immediate environment as a “permaculture,” an approach that allows the natural elements to support and complement each other.
“I have more of a relationship with the place and the land than with the people,” he said. “I could never do a 9-5 in an office. That’s why I live on the island.”
But he’s not Thoreau in the woods all year; on an April morning, Tutor takes time out for an interview only because it’s raining. When it clears, he’ll be back at work, tending to landscaping tasks at Islesboro’s many summer homes, working with his mother, Sue Hatch, and their business, S.A. Hatch Landscaping.
She started the business some 30 years ago, and Tutor has been running the operation the last few years. Most of the work is on the island’s old and new estates owned by seasonal residents. It includes stone work, establishing and tending to flower gardens, and creating a Japanese-style garden at one place.
“We’ve even installed some ponds,” he added.
Tutor estimates the business has 30 to 40 regular clients.
Though Tutor loves the island life, he has traveled and lived in other places.
In his high school years, he attended the private boarding school Gould Academy in Bethel, where others in his family attended. He chuckles before answering a question about college. He’s attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Bennington College in Vermont, Humboldt State College in California and, for two years, the University of Southern Maine in Portland, where he is just shy of a four-year degree.
Other stops included Aspen, Colo., where he tended bar and snowboarded. “That was the important thing,” he joked of the latter.
His father, Tom Tutor, is from Mississippi originally, moved to the island in the mid-1970s where he met Tutor’s mother. His father taught math at the Islesboro Central School and retired in 2012. Through his father, who completed a Fulbright fellowship, Tutor visited South Africa and later, Thailand.
“I’ve been out and I came back and I’m here to stay,” is how he sums up his view these days. And why not? As he said, “I have the opportunity to pursue my interests here, and it’s a really nice place to live.”
Part of what makes it so is what he calls a critical mass— even if it’s only a few—of like-minded people of roughly the same age.
“They all want to be here and they all value it for the same reason,” he said. “It’s really conducive to a creative environment.”
Those who are close in age—late 20s, early 30s—are “really accepting” and even supportive of those who try new endeavors, he said, yet another benefit to living in this community, whose year-round residents number about 560.
When he has down time again, Tutor will continue to work on the self-sustaining permaculture at his place, perhaps establishing a sugar bush stand which also would produce maple logs in which to grow shiitake mushrooms, with pest control assisted by a small flock of ducks.
Though he cherishes those ties to the land, the mainland and access to the busy towns of Belfast and Camden are only a 20-minute ferry ride away.