lobsterboats at the end of a dock

Making It Here: The Island Retailer

Making It Here: The Island Retailer

Swan’s Island store owners reach beyond shelves to make profit.

STORY AND PHOTOS By Laurie Schreiber

On a late autumn, hard-charging Thursday, Brian Krafjack starts the morning on the computer, spreadsheets open for inventory and bookkeeping, social media posts about freight arrivals and specials du jour. He and his wife Kathy own The Island Market & Supply on Swan’s Island. Like many island retail operations, TIMS—as islanders call it—is much more than a store.

Case in point: The Krafjacks’ Thursday morning tasks actually were started the evening before when fisherman Les Ranquist brought Brian a haul of scallops, and long-time postman/freight deliveryman L.J. Hopkins sent an unexpected delivery of freight, loaded in his van, on the ferry on the last run of the day.

The Krafjacks stowed the scallops, drove to the ferry terminal to pick up the van, then unpacked several dozen boxes from the van into TIMS’ cramped back office.

Their labors of Wednesday evening meant posting Thursday’s scallop special on the store’s Facebook page and cataloguing freight packages and posting those on the Swan’s Island information Facebook page first thing in the morning so people knew to pick up their merchandise. All that before preparing for a day of actually running the store.

But there’s more–a lot more–to be done on this autumnal Thursday.

The Krafjacks oversee the food truck parked adjacent to the store, deliver vendor orders to Swan’s Island Elementary School, and take the noon freight delivery for Swan’s Island as well as freight and mail for the neighboring island of Frenchboro. That island’s groceries are delivered by boat, and its mail is picked up in time to drop off at the Swan’s Island Post Office to make the next ferry to the mainland.

Then it’s back to the store to sort and catalogue the noon freight, catalogue and put in orders to mainland providers for goods, and fill orders that have been coming in via text, phone, and social media throughout the day from individuals, businesses, and other entities, and pick up, fill, and deliver 100-pound propane tanks.

people standing on a dock

And amid all the work for their store, Kathy creates and exhibits her own art work, and Brian volunteers as a firefighter, is an architect and photographer, and publishes weekly social media essays that have become a popular read.

The Krafjacks’ days are a whirlwind of activity, sometimes not ending until midnight or later, surging in the summer, fading back a bit in the winter.

“It’s taken us a while to figure it all out,” said Brian.

It’s all worth it. In just the three years since moving to the island and opening their store, they and the community have embraced each other.

“It’s every day an adventure,” says Brian. “I don’t know that we could have even imagined the details. Going into it, I
figured it would be hard work. Most things worth anything are hard work. People say, ‘Do you get to go on vacation?’ I look at Kathy and say, ‘We are on vacation. We’re working hard, but we get to be here.’”

TIMS is a vital center of community life for this unbridged island—year-round population 350, summer 1,200 to 1,500. Perhaps that’s no different from countless small communities—island, mainland, or even big-city neighborhood—that have their own gathering spots.

But TIMS and stores on other unbridged islands fulfill needs and face challenges particular to their geography. It’s not easy to get to the mainland and back except, mainly, by ferry, and that’s expensive, schedule- and weather-dependent, and time-consuming. So, island stores are not just a fun gathering place or picturesque imagery for visiting photographers. They’re one of several pillars that help ensure the community’s life, health, and safety.

“When you’re a visitor, which we were for many years, you’re here because it’s a beautiful place and your friends are here,” says Tom McAloon, a year-round resident with his wife Bev since 2009, who’s stopped in to pick up some of those scallops. “But you’re here for a short time. Our take on the community was that it was a magical place. It’s still a magical place, but now it’s also a real place. We need to explore the issues, like how does this store make it? This island needs the store. We need L.J. (Hopkins) and what he provides. When you live here year-round, you realize it more acutely than if you’re a visitor.”

two people putting boxes into the back of a car

The Krafjacks shared that sense when, in 2014, they uprooted themselves from prosperous careers in
Stonington,
Connecticut to buy The Carrying Place, then owned by David and Cindy Niquette. The Krafjacks wanted to live on an island–running the store seemed like a great way to achieve that goal. They renamed it, inherited a core group of employees, and were off.

Now in their third winter, they reflect on the learning curve.

“Nothing happens as planned,” said Kathy. “You start the day with a plan and find out the boat’s late or the freight’s not coming or somebody’s sick. You have to learn to adjust and adapt and be resourceful.”

Island culture, though, means not having to figure things out alone. Folks want a store, so they help the storekeepers make it successful.

“They go out of their way to help you out,” she said. “That’s been an eye-opener.”

man rowing a dinghy

Brian Krafjack rows to his boat at its mooring.

“Going into it, I figured it would be hard work. Most things worth anything are hard work.” 
— Brian Krafjack

At TIMS, diversification is key to making the store work year-round. They’ve continued the Niquettes’ Pizza Friday—a big hit—but made it year-round. The takeout’s lunch specials are popular. They stock specialty breads, meats, cheeses, and delicacies from the mainland. The Krafjacks are considering building greenhouses to grow produce. Earlier this year, they bought a boat to take on the Frenchboro mail sub-contract, which also makes bringing groceries out financially viable. Two summers ago, they became the island’s propane dealer.

In the end, though, winter operations are financed by summer profit, itself running on slim margins.

“It all helps,” Brian says. “You have to do a lot things to make it all work.”

Laurie Schreiber is a regular contributor to The
Working Waterfront and the author of Boatbuilding on Mount Desert Island,  a collection of profiles about great wooden boatbuilders, along with their families and communities, dating back to the early 20th century.


man pushing luggage through ankle-deep water

Along the American Archipelago, Signs Are Everywhere

Along the American Archipelago, Signs Are Everywhere

Rising seas, warming waters impacting islands in Alaska, the Carolinas, the Chesapeake

By PHILIP CONKLING

When Maine islanders meet islanders from other American coastlines, you might notice a bit of deference in the air. Maine’s 15 year-round island communities have standing around the country, in part for having persevered while so many others have gone extinct elsewhere.

To add to Maine’s island luster, our island communities also have an impressive history of building elegant and durable boats, from which we harvest more than 700 million pounds of seafood each year.

Maine islanders also have gained national recognition—a front-page story in the New York Times, for instance—when ratepayers on the Fox Islands voted overwhelmingly in favor of erecting three wind turbines on a Vinalhaven hilltop that would produce enough electricity to supply that island and neighboring North Haven’s annual energy needs. According to many islanders, the 2008 vote had more to do with economics than green energy or climate change concerns.

But when Maine island lobstermen began reporting the appearance of marine species from southern waters in their traps—black bass, blue crabs and even sea horses—some fishermen began to wonder whether warming ocean temperatures might increase the incidence of shell disease that had decimated lobster fishing in southern New England.

Ocean warming seemed more pressing after 2012, when Maine lobsters shed their shells three weeks ahead of their normal time after a freakishly warm winter, and nearly paralyzed the industry because the markets could not absorb them. Then two years ago, scientists at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute confirmed that the waters of the Gulf of Maine are warming faster than 99 percent of the rest of the world’s oceans.

What Are They Seeing?

Islanders, I thought, are important witnesses in the front row of climate change, and their attitudes, responses—and adaptations—could be helpful to other Americans. With this in mind, I started visiting and writing to other islanders around the coasts of the U.S. to ask not just about warmer ocean waters, but also about whether they had experienced rising sea levels, storm surges, or other signs of a changing climate. They had.

Around the mid-1990s, fishermen fishing the cool waters off Hatteras Island on the Outer Banks—part of a sinuous chain of sandy barrier islands that stretch for 200 miles off the southern Virginia and North Carolina coasts—started catching fish with sores. Crab potters started talking about pulling up dead crabs and crabs swimming high up in the water column from a lack of oxygen in the water, recalls long-time Hatteras Island resident and writer Susan West, whose husband is a commercial fisherman. “We used to have a straight bass or rockfish catch, but it’s probably been over 10 years since one has been caught,” she said. “That’s a huge change. I have to believe it has something to do with the temperature of ocean water.” The water, she said, used to be cold, but it’s not anymore.

a blooded bulkhead

Flooding caused by a nor’easter pushes water on both sides of the bulkhead in Tylerton, one of three communities on Smith Island, Maryland.
(Photo: Dave Harp/Courtesy Bay Journal)

Noongwook, a member of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission from St. Lawrence Island, is worried about warming ocean temperatures in the Arctic. I met Noongwook at a conference of native Alaskan members of the Marine Mammal Commission at Bowdoin College in 2013, and listened to his accounts of the effects of rapid climate change, including earlier spring ice melt and later fall freeze-up, which result in thinning of ice at unexpected times, along with an increase in unpredictable violent weather. Having more and more days of open ocean is a double-edge sword: Last year, Noongwook was part of a whaling crew that landed its first bowhead of the season on March 27—earlier than ever before in the native people’s history. However, more days of open ocean means St. Lawrence islanders also must adjust to a rapid increase in large marine transportation vessels transiting the Bering Strait for commercial purposes.

But Who Is Noticing?

Even as warming ocean temperatures dramatically affect the day-to-day lives of fishermen and hunters, most of the rest of us—on islands or elsewhere—barely notice. We do, however, occasionally notice sea level rise, driven in part,
scientists tell us, by “thermal expansion” from a warmer and thus larger ocean, but also from the additional water from melting ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica. Watching sea level rise can be like boiling the proverbial frog in incrementally warmer water—the frog doesn’t know it is in trouble until it’s too late.

