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My book is called Well Out to Sea. My son still calls it “My Life in Kenya.” One morning last winter, as I sat in a parking lot on the mainland waiting for the appointed time for my meeting with the potential publisher of my book, Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” came on the car radio.
Matinicus Elementary School: How things really work
He may pause and wonder for a moment just what he’s gotten himself into. Each summer, visitors to Matinicus ask questions about our little school. Misconceptions about our island school, one of the last remaining one-room schools in the country, abound. As a former teacher, former school district bookkeeper, parent of former island students, classroom
Bomb squad
“Well, you just missed the bomb squad…” “Now what? Did Nellie turn up another old hand grenade in the back of a desk drawer?” “No,” I replied. “This time, we had to blow up one of Suzanne’s best Historical Society artifacts.” Emily sighed. “How many times are my parents going to have to call the
Essay: Tweeting island news
The Twitter phenomenon, and the way Twitter “connects the world” is (according to the little magazine supplement that we find in the Sunday paper) one of the past year’s “Big Things.” That technology, closely aligned with thinking out loud, seems hardly equal to the other major news items these days. Some Americans have been neglecting
Improvements planned for island airstrips
Each day that the weather cooperates, residents of Matinicus drive to the gravel airstrip on the north end of the island, where pilots and islanders unload groceries and prescriptions, furnace parts and birthday cakes, mail bags and UPS boxes, medical oxygen and plumbing fittings from the small Cessna airplanes operated by Penobscot Island Air. They
For Matinicus students, leaving home comes early
From the time they are big enough to ride a wobbly bicycle a quarter of a mile until they are, in some cases, capable of running a boat to the mainland, Matinicus kids assemble daily in their one schoolroom. Preschoolers look forward to it. Students learning the alphabet work beside teens working on algebra and
A busy start for children at Matinicus Island School
Five weeks into the school year, Matinicus Island School teacher Heather Wells was almost wishing things would get a little more…humdrum. “Well, not really,” she smiles, “but we haven’t had a single full week of regular school yet.” To date, her six-student group has attended the Inter-Island Event on Islesford in September. They learned about
Coastal cleanup on Matinicus Island
I’ve been reading Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano’s recent book Flotsametrics, a happy accidental find in the Rockland Library. The book describes the science of worldwide ocean currents, or gyres, that circulate floating objects such as the many thousands of Nike sneakers lost overboard from a container ship in a 1990 storm. Beachcombing becomes more
What is “phase separation?”
According to literature provided to fuel dealers by Irving, “Phase separation occurs when the ethanol blended into the fuel absorbs enough water to separate from the gasoline. It only takes a small amount of water to cause phase separation in a tank, making it critical that ethanol-blended gasoline is not exposed to water at any
Ethanol gasoline causes problems for islanders
A couple of years ago, our televisions wooed us with happy advertisements showing glistening ears of bright yellow corn, a marketing strategy encouraging us to imagine a clean, renewable, American-made fuel source that would reduce our dependence on foreign oil, improve air quality, and sidestep runaway price hikes at the local service station because we,