Sea level rise has become an intensely political topic in places like the North Carolina coast where lawmakers, concerned that scientific forecasts may damage economically powerful tourism and real estate industries, passed a law in 2012 requiring future sea level rise projections be based only on observed rates of the past three decades. Several scientists on the state’s advisory coastal research panel resigned from the panel in protest, but the law stuck.

Karen Amspacher, a native of Harkers Island in the “downeast” section of the North Carolina coast, called sea level rise “a hot button issue” on her island.

“Sea level rise is very real in small ways and big ways,” she said. “The marshes are creeping up, trees are dying, and salt water washes into everything. But the local community doesn’t see it as sea level rise and people are in denial, to be honest.”

To many islanders along the Atlantic coast, sea level rise is an overwhelming existential issue. Amspacher put it this way:

“Us locals have lived through a lot of bad weather. The people here take great pride in resilience and they expect the weather to be rough. People here see the changes, but they just deal with it. But no one is moving away, that’s for sure. Most people have raised their house but very, very few are leaving. You know, you just don’t leave. I mean where the hell do we go?”

A Tale Of Two Islands

Nowhere are the effects of sea level rise more dramatic than for the two low-lying island communities, Smith and Tangier islands, in Chesapeake Bay. The two islands are only nine miles apart, but their worlds and worldviews are dramatically different.

Smith and Tangier, like the whole of the Chesapeake Bay region, are slowly sinking—or “subsiding” to use the geological term—the result of the Earth’s crust settling along this part of the coast following the end of the Ice Age. At the same time, sea level is also rising around the two islands, at least according to scientists at the Army Corps of Engineers.

The Virginia-Maryland state border runs between the two islands with Tangier on the Virginia side and Smith on the Maryland side. On the Virginia side, the leaders and residents of Tangier Island have taken the Corps’ message to heart and have been actively lobbying the engineers for funding to build a seawall along its rapidly eroding northern edge, but Smith islanders aren’t so convinced by the Corps.

With their own town government and an island high school, Tangier islanders have developed local strategies for the community’s survival. As Tangier Island resident and native Carol Moore-Pruitt told a New York Times reporter, “I don’t know anything about climate change. But if calling me a
climate-change refugee gets me a seawall, then go ahead, call me a climate-change refugee.”

On the North Carolina coast, lawmakers were concerned that scientific forecasts would damage economically powerful tourism and real estate industries.

On the Smith Island side, islanders have little patience with government at any level. The seat of government for Smith Island is not on the island itself, but on the mainland, where St. Mary’s County commissioners control basic local functions. Smith Island, with its three villages of some 280 residents—mostly watermen and their families—has never felt the need for local government. As my friend Tom Horton, an award-winning journalist who covered the Chesapeake Bay for more than 30 years, told me, Smith Island’s motto might well be, “There’s no government like no government.” The island, as Horton remarks dryly, “is as close to chaos and still on the right side of the law as you can get.”

When I landed at the main dock on Smith Island a few years ago with Horton, I marveled at the Corps’ new bulkhead, a structure that stretches along perhaps a half-mile of Smith Island’s waterfront. It is the centerpiece of a huge federal effort to minimize shoreline erosion from the relentlessly rising sea level in the bay. But the Corps is controversial among many islanders who view the agency’s offer to buy out flooded island homes as tantamount to a death sentence for the community.

How can an agency that wants to destroy the community be trusted to be objective with any kind of information? Smith islanders freely admit their island is eroding—but just don’t attach the Corps’ label of “sea level rise” to the issue.

Sandy’s Message

Further north on 32-mile-long Fire Island off New York’s Long Island, where Superstorm Sandy battered the year-round and seasonal communities in 2012, the twin punch of rising sea level with storm surges is all too real.

Sandy was a massive storm with tropical-force winds
reaching out 580 miles, with 40-foot waves and a storm surge that flooded nearly 80 percent of the island’s 4,500 homes, destroying 90 houses outright. Sandy’s damage would have been much worse if residents of Fire Island had not raised $23 million in 2009 from their own pockets to replenish a protective dune.

When the federal government proposed a $207 million plan to build a 13-foot to 15-foot-high dune along 12 miles of the island’s shoreline after the storm, there was widespread acceptance across most of the island, even though the plan would displace 40 shorefront homeowners.

 

“The marshes are creeping up, trees are dying, and salt water washes into everything.”
— Karen Amspacher

 

Suzy Goldhirsch, president of the Fire Island Association, who has family roots on the island dating back more than 100 years, said that after Sandy, “There was a serious dialogue and debate about whether to retreat or rebuild the dunes and allow our communities to remain. For us it’s not about protecting homes, it’s about protecting the culture of the island. The job of a barrier island is to take the front hit. If you’re not comfortable with that, you shouldn’t live here.”

man pushing luggage through ankle-deep water

Rob Kellogg carries luggage during
flooding to The Inn of Silent Music,
a bed and breakfast that he and his
wife Linda operate in Tylerton, on
Smith Island.
(Photo: Dave Harp/Courtesy Bay
Journal)

To ‘Armor’ Or Not

Storm surges also are eating away at the sandy shores of Nantucket in Massachusetts, where a high-powered confrontation has been unfolding over the past decade about whether to “armor” the eroding ‘Sconset Bluff above one of the island’s famous beaches on its eastern shoreline. In Nantucket’s case, sea level rise is especially impacted by northeast storm surges, after which changes to the island’s shoreline become shockingly evident.

Perched above the beach on ‘Sconset Bluff are the summer homes of some wealthy Americans. The Atlantic Ocean has steadily reclaimed acres of their dunes and they were determined to do something about it.

After a long, expensive and litigious process, a local organization of private property owners on ‘Sconset Bluff received permission to install “geo-tubes”—tiered textile tubes filled with sand and layered along a 900-foot wall—to protect the toe of the bluff from being undercut by storm-driven seas.

Cormac Collier, executive director of the Nantucket Land Council, believes the geo-tubes at ‘Sconset are only a short-term fix.

“The most effective way for Nantucket to deal with erosion is retreat,” said Collier. “We are still bringing in extreme quantities of sand and it’s all paid for by landowners—the one percent of the one percent. They can throw money at the problem, but unfortunately, Nantucket is an ironic situation in that we see erosion all around us, but we are at such a loss to deal with the true problem of fossil fuel use, which people can’t wrap their heads around actually changing.”

One of the perennial problems with experts who have developed plans to engineer shorelines is that the solutions, particularly when private clients are paying the bills, often amount to a “beggar thy neighbor” approach when the structures interrupt natural processes and end up depriving others of beach sand.

Many oceanfront homes on Fire Island, New York, were damaged or destroyed during Hurricane Sandy.
(Photo: USGS Coastal and Marine Geology Program)

Tom Chase, The Nature Conservancy’s director of conservation strategy for both Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, and an island native, is well aware of the disdain for expert opinions.

 

“My grandfather used to say, ‘Experts are nothing but mainlanders with briefcases,’” he recalled.

 

“Climate change is going to require redevelopment, to move out of harm’s way to safety,” Chase believes. “My thinking is we use things like a life estate-reverse mortgage. I buy it from you at today’s rate and when you go, we use it for conservation or storm takeout. If your house is impacted and we buy you out, you can redevelop in places far from serious damage.”

Blowing In The Wind

The one community that has confronted climate change by addressing its use of fossil fuels is nearby Block Island in Rhode Island. Representatives of an ocean wind development company named Deepwater Wind approached island leaders with a proposition. The wind company wanted to locate a five-turbine electricity-generating pilot project in the Atlantic Ocean, three miles off Block Island’s southern shores.

Aware of the intense local opposition the much larger Cape Wind project had encountered from many residents of Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and Cape Cod, Deepwater Wind proposed routing an electric transmission cable to Block Island—the most visually affected community—to supply Block Island residents with electricity.

Kim Gaffett, a Block Island native, was the first warden of Block Island’s local government and as such, the island’s point person for negotiating with Deepwater Wind.

“The project was controversial, no question about it,” said Gaffett. “I think it was 70 percent in favor, 30 percent against, initially. Then it became 50-50.” Block Island has a year-round population of fewer than 1,000 which jumps to approximately 15,000 in the summer. There are 1,700 island homes, most of which are seasonal.

“In general,” Gaffett continued, “the seasonal homeowners were not OK with the plan because of the aesthetics.” However, electricity from Deepwater Wind is expected to
be cheaper than the cost of the island’s diesel-generated electricity. “Year-round islanders, who had been dealing with a high cost of energy, wanted it badly,” said Gaffett, adding that Deepwater’s electricity would also avoid “shipping millions of gallons of diesel to the island every year.”

Looking back at the five-year-long battle to site the wind farm, Gaffett was philosophical. She likened the appearance of the Deepwater Wind project to Block Island’s history when occasionally a valuable cargo washed up on the island’s shores.

“We could’ve thwarted it, but we didn’t, which is good. I think our biggest challenges are finding the balance between the blue-collar working class community and the affluent. I worry about those who can afford whatever they want and don’t care much about their use or what they do. In the end, I like to think the have-nots prevailed, but who knows? The locals are the ones who are proud about the project. We have a strong environmental ethic—it’s a natural extension of us, the locals.”

Philip Conkling,founder of the Island Institute and former president, continues his work as a non-profit and environmental consultant. His most recent book, co-written with Bob Demont is People Give to People – Simple Rules for Successful Fundraising.


people in a classroom

Vinalhaven's Investment

Vinalhaven’s Investment

Town hired manager with scant experience, and has no regrets.

Story by Tom Groening
Photos by Scott Sell

For an island community that’s a 75-minute ferry ride away from the mainland, Vinalhaven has been fortunate to have had two very successful long-term town managers, says Emily Lane, a current member of the island town’s board of selectmen.

Sue Lessard served from 1993 to 2000, and then Marjorie Stratton held the job from 2002 to 2014.

Both remain well-regarded in the community, even though each had different strengths.

But in mid-2015, the town found itself without a manager. Steve Eldridge, hired in December 2014, left the job abruptly for a position in southern Maine.

What the town did next might seem rash, or ill-conceived, or even risky. But in hiring a 28-year-old without the typical public administration degree or much municipal experience, Vinalhaven showed a kind of leadership, betting not only that the young man would grow into the job, but that the qualities he brought to the town office might just trump what a veteran municipal manager could list on a résumé.

“I think we were quite forward-thinking,” says Lane. “Not only the selectmen, but the community.”

To understand why Vinalhaven hired Andy Dorr, you have to understand the process that led to Dorr not getting the job the first time around.

Stratton left the post in 2014, but had given the town ample time to plan for her successor. Using the Maine Municipal Association (MMA) as a consultant, the town created a 10-member committee to articulate what it was looking for in the new town manager. A staffer from MMA wrote a job description based on the committee’s work, and the position was advertised.

“We had a basic idea of what we wanted,” Lane remembers.

More than 100 applied. The MMA staffer winnowed that number down to 20, and the island committee further cut the list to 10 finalists. All were invited to the island for interviews.

“We were looking for that perfect person who would reach out to the community,” she said, “but who also had a strong financial background.”

man sitting at a table looking at mail

While that process unfolded, Dorr was asked to serve as interim town manager. He had impressed selectmen and others with his handling of the town’s comprehensive plan, shepherding it to public approval. That work was his focus as an Island Fellow, the internship program run by the Island Institute (publisher of Island Journal).

“You just say ‘yes’ to every invite. I couldn’t afford to say no.”
— Andy Dorr

For selectmen and members of the community at large who served on the screening committee, Dorr was a strong second choice.

“Andy had all the attributes that we wanted,” Lane recalls, including a knowledge of and passion for Vinalhaven’s unique charms, assets, and challenges. “But he lacked that financial background.”

After Eldridge left, the thought of starting an exhaustive search all over again was daunting. So selectmen made what might seem like an old-school, from-the-gut move: They hired the young man who had been one of the runners-up for the job.

Small-Town Guy

Dorr hails from Waterville, a small town in upstate New York. Hed earned a two-year degree at a community college, studying criminal justice. After a year off, he enrolled in the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, where he earned a BS in environmental studies, with a concentration in policy, planning, and law.

Dorr arrived on Vinalhaven in the fall of 2011 for the fellowship. Being single and in his twenties, Dorr recalls watching the ferry leaving with his parents aboard. Laughing about it now, he remembers the finality of being island-bound sinking in, and asking himself, “What have I done?”

But he began exploring Vinalhaven’s hiking trails, and joined a men’s book club—and just about every other social group.

“You just say ‘yes’ to every invite,” he said. “I couldn’t afford to say no.”

The work at hand—updating the town’s comprehensive plan—would take a lot of time and effort. The state requires plans to be current, and often, towns are not eligible for state grants if the plan is out-of-date.

A previous multiyear effort to update the document, which identifies assets, resources, challenges, and goals, ended with islanders voting it down at town meeting.

Dorr’s approach to the project is telling about his people and political savvy. Though the plan is not zoning, it can be the blueprint for new land-use regulations, and that can make locals nervous.

Dorr kept people informed, a strategy he described as “not putting people on their heels,” a way to present information without making people defensive. And he listened.

“I tried to make an effort to identify who was against it last time, and get them to talk about it,” he said. Some of the gripes about the previous plan involved small matters, Dorr said. “Well, it’s easy to not include some of those [provisions].”

two people talking in a grocery store

Andy Dorr talks with Lisa Shields in
Carver’s Harbor Market on Vinalhaven.

Previously, the update was seen as driven by summer residents. To reverse that perception, “we did a lot of working groups in the winter,” he said.

“My job was to understand the island. I’d talk to anyone who wanted to talk,” he said.

But being town manager means more than understanding the people and their values. Vinalhaven’s annual municipal budget is about $1.8 million; the school budget is about $3 million, and the town pays about $500,000 each year to the county. It’s a serious business, requiring real financial skills.

Impressing the Locals

Lane, who has served a half-dozen terms as selectman in the 45 years she’s lived on the island, said Dorr came close to being hired after his stint as interim manager.

“Barring his lack of financial experience, he would have been our choice,” she said.

And Dorr understood the town’s trepidation.

“I was grateful to have the six months [as interim manager],” he said. “I couldn’t find any fault in not getting it.”

Phil Crossman, now a selectman who was on the screening committee the first time Dorr applied for the manager job, is a supporter.

“He really had, by the time he applied for the permanent position, settled nicely into the fabric of this community and acquired a good understanding of much of what makes us tick,” he said. “His having done that so capably gave us the courage to take a chance on his growing in the job.”

Kris Davidson, an island real estate broker, was one of Dorr’s advisors during his fellowship.

“We could tell he had all the qualities to fit in and be a leader,” she recalled, when island leaders interviewed him for the fellowship. “He’s very approachable, very likable, which is really important when you come into a small community.” She also saw “a lot of confidence,” tempered with a genuine humility.

Kathy Warren, the school business manager who worked at getting a Fellow on the island to tackle the comprehensive plan, gives him high marks, also noting his approachability. Throughout the comprehensive-plan work, Warren said, “He was very good about putting the responsibility for choices back on the townspeople.”

Dorr was not shy about approaching people to solicit their views, and then took to heart what they said. “He’s done a good job of really advocating for what he’s been told by people. He’s just a nice guy,” she concludes.

Dorr loves the job.

“You never know who’s going to call or show up in the office. You wear so many hats—treasurer, tax collector, general welfare administrator.”

Along with day-to-day tasks are big projects. “We’re looking at a new public works garage right now,” he said. Being the team leader on such work “is the best part,” he says.

“There’s a lot of pride in the community,” he continues. “It’s nice to walk into a shop and have the shopkeeper know your name. It’s a very independent, hardworking community. I think it’s really a treasure.”

Now that he’s on board full-time, the town is investing in Dorr’s education. He’s enrolled in the University of Southern Maine’s policy, planning, and management program at the Muskie School in Portland, attending classes there and online.

The decision to pay for the classes, which will give Dorr a master’s degree, was unanimous among selectmen, Lane said.

The town sees its investment in Dorr’s continuing education as an investment in the island’s future.

“We hope he stays,” Lane says.

Emily Lane is a member of the Island Institute’s board of trustees.

Tom Groening is editor of Island Journal.


musicians performing on a sidewalk with young kids playing in the background

Trading Sardines For Lupines

Trading Sardines for Lupines

Eastport’s rebirth may portend a new kind of rejuvenation

By Rob McCall

The sardine—a generic name for several types of herring—is the icon of Eastport, which likes to call itself “the easternmost city in the USA.” Eastport encompasses five islands, the largest being Moose Island. With a population of only about 1,300 people, Eastport still remembers its heritage every New Year’s Eve by dropping, not a sparkling ball, but a giant sardine from the roof of the tallest building on Water Street.

At its peak, Eastport had 5,000 people and dozens of sardine canneries in operation when the herring were running, and Eastport sardines were shipped around the world.We first came to Eastport in the mid-1970s, camping out on Cobscook Bay. We built a cabin on Leighton Neck in 1980. When I was called to serve as pastor of the Congregational Church in Blue Hill in 1986, one of the many enticements—along with fields of lupine—was that our camp was just a two-hour drive away. In the fall of 2014, we moved to Eastport to live there year-round, just in time for the coldest and snowiest winter ever recorded in the state.The golden age for Eastport ended in the 1950s as the herring dwindled, the canneries began to close down, and the city slipped into a depression, both economically and emotionally. There were few bleaker places along the Maine coast. In the 1970s, Tim Sample joked about an Eastport “Vacant Building Festival,” and quipped that if you could buy a Greyhound bus ticket with food stamps, there would be no one left in town. He could have said the same about most of Washington County.

~

Washington County’s population in 2010 was 32,856; the estimate for 2014 was 31,808, showing a decline of 3.2 percent. At 3,255 square miles, of which 695 square miles are water, the county is a good deal larger than Delaware. Due to the Native American population and a surprising number of Hispanic settlers who came to rake blueberries and stayed, the minority population is almost 10 percent, compared to about 6 percent for the rest of Maine, and less than 4 percent for neighboring Hancock County.

There are many conservation lands, notably Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge, at over 28,000 acres; Cobscook Bay State Park, at 888 acres; and Quoddy Head State Park, at 541 acres, where you can hear the grumbling of softball-size rocks being rolled up and down the beach by wind and waves coming up the Grand Manan Channel.

Economically, about 20 percent of the people in the Sunrise County are living below the federal poverty line, compared to about 14 percent in Maine as a whole. According to Good Shepherd Food Bank, Washington County has a food insecurity rate of 17.6 percent, and 28 percent of county children regularly face hunger. Unemployment in 2013 was 7.7 percent, compared to 5.1 percent for the state. The suicide rate is 16.7 percent per 100,000, the third highest in the state.

~

Not long ago, I pulled into a gas station mini-mart way Downeast on Route 1 for a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin. I parked next to an older, banged-up Dodge Ram pickup, covered with a coating of oil and dust. In the bed were rubber boots, a chain saw, some plastic fish totes, and numerous rusting tools—nothing unusual here, where the pickup trucks still outnumber the Subarus by about two to one.

What caught my eye was the vinyl lettering on the back window which read, “In Loving Memory of Lillian ————, 1975–2015,” with a photo beneath showing a haggard woman who could easily have been 65. With a bit of a shock, I said to myself, “I know her.”

She used to call on the church for help with food and fuel, but as often as she called for herself, she called for someone else—her disabled brother, her mother- and father-in-law, her grown kids, her friends. I knew she had struggled through rehab into recovery, and through chemotherapy into remission, but I didn’t know that her struggles had ended so soon. As desperate as her situation was, she always looked out for her family and friends with a fierce determination and persistence. She was a grievous angel of hardship in far Downeast Maine.

A sidestreet in Eastport, Maine

Why do people stay in Washington County? Not an easy question to answer. Certainly, some stay because they lack the ambition or the resources even to move out. Many more stay because of family ties, ancestral history, a wide freedom to live your life, good fishing and hunting, and for just the sheer raw beauty of it.

It is very hard to describe this land of high tides and leaping whales, of shattered rocks and ripping currents, of eagles and herons, to someone who hasn’t seen it. It becomes a part of you, and you become a part of it. Elsewhere, humankind has some semblance of control; here, nature still has the upper hand.

A living embodiment of that was Junior ————, who made his living on the clam flats year-round. The first time I met him he was coming up from the shore near our camp in his clean, but old, Toyota Tercel, with some cement blocks in the back to give it traction, and several hods of squeaking clams.

“I’ve been to the city, but I came right back. I wouldn’t trade this for anything,” he said, with a sweeping gesture of his arm toward the bay. “I’m my own boss, and I can pretty much do what I want to do.” What he wanted to do was earn enough to make a living and send his children to college, and to be outside winter, spring, summer, and fall. And that is just what he did.

That same self-sufficiency and independence shows itself when neighbor helps neighbor. It may be the coffee can on the checkout counter to help someone with medical bills, or the benefit supper to help the family whose house burned down, or the food pantries, yard sales, flea markets, or deer meat that is brought to someone who can’t hunt anymore. Compassion and hope are not dead. If anything, they burn brighter through hardship.

~

Comedians may wisecrack, but it is no joke when years of poverty from a collapsed economy bring high rates of domestic violence, suicide, and petty crime, along with despair and hopelessness and self-medication with alcohol and drugs to ease the pain. Drug use in Washington County has moved with terrifying speed, from the abuse of prescription opiates like OxyContin to the real thing: heroin. Most of us know the story. State funds for addiction treatment are drying up, and law enforcement is stretched to the limit, particularly here, where a small population is spread over a vast region, much of it in unincorporated areas and tiny towns without any police force. The county sheriff has only eight deputies patrolling an area half the size of Massachusetts.

I have a theory that Washington County may be a harbinger of all of postapocalyptic America. It has been overlogged, overfished, overworked, and overlooked. The former bounty of its rivers and forests and sea have been taken and hauled away to somewhere else; it has been exploited and left drained and depleted, like a lot of other places in our great country. But it will not roll over and die.

musicians playing at night in front of a storefront

Musicians play in front of the
Tides Institute in downtown
Eastport.

Something new and startling has been happening here in this beleaguered region. After a number of false starts and dashed hopes over the years, Eastport is now a dozen years into a remarkable rebirth which may provide a model for other forlorn and forgotten places.

At its lowest, Eastport still had some resources: cheap real estate, a slower pace, soothing quiet, and breathtaking beauty, to mention a few. As all the other available coastal property was being bought up from Kittery to Machias, this area still had affordable old homes and saltwater farms, and people from elsewhere took notice.

Old houses have been renovated, vacant buildings have been filled, and Eastport is busier than it has been in 50 or 60 years. On any good day, the sound of hammers and saws echoes around the island, and trucks from the lumberyards rumble up and down the streets, delivering materials.

The exodus of young people has not stopped, but it is increasingly being matched by the influx of older people from away—lupine lovers. Many of these people have fled other parts of Maine, and the country, to find a slower, more human-friendly pace of life. People come from other places to be renewed. Many also bring talent and experience that can enrich the life of a community. Quaint and quirky shops open, galleries spring up, music and drama find a stage on which to appear.

On the back roads, farmers and market gardeners take hold, producing local food. Where before there was only despair and depression, now there are glimmers of hope. Maybe the apocalypse was not the end of the world. Maybe what we are seeing in Washington County is a contrast to the morbid Mad Max vision of postapocalyptic America: that is, a slow, gradual healing.

~

You could call this the Lupine Revolution, and it is happening all over Maine, but most dramatically in some of its hardest-hit towns. It is significant that the lupine is the totemic flower of Maine, especially since it is classified as an invasive species. Lupine is attracted to what botanists call “disturbed soils.” As an example, the lower fields on Blue Hill Mountain had been burned and sprayed with herbicides for commercial blueberry operations for many years, until the mid-1990s. All that grew there were blueberries; the herbicides had killed everything else.

The fields were eroded and rutted, the soil, depleted. When the land was put under conservation, the spraying stopped, and pretty soon the lupine took hold. For several years, the worn-out fields were blanketed with purple. People flocked to see the lupine, they took pictures, had picnics, weddings, and festivals.

Lupine is a legume which puts down a tough and deep root system with the ability to fix nitrogen in the soil where it grows. A stand of lupine moving into a field of worn-out soil will soon improve it so that other plants can move in too, both native and nonnative. After a few years, something strange happens: The lupine begins to shrink back to a few smaller patches while the native flora fills in and takes over. After a time a healthy, diverse flora and fauna are once more established and flourishing.

This is what the Lupine Revolution is doing in so many of our small coastal towns: rebuilding the soil, and the soul, of easternmost Maine.

Rob McCall lives on Moose Island. His latest book is Great Speckled Bird: Confessions of a Village Preacher available from your local bookstore or W.W. Norton.


waterfalls and pointy mountain in Iceland

Fire & Ice

Fire & Ice

Iceland’s Stark Beauty Found Outside Reykjavík on Ring Road

PHOTOS AND STORY BY JLYNN FRAZIER

Maine’s connections to the North Atlantic island nation of Iceland are stronger than you might think. Eimskip—Iceland’s oldest shipping company, which operates around the globe—is based in Reykjavík. Portland is Eimskip’s only US-based port. Last fall, a delegation from Iceland visited Portland to discuss how to boost cultural connections between Reykjavík and Portland.

Also in the fall, my partner Jared and I headed to Iceland for a two-week road trip.

Reykjavík, the capital, is where two-thirds of the nation’s population of 329,100 lives. To put it in perspective, Maine has four times as many residents living in roughly a third of the land mass. Reykjavík served as our starting and ending point to stock up on supplies, but for most of the trip, we explored the wilds of the rural landscape that makes up so much of the country.

Our mission was to circumnavigate the island by traveling the 1,332-kilometer (828-mile) coastal route known as the Ring Road. The route was completed in 1974 and consists of two lanes, one going in each direction, with many small, one-lane bridges made out of wood or steel. Most of the road is paved, though many sections are still gravel.

lake in Iceland

We found that as we detoured off the Ring Road and started inland, the roads quickly became very challenging. They label them accordingly as “F” roads to signify that four-wheel drive is required. We pushed the little two-wheel-drive camper van we had rented past its limits, but still managed several successful adventures off the beaten path. We were forced to cut short a couple of adventures when roads were rendered impassable by loose sand or deep water. Lesson learned: Iceland adventures require four-wheel drive.

We didn’t set a concrete itinerary, opting instead to use a Lonely Planet guide and plan the details on the fly from our camper van, allowing us the flexibility to experience anything the island might have to offer us that day.

person standing in a cave

Loftsalahellir, a cave used for council meetings during the Saga times, is located just before the causeway to Dyrhólaey, Southwest Iceland.

On the morning of our first full day, we were greeted with a fresh blanket of snow, then further welcomed by the high winds and torrential rains that were the remnants of Hurricane Joaquin. Then it rained, and rained some more.

In fact, these were some of the heaviest rains we had ever experienced. It turns out the “Land of Fire and Ice,” as Iceland is known, also can be the land of brutal and unpredictable weather. So with the weather report grimly forecasting no end in sight to the rain, we grudgingly abandoned the southern reaches of the island and spent an entire day on the road, driving east toward the hope of blue skies and our first view of the fjords.

We continued our way around the Ring Road, occasionally making detours to explore remote areas like Þingvellir National Park and the Westfjords, venturing down rough dirt roads and across mountain passes to catch glimpses of snowcapped volcanoes, hidden waterfalls, and imposing glaciers. We saw a lot of sheep grazing in fields, and sometimes crossing the road in front of us. There are many more sheep than people, according to my research.

snowy roads in Iceland

Being there outside of peak tourist season, which is June to August, meant we could often spend an entire day driving without seeing another person. The few people we did interact with were exceptionally friendly and welcoming.

I remember one early morning waiting for the only gas station in town to open so that we could get a cup of coffee. The coffee came in small, eight-ounce cups. The owner chuckled as we both approached the counter with two cups in each of our hands. “Ah,” he said. “Americans always want more coffee.”

lake inside cave in Iceland

Another morning we arrived at the small fishing town of Hólmavík (pop. 337), again looking for hot beverages, breakfast, and much-needed diesel. We pulled into the petrol station next to a local man refueling his truck. As Jared began to pump, the man greeted him, saying, “Isn’t life beautiful? And it just keeps getting better and better each day, doesn’t it?”

Jared, not yet properly caffeinated, replied, “Yes, I suppose it does.” The man grinned, hopped in his truck, and went off to enjoy the rest of his day.

Such a simple statement, yet so powerful. Yes, it was a beautiful day, and we felt so fortunate that Iceland had welcomed us so warmly.

rushing river in Iceland

Jlynn Frazier is the Island Institute’s membership manager.

To view more of Jlynn’s photography, visit her website at www.jfrazierphotography.com.


aerial shot of dinghy floating along rocky coastline

Widow's Island

Widow’s Island: A Curious Tale of Quarantine and Convalescence

Yellow fever, mental illness, and war wounds treated on island off North Haven.

By Carl Little
Photos by WILLIAM TreVASKIS

Back in the 1970s when I lived on Long Island, New York, I had occasion to take the ferry from Orient Point to New London. I remember passing Plum Island and being told there was a center for disease research on it. Visions of infected patients wandering the island gave me the creeps. In fact, the facility, founded in 1954 and now under the aegis of Homeland Security, has focused on the study of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle. Area residents have never fully embraced its existence, and have even come up with a theory that Lyme disease was created there as a biological weapon, but escaped the island.Seagoing folk passing by Widow’s Island in the late 1800s might have gotten similar vibes. This 15-acre isle off the eastern shore of North Haven, one of several flanking the Fox Islands Thoroughfare, was home to a quarantine station built by the US Navy to house sailors returning from foreign ports, Panama in particular, who had contracted yellow fever.

Why Widow’s? Colder climates were thought to aid in the recovery from the deadly virus, which is transmitted by infected mosquitoes, a fact doctors didn’t know at the time. With the quarantine station in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, “antiquated and played out,” this island seemed like a perfect spot to isolate victims while they recovered.

So the US Navy had procured Widow’s and built a temporary hospital—a pavilion—in 1885, and then, in 1888, a permanent facility, an imposing two-story brick building that could accommodate fifty patients. Both structures were built by W. H. Glover & Co. of Rockland.

Area citizens were none too pleased to have this possible source of contagion in their backyard; a “remonstrance” expressing their concerns was circulated on North Haven and Vinalhaven in 1885. The Courier-Gazette of May 12 of that year stated, “The people in the vicinity have no cause for alarm,” noting that at Portsmouth, “rusticators have built their cottages right down to the quarantine line, and have no fear of contagious diseases, [even] though two yellow fever vessels were anchored there last year.”

old photo of hospital

The hospital, ca. 1888. (Courtesy North Haven Historical Society)

Dr. A. C. Heffinger, the naval surgeon put in charge of the project, helped sell the idea, inviting “leading citizens” of Rockland to the island for tours of the facility. In the end, they needn’t have worried. The complex never actually housed any yellow fever patients, thanks to new knowledge about the malady.

A bit of history: In his Islands of the Mid-Maine Coast: Blue Hill and Penobscot Bays (1983), Charles McLane offered an account of the island’s habitation. Originally called Sheep Island on John Vinal’s map of the area, Widow’s was a part of the Winslow Farm on North Haven, its Addams Family-esque name honoring Josiah Winslow’s wife, who spent nearly a half-century in widowhood.

Deemed unnecessary as a quarantine station, on January 1, 1904, the facility was transferred by the US government to the State of Maine to be used as a summer retreat for the “convalescent insane.” For the next ten years, local islanders witnessed the comings and goings of groups of men and women from the Maine Insane Asylum in Augusta and Bangor.

In an article in the Courier-Gazette from fall 1971, Rockland resident Albert Mills Sr. shared memories of the facility from when he worked there during the summers of 1909 and 1910. By this time, the island’s name had been changed to Chase’s, in honor of Judge Edward Everett Chase of Blue Hill. According to McLane, it was Chase, a trustee of the Maine State Mental Hospitals, who had urged the transfer of the Widow’s Island hospital to the state. The facility came to be called the Chase Island Convalescent Hospital.

The son of the keeper of nearby Goose Rocks Light, Mills had been hired by Manning S. Campbell, treasurer of the Maine State Hospital, to be the on-site engineer. With help from the keeper, Captain Frank Cooper, he took care of the water and electricity, no mean feat in this remote outpost. He also serviced the boats, which included the whim, a small open launch, and the 40-foot schooner general knox, which carried patients and personnel on cruises around the islands. In that 1971 article, Mills described a picnic on Vinalhaven during which a female patient disappeared and was found hours later at the North Haven post office.

Mills described the grounds, which featured trees planted in 1885 by officers of the 127-ton naval tugboat rocket, in order to make the property less destitute. (In photos of the era, only a few spruce trees accent the sheep-shorn island; today, it is more or less covered in evergreens.) A large swimming pool built near the shore could be filled with seawater at high tide and then shut off to be warmed by the sun. “It gave the patients a nice change and [a] summer vacation,” Mills wrote.

island photographed from above around sunset

Reading excerpts from the diaries of Dr. Bigelow Sanborn (1839–1910), physician at, and then superintendent of, the Maine Insane Asylum from 1866 until his death, one realizes that the challenges of dealing with mental illness in Maine go back generations. Transcribed by Sanborn’s granddaughter, Margaret Hodgdon, the diary mentions issues familiar to anyone following the current tribulations of the Department of Health and Human Services: lack of funding, deferred maintenance, a sometimes stingy legislature, and a scrutinizing press.

There are touches of Cider House Rules in Dr. Sanborn’s reports. Outbreaks of diphtheria and la grippe, snowstorms, residents setting fire to beds, physicians abusing alcohol and morphine—the accounts are matter-of-fact but often startling. Not all is disaster control: the Togus minstrels and the Augusta Brass Band performed for the patients, and there were magic lantern shows and picnics.

The name “Widows Island” (without the apostrophe) appears for the first time in entries for 1905. Following a visit by Dr. Sanborn, his wife, and hospital trustees to inspect the facility, the Maine Insane Asylum began taking patients to the island in the summer and fall.

“On August 4,” the superintendent reported, “I went down to Widows Island with 28 females and took back the males.” Dr. Sanborn noted the mostly positive impact of this retreat in his diary. He already knew the beneficial effects of a Maine island on patients: In the 1890s he organized annual trips by steamboat to his summer home on the Isle of Springs.When “Mr. Chase’s experiment” closed in 1915, historian McLane recounted, the facility was for a short time repurposed as a school for the children of lighthouse keepers. During World War I, US Navy sailors came to the island to convalesce from injuries and illness.

The hospital was torn down in 1935 “as a WPA project.” An April 1986 article in Down East magazine, with the somewhat sensational title “Widow Island’s Tainted Past,” noted that the bricks from the building “found their way into fireplaces on nearby Vinalhaven, and the rest were used to weight lobster traps in Penobscot Bay.” The island became a bird sanctuary, and then, writes McLane, the summer home “of a vacationing realtor.”

A fitting finale to this curious piece of Maine island history might be the last stanza from Mary W. Litchfield’s poem, “Governor’s Day at Widow’s Island,” written on September 5, 1905, and inspired by the visit of former Maine governor Frederick Robie and other dignitaries, including Judge Chase, to the island. As the sunset lights up the Camden Hills and drives “grief and gloom away,”

All too soon the party leaves us,

Pleasant guests, though short their stay,

Long by us will be remembered

Widow’s Island’s gala day.

 

Thanks to Jason Mann, and to Nan Lee, John Storck, and Kate Quinn at the North Haven Library and Historical Society, for providing background and photographs.

Carl Little is co-author with his brother David of the forthcoming Art of Acadia (Down East Books). He lives and writes on Mount Desert Island.


two lobster boats

Race day in Casco Bay

Race Day in Casco Bay

George Ross enjoys the best seat in the house for the race.   

By Tom Groening
Photos by Katie Johnson

I’m squatting in the small cockpit of an outboard-powered sailboat racing across Casco Bay. Lightning bolts are striking the mainland and islands to our west. I look up at the aluminum mast, then at the woman at the wheel. She’s wearing a wide grin and a purple feather boa.

Everything is going to be just fine, I think. After all, what could go wrong when lightning and sailboat masts come together?

Then my hat flies off.

But I’m grinning, too, even though the rooster tail churned up by the twin, 250-horsepower outboards is lapping over the rail, soaking my pants.

As discordant as these elements might seem, they are, in fact, entirely appropriate for the sometimes wacky, sometimes wild, and always fun world of lobster-boat races. This hot and humid August Saturday, it was Long Island’s turn to host the contest. The race circuit is a summer tradition in Maine, with towns and harbors hosting the events from Jonesport and Beals Island in the northeast all the way to Long Island in the southwest.

The Long Island races this year lean toward the wacky end of the spectrum, in part because there were no cash prizes for winners. The sailboat I raced in, aptly named wild women, was actually the top half of a sailboat that had been attached to the hull of a powerboat. We raced—and won—in an “anything goes” class. The only thing the hybrid boat had in common with the others in that heat was that all had been built by Steve Johnson, who owns and operates Johnson’s Boatyard on the island.

Johnson was at Sandie Moran’s side—the feather boa–wearing woman who piloted wild women—when the boat won that final heat of the day. It ended up being the final heat because the Coast Guard contacted race organizers and said the lightning was headed our way, and it was time to end the fun and be safe.

The two were clearly enjoying the afterglow of their victory, suggesting that even with all the goofy trappings of the race, a competitive edge runs through the event.

In other harbors, the races are very competitive because of the prizes, and, of course, because bragging rights are at stake. This, the 2015 race, was the second year the Long Island event has counted in the points totals. As one participant explained, it’s very much like NASCAR, with racers racking up points through the summer.

man holding beer photographed from above

George Ross enjoys the best
seat in the house for the race.   

Hard Work, Then Fun

Earlier in the day, making the rounds on the docks and town landing as observers and participants gathered, the race seemed like the island version of a county fair. At about 11 a.m., Moran was stocking coolers with beer on wild women, but that chore was the last of many.

“It’s an awful lot of work, organizing it,” she said of the race. “Keeping it going is a challenge.”

Why do it?

“So these guys who work so hard can cut loose,” she says.

That explanation is repeated by many. Though most fishermen will tell you they love being their own boss, love being out in the elements, lobstering is solitary, repetitive work. Hanging out with other fishermen, on the water, talking boats and engines, and yes, drinking beer, is a nice way to break up that solitude.

Travis Otis and his father, Keith, of Searsport, build lobster boats—the Northern Bay 36-foot among them—and were on hand to race. Their boat, First Team, named for the unit Keith served with in Vietnam, features a 410-horsepower diesel engine, and will compete with like-size boats.

“This is my family reunion,” Keith says. “We’ve been racing for 15 years, so I know all these jokers,” he adds, gesturing to the boats docked adjacent to his.

Travis offers what is the best description of the race scene: “This is the perfect mix between family reunion and tractor pull.”

How serious does the Otis family take these races?

“Pretty seriously,” Travis says, cocking his head and smiling. They’ve won their class seven years running.

Chris Smith of Richmond, a town up the Kennebec River, uses his boat misty, a 33-foot Crowley, to chase eels, the adult versions of elvers. It’s his eighth year on the race circuit.

“You get to travel up and down the coast and meet nice people,” he says, an observation his wife Linda seconds.

Lee MacVane, in his 30s, is originally from Long Island but now lives in and fishes from Cape Elizabeth. This is the only race he’s doing, running his 46-foot, 670-horsepower boat, aptly called dominator. “I don’t know,” he says, thinking about why he participates in the race. “It’s just a good chance to get out and unwind, and see people you don’t normally get to see.”

The blind-folded dinghy races.

crowd gathered as two people, one blindfolded, row away in a dinghy

Bill Randall of Hiram is a summer resident of Long Island.

“I’m here with my grandson Preston and my son Ryan,” he says proudly.

“This is a fun event. It’s a good time; they got good eats.”

John Murphy of Portland is a summer resident of the island—a “summer dub,” as he calls himself, though his family has been coming here for five generations—and he loves the event.

“A lot of these people work really hard,” he says, repeating the refrain. “It’s their way of having a good time.”

Before the races begin, there are shoreside events, like a dinghy race in which the rower is blindfolded and directed by the other occupant of the boat. There’s also a race in which participants swim in those bulky survival suits.

A band plays in the parking lot and hot dogs and burgers are being grilled, with sale proceeds going to the island fire and rescue department.

Rafting Up

Out on the water, the real fun begins. Katie Johnson, the photographer for this story, is an island native, and she gets us aboard her stepfather Scott Wood’s boat, wild one. In a matter of minutes, three, five, and then eight boats have tied up, side to side, in what is known as “rafting up.” The coolers open, food and beer is passed around, and people climb from boat to boat, greeting old friends, shaking hands with new ones, and taking photos. Teen girls in bikinis on the boat to one side of us leap into the water to cool off, as does a dog.

When it’s time for a boat to race, it’s untied and the other vessels close ranks, as if the racing boat had never been there.

On the radio, there’s evidence that racers have jumped the gun: “I think we’re going to have to do the second race again.”

man wearing t shirt that says

“It’s just a good chance to get out and unwind, and see people you don’t normally get to see.”
— Lee MacVane

This prompts a comment from Randy Durkee, who’s come down from Islesboro to race black diamond, tied next to us: “Jesus Christ, they ain’t got it figured out yet?”

When it’s time for wild one to race, everyone leaves the boat, except for Wood at the helm, Katie and I, and George Ross, who visits the island every summer from Marietta, Georgia, and loves the races. The engine cover is lifted off as we chug over and join a handful of boats, lined up along a vague line in the water. When the start signal comes by radio, the engine roars and the boat lurches forward.

Within a minute, black smoke is coming off the engine block, Katie is bouncing around the deck, shooting photos, and George sits motionless in a chair near the stern, a grin that seems to have been carved into his face his only reaction. A minute later, it’s clear we won’t win, as one vessel pulls away.

Back with the other boats, the fun resumes. We’ve got the best seat in the house to see the finishes, and corresponding to friendships with fishermen, there’s loud rooting for one or another boat.

Jennifer Franz, who with her husband Rick lives on nearby Great Diamond Island, is among the folks aboard wild one. She tells the story of being on a racing boat several years back: As the race got under way, the captain looked over at a competitor’s boat.

“He’s cheating!” the lobsterman shouted.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Because I’m cheating,” he replied. “And goddamn it, he’s beating us!”

Cheating—if there is any—could be achieved by introducing fuel additives or modifying the engine.

Franz tells another story that sums up the lobster boat–race vibe. It was one of the first years she and Rick were on a racing boat, and when that boat was readying to race, she asked if she should move her bags and cooler to a non-racing boat so the racer would be lighter.

An older woman said, in a sweet and motherly voice, “You do whatever suits you, dear.” The sentiment, Franz says, is that having fun is paramount here.

man and kids with water guns in small boat

Jennifer and Rick visit Long Island often, and though they are not a fishing family—they own and operate Andy’s Old Port Pub on Commercial Street in Portland, a sponsor of the race—many of the fishermen know the couple and exchange good-natured banter with them.

Copious amounts of alcohol are consumed throughout the day, but it seems to be mostly festive fun. Joe Schnapp, the island deputy, was out and about, patrolling the shore, but he was all smiles and hellos, walking among the crowd.

“It’s a wonderful time. It’s a good community event,” he says.

And when the Coast Guard radios organizers to pull the plug in deference to the lightning, the deputy’s take seems like the right way to sum up the day.

Tom Groening is editor of Island Journal.


small wooded island

A Tale to Tell

A Tale to Tell

Phippsburg’s Eugene Atwood faced three near-death experiences on the water.

old bearded man

Eugene Atwood with his “sandals”  

He’s known around the peninsula below Bath as Captain Bullhead. The stubborn will the nickname implies may have saved his life. Now 75, Eugene Atwood survived three serious threats to his life, served up by the sea and from trying to wrest a living from it. The last, about 12 years ago, was the most dramatic.
“They always say the third time never fails, but Christ, I think I got by it,” he says.
Was it divine intervention that saved him?
“No, I don’t believe in that stuff. I might as well say that up front. I believe in what I can do.”

I was born in Bath. I was working down on the wharf when I was 14.

The first of it, I fished for lobster, then I got a dragger. I’ve had about three draggers.

The first thing that happened, years ago, we dragged up a depth charge. We tied it on the deck, and [people from the Brunswick Naval] air base came over and got it, and they said if we’d throwed it overboard it might’ve gone off, ’cause it was all set for a certain depth. They said we were just lucky it didn’t go off. We didn’t know what it was. We tied it off because it was rolling around the deck. It was a great big round one.

After my helper cleaned it off, it said “depth charge” right on it. That was the first lucky one.

The next one was, my daughter and I was in the boat that burned. It was around 1977. I think it was a 19- or 20-foot Seaworthy. What happened, the hauling motor run out of gas, so I took the can and went up and when I tipped up and started filling it, the gas, I guess, went on the manifold or something, and it went off, and I dropped the can, and when I did it went on me and then it rolled back and went on my daughter. She was out there baiting a trap.

I went right out over the outboard, and she jumped right overboard, too, because the boat went on fire.

We had oil clothes on and we couldn’t hardly swim. There was a trap buoy got caught on the outboard—the boat was going away from us—so we got ahold of it then, because it stopped. That was the lucky part.

If it hadn’t been for that, we’d probably drowned.

It burned the inside and almost down to the waterline on the other side. It still floated. There was a Mrs. Cushman, I think it was, who owned Burnt Coat Island, they was painting a float and her and a little kid come out and got us. They was watching us. We lucked out pretty good.

[The third time] it was the summertime. We were setting traps. It was probably around 8, 9 o’clock. It was kind of a pleasure boat, but it was all cut down, and ripped out, like a flat-bottomed skiff. About 16-foot. Carrying 24 traps, something like that, on it.

Something happened up in the bow, cause I was going right along, and then I see water come up around my feet, just a little bit at a time, so I slowed her down, and when I did, it tipped right up on the bow. And I think what happened, she must have cracked up in the bow. When I slowed down, then she tipped up. And when she did, she went. And all the floating rope come up and kind of got ahold of me, and I had fun then.

I tried to get that off the top of me, it was sawing into my neck and everything else. That was kind of scary, then, but I guess you’re just too busy getting it off you. You’re just trying to survive. The only thing on your mind is getting on top of that water and breathing. I got out of it, come up, gagging, spitting water, all that stuff. All I can remember is bubbles. I was just trying to stay afloat, cause I had boots on. Christ, you could kick, but it don’t do any good.

Some buoys floated up—two or three buoys—and I got one, and that helped me float a little bit, and I got another one, and put one under each arm and it was just like a life preserver. Then my dinner bucket come up. It was one of them Igloos. I sat it up straight, and kept pushing it ahead of me and swam in towards the island, about a quarter of a mile away. I did think if there was any sharks; that did cross my mind. It probably does everybody. They’ve seen sharks up in there.

I had a little job getting up on the island, cause the breakers were coming in. I went up once, and went back down. Christ, my dinner bucket went right in and set right up. The second time, I went up. It was hard on my fingers, though, trying to get ahold of them rocks, and you’d slide down across there.

Then I got up on the rocks, and Granville Wallace was hauling traps. It was foggy—it was right thick—I could just see him. I hollered, but he couldn’t hear me, with the boat running and everything. So I just took off, walking. It’s quite big . . . Big Wood Island. There’s probably three or four houses on it now. There’s one on a cove up on the north end, that’s where I was headed for.

I found a buoy and made me a pair of shoes. I took my jackknife out and split the trap buoy. Then I cut the bottom of my pants off [into strips] and made little sandals, cause there was all rocks going up across there. There was kind of a high cliff, then it was all bushes and then it went up into the trees and woods. But I stayed down on the edge and went along the rocks.

And when I got up to the cottage, I went around and on the back side, they left a window unlocked. So I went in and got me a pair of sandals—women’s slippers, with fur all around the top—a flashlight, and got me some bug spray… everything I needed. It was getting late then. I was on the island all day. It took a long time to climb them rocks. There was a lot of big rocks, cliffs. I had to go down on my knees and climb. I couldn’t go very fast.

Keith Wallace was out hunting for me. He was in his big boat, and he come around the shore, and I kept flashing my light and he come in as close as he could. And he went clear home, and got his skiff and come back in. Then he rowed in and got me. It must have been 8:30.

My skiff and outboard, nobody ever got it. I don’t know why. I set traps, right on top of where I was. I guess somebody probably got it and didn’t say nothing.

It worked out good. Christ, it was just another day. I thought about it [later], but it was nothing to worry you. Just another day, I guess. If you were to have panicked, why, then, Christ, you’d probably have killed yourself.

You know, there’s some people get drowned and some people come out of it. But that’s something they learn when they’re doing it, I guess. I don’t think it’s anything you can prevent. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. That’s why they call it an “accident.”


exterior of assisted living facility

Not Aging, But Thriving In Place

Not Aging, But Thriving in Place

Safe housing, healthcare for elderly poses challenges on islands.

BY SUSAN Q. STRANAHAN
PHOTOS BY JIM THRESHER

Victoria Smith was born on Chebeague Island on January 6, 1925, surrounded by her family in the neat frame home now occupied by her son and his wife. When she married an islander, they moved next door. Today, Smith’s granddaughter, grandson-in-law, and two great-grandsons have a home nearby.

Three years ago, when Smith’s health declined and living alone became difficult, she and her family made a choice available to few islanders: She moved about a mile away, into a cozy room at Chebeague’s Island Commons, a seven-bed residential care home created for people exactly like Smith.

Lifelong friends live just down the hall at the Commons. Her extended family drops in daily. Friends stop by. She keeps tabs on the newest generation of Chebeaguers when students from the island’s elementary school arrive for regular visits. Social events and workdays at the Commons attract the whole community. All the while, a team of trained caregivers works 24/7, helping with daily tasks, providing home-cooked meals and companionship, and overseeing the health and well-being of the elderly residents.

Smith is unstinting in her gratitude. “I feel Chebeague is truly blessed to have the Island Commons,” she says.

~

Only recently has eldercare in Maine surfaced as a critical social and economic issue. Demographics drive that urgency. Maine has the highest percentage of older people in the United States, with a third of its population (nearly 420,000 people) above 55. That number will grow by 13 percent in just six years, according to a recent study. In pockets of the state, the median age already is considerably higher. On Chebeague, for example, it is 61, making the town the “grayest” of Maine’s unbridged islands.

Age isn’t the only statistic that makes eldercare a looming problem for government officials, nonprofit organizations, and policy makers. More than a third of Maine’s population is considered low-income. Many of the state’s elderly live in old houses, costly to maintain and heat, and often full of hazards for the frail or those with mobility problems. In rural communities, both on islands and the mainland, access to home care and even basic medical treatment is difficult and undependable, with transportation a major obstacle. Care often falls to family members, many ill-equipped financially or lacking in training.

And then there is the human side of the equation. Elders like Victoria Smith have spent their entire lives sustaining their small communities, raising families, supporting schools, churches, libraries, and volunteer organizations. In their final years, shouldn’t they be able to live amid all that’s familiar, close to family and friends? For many, that’s simply not an option.

Twenty years ago, a small group of Chebeague residents, led by Charlotte “Pommy” Hatfield, recognized the lack of basic health-care services for islanders. Hatfield, a schoolteacher who had cared for her dying husband at home, had been rebuffed by mainland agencies and care providers unwilling to travel to the island. Unwilling to give up, Hatfield and her team came to a conclusion.

woman with elderly woman with fall leaves spread out on table

“We should do this ourselves,” she recalled. “We knew nothing, but we just did it.”

Hatfield researched what other regions of the country were doing, and familiarized herself with eldercare and hospice care requirements, eventually working as a care provider herself. What began as an effort to educate islanders about health and aging issues grew as the community members made clear what they wanted to have.

“They wanted comfort and care,” said Hatfield. But there was more: “They wanted to see a familiar face.”

Thus was born the Island Commons. Since it opened its doors in January 1999, the Commons has enabled more than 100 elders to “age in place,” or, to borrow a more up-to-date term of care, “thrive in place.”

An early document set out the ambitious goal: The Island Commons will be a “homey, congenial place where friends, relatives (including children), neighbors, and caregivers can drop in, lend a hand, or share a quiet moment.” A 19th-century farmhouse was donated, renovations undertaken, and fund-raising began in earnest.

From the start, the challenges were enormous—and they remain just as daunting today. Nonstop fund-raising is essential simply to keep the Commons’ doors open.

Typically, about two-thirds of Commons residents are MaineCare (Maine’s name for its Medicaid program) recipients. Yet MaineCare reimbursement rates fail to cover the cost of delivering care by about $20,000 per person per year. And, given the small size of the facility and its remote location, even the most cost-conscious administrator is unable to achieve economies of scale available to larger mainland counterparts.

Facilities like the Commons also operate in a highly regulated environment, with rules governing everything from the temperature of food in the refrigerator to the licensing of caregivers. Unlike other island nonprofits, the lights never go off at the Commons. Finding, training, and retaining staff to operate the facility round-the-clock can prove difficult.

But such challenges have not deterred other island communities from responding in their own ways to the needs of their elderly populations. Those services include the residential facilities Boardman Cottage on Islesboro and the Ivan Calderwood Home on Vinalhaven, with plans for a facility on North Haven in the works.

Maine Seacoast Mission, which has long provided health-care services in Penobscot Bay, is expanding its eldercare offerings. On Swan’s Island, Eldercare Outreach offers a variety of services for elderly residents, intended to enable them to remain in their own homes for as long as possible. The Island Commons also recently added in-home care to its services through Chebeague Cares.

In many respects, this is new territory for health-care providers, regulators, volunteer board members, and facility administrators, in part because of the unique nature of each location and its needs. To share common experiences, an informal network of providers has formed to discuss problems and explore new services. (Many of the solutions being tried by island eldercare providers also have applications elsewhere, notably in Maine’s rural and Native American communities.)

The island eldercare network also has demonstrated that there can be strength in numbers. Last year, the Maine Legislature approved a 15 percent increase in MaineCare subsidies for the Commons, Boardman Cottage, and Ivan Calderwood, recognizing that offshore locations drive up the cost of food and fuel, further straining the low subsidies. The increase came after testimony from island eldercare administrators about the importance of their services and their dire financial needs. The total outlay of state funds is small—about $26,000 annually—but the acknowledgment of the special circumstances was welcomed.

elderly woman sitting with two young girls

All who are involved in this growing response share a common goal: keeping island elders in their communities. “This is what they know,” said Amy Rich, administrator at the Commons. “This is where their roots are, where their families are, and this is where they want to stay.”

To make that possible, they may require modest services such as light housekeeping and meal preparation, or their needs might rise to the level of skilled nursing or hospice care. The advancing ages and declining health of many islanders pose their own set of challenges to the care providers that go far beyond the financial pressures of day-to-day operations.

~

It’s late afternoon and Jen Belesca is sitting at her grandmother’s bedside, massaging Victoria Smith’s hands. The warm yellow bedroom, with chintz curtains and comfortable pillows, is full of family photos and mementos. From the hallway, the aroma of dinner fills the air.

Belesca stops in daily to keep “Grammy Toe,” as Smith is known to her family, company. Belesca’s sons, Ethan, 15, and Aaron, 14, often ride their bikes over to pay a call.

“She’s right here,” says Ethan of his great-grandmother. During last year’s Fourth of July Road Race, he even stopped by to grab a glass of water and say “Hi” to her before resuming the race. Family members visit at meals and bedtime to assist Smith and keep her up-to-date on island news.

Those routine visits would be difficult if Smith were in a mainland nursing home. (Long before the Commons opened, Smith’s own mother spent four years in a mainland nursing home, an experience the family never wants to repeat.) Now, Smith is just minutes away. The value of having her so close is apparent to everyone. “When the Commons came into being, it was one of the best things that ever happened to Chebeague,” said her son, Lindy Smith. “I thought then it was a great idea—but I didn’t realize how important it would become to this island.”

Susan Q. Stranahan lives on Chebeague Island and is president of the board of the Island Commons Resource Center. She is a veteran journalist, author of Susquehanna River of Dreams and co-author of Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster.


dock on water in fog

Folio: Katie Johnson

Folio: Katie Johnson

Picturing Home

These images, all shot on Long Island in Casco Bay, are without a doubt my favorite collection of work, and closest to my heart.

It is important to me to provide a visual explanation of, and connection to, the place where I grew up. I am creating an ongoing body of work that not only documents the geography and culture of Long Island, but also provides insight into our community.

Growing up here, I had multiple sets of parents and grandparents, and many brothers and sisters. Until I left for college, I had never spent more than a week or so without seeing any of my island family.

Long Island is three miles long by one mile wide, and lies four miles off the coast. There are only five boats to the mainland a day, and just 230 people live here year-round. During the long winter months, isolated doesn’t begin to describe what that feels like. But this community is full of intimate connections between the people and the land, the island’s history, and with each other. Almost everyone is related, one way or another, and no one gets away with keeping any secrets. I have always feared change and the decline of this unique culture and society.

But it has been almost three years since the bulk of this portfolio was taken, and looking back through all the negatives in preparation for this publication, I see that not a lot has changed. Some of the people in the photos are no longer with us, and some have grown up. However, my fear of losing what makes life here special has been challenged, as I see sons become fathers, daughters marry into island life, and generation after generation succeed in preserving Long Island.

— Katie Johnson


mothers with small children

Babies on Board

Babies on Board

Islands Celebrate Family Growth

Story By Courtney Naliboff
Photos by William Trevaskis

I recently attended a three-year-old boy’s birthday party on North Haven, where I live. His family’s sloping lawn was overgrown with kids. One-year-olds rolled on the grass while toddlers bounced on trampolines. Slightly more sure-footed preschoolers bombed downhill on tiny bikes or climbed the tepee poles.

For those concerned about island communities, a scene like this is so much more than cute and heartwarming; it encourages us about our future. When couples have and raise children on islands, they are ensuring that there is a future.

There is more evidence than the birthday party that islands are fertile ground for the next generation. Both classes at North Haven’s Laugh & Learn Preschool are brimming with children. In fact, the one- to three-year-old class was started in March 2015 to accommodate what appears to be a Fox Islands baby boom.

“It does seem to me that more than any other time since I’ve lived here, young people are choosing island life deliberately,” says Christie Hallowell, Laugh & Learn Preschool’s director. “They like the qualities and aspects, the comings and goings of island life, especially as the world changes. They want to bring up their children in a place like this.”

Vinalhaven’s Island Village Childcare had 22 students enrolled in late 2015, ranging from six-week-olds to five-year-olds.

“It was a long winter. It happens every so often,” says Megan Day, director of the Vinalhaven child-care program. “It’s like a cycle.”

Calling it a baby boom might be hyperbole, but North Haven and Vinalhaven aren’t the only islands seeing babies and toddlers as new year-round residents.

Just north in Penobscot Bay on Islesboro, 18 babies were born in the period from 2011 to 2015, with two born on the island.

small children playing at a childcare

Playing outside of Island Village Childcare on Vinalhaven

On Cliff Island in Casco Bay, there are four children, ranging from ages five to nine, in the one-room school, and on Long Island, three babies were born in the second half of 2015.

On the Cranberry Isles, which includes Great Cranberry and Islesford, two babies were born to islanders in 2015, three in 2013, and one in 2010. Swan’s Island, town clerk Gwen May joked, had a baby boom, with five born in 2011, three in 2012, four in 2013, three in 2014, and two in 2015. And on nearby Frenchboro (also known as Long Island), two babies have been born in recent years.

On Isle au Haut, just one child was born in the last few years, and it was to a family that had been seasonally on the island but may be moving out permanently this summer.

When island populations include children, schools stay open. When schools stay open, it’s easier to entice other young families to move to an island. Island leaders are thrilled when families with children choose to make an island their home.

Giving Birth on-Island

There are no hospitals on Maine’s islands, but that doesn’t stop some from choosing to give birth at home. Sarah Poole, 34, gave birth to each of her three children in her own home on Vinalhaven.

“I was born here, and it was just something I always wanted to do,” she said. “The doctor here at the [Vinalhaven] medical center used to deliver babies,” she said. “I think for insurance reasons they stopped, and then people got in the habit [of going to the mainland] and thinking that you have to go to the hospital to have a baby.”

Poole worked with Morningstar Midwifery, a Belfast-based practice with two certified professional midwives. The midwives visited the house prior to Poole’s labor beginning, and left a birth kit at the house. They returned when she went into labor.

“They make arrangements and come to the house and hang out if they have to. With my first one, they hung out for two days because it was a long process,” she said.

As with much of island life, sometimes the best-laid plans go awry, Lydia Brown remembers.

When Brown’s daughter Rita was born, “the midwives didn’t quite make it in time,” she remembers. But in a way, that’s a family tradition. Both Brown and her sister Thena were born at home on Vinalhaven and attended high school on North Haven. Both returned to the islands to farm and write after college.

When Brown had her first child, Cyrus, who is now seven, at home on North Haven, Morningstar’s midwives were able to attend.

Rita, born without the assistance of midwives, was small but healthy. Although the circumstances could have been frightening, Brown accepted it as part of the deal. “I felt like it was the risk you take living on an island. You could have a stroke or a heart attack, and it was a factor of island living I accepted,” she said.

“It’s a sense of pride thing, being born here,” Brown said. However, not being born on-island isn’t an impediment to being accepted. This, happily, seems very true. My husband and I moved to North Haven in 2005, when Waterman’s Community Center was first opening its doors to preschool children. There was no day care available, but we hadn’t yet considered having kids.

parents laughing with their two kids

Foy and Lydia Brown with their
children Cyrus and Rita

We got married in 2012, and I became pregnant in 2013. My obstetrician sister and obstetrician father were insistent that I plan to have my daughter in a hospital.

Since I was determined not to be in labor on a boat, I went to the mainland a week before my due date. I assumed the baby would be fashionably late, but I went into labor two days early, prompting my husband, who was still on-island, to frantically run onto the ferry with our dog and his overnight bag, but without our car, which didn’t make it on, or my carefully packed hospital bag.

I labored at my best friend and doula’s parents’ house in Owls Head until I thought the baby might fall out onto their nice, clean floor, and we jumped into her car and took the longest twenty-minute car ride of my life. Once we arrived at Pen Bay’s Women’s Health center in Rockport, and it was determined that I was in transitional labor, we dashed across campus to the hospital, and within two hours, Penrose Claire Trevaskis was born. Her arrival was extremely normal, but I hemorrhaged after delivering the placenta and was grateful to be in a hospital and not facing emergency transport in a boat, plane, or helicopter.

Penrose plays every day with the five other kids in North Haven’s class of 2032. She can go outside every day in our yard or on the playground, can walk in the park or ride down quiet roads in her stroller. Everyone knows her.

Hallowell, director of Laugh & Learn Preschool, is cheered by the babies.

“One of my favorite moments is when we have our weekly community coffee hour where people come and have coffee at Waterman’s, and the toddlers come in and everybody’s interacting and enjoying each other’s company,” she says. “It keeps the community vibrant and healthy.”

Day, director of the Vinalhaven day-care center, agrees.

“It’s great! I love it,” she says. “I think it’s wonderful to have so many kids on the island. It’s great for the community, and we all work together to raise [our] kids.”

Courtney Naliboff lives, writes, teaches, and parents on North Haven. She writes a column for The Working Waterfront and Kveller.com, and recently completed two manuscripts.


two hunters in the woods

One Deer, Two Islands

One Deer, Two Islands

Hunting on Frenchboro creates logistical obstacles unlike any on mainland.

Story and photos By Scott Sell

Zach Lunt’s hands are covered in blood and bile and fur.

“The fun part is over for me,” he says, midway through field-dressing the buck he just shot. “It’s all work from here on out.”

But the work will take far longer than he thinks: Even though the kill was quick and easy, trying to make it legal won’t be.

~

Earlier on this November morning: After bacon and eggs and coffee, Zach and I walk silently through the woods of Frenchboro, only stopping to inspect a deer trail or hoofprints or scat. The plan is to walk east from the gravel pit in the middle of the island to the back side of Rich’s Head, where the wind won’t be blowing quite so fiercely. Sunlight has just started to filter through the pines.

I have a bag packed with snacks and water and layers of clothes and lots of camera batteries, prepared for sitting in a blind for hours, waiting.

But we don’t even make it to the Head. Just after coming down to the isthmus of beach stones that connects the Head to the rest of the island, Zach pauses for a second, shields his eyes from the sun’s glare with his hand, then takes up his shotgun, gives the scope a brief glance, and fires between two trees. I hadn’t even seen the deer.

We walk over to where the deer lies. A three-point buck, his fourth antler broken. Zach hit him in the heart and he dropped where he stood. He’s still taking his last few breaths.

“Let’s leave him be for a minute,” Zach says.

~

At the crest of the hill overlooking Rich’s Head, Zach takes in the field below, old cellar holes from a settlement that was once here, now covered with puckerbrush and skunk spruce.

“This won’t be quite as long of a day as we thought it would be,” he says.

He’s a little disappointed. He hasn’t seen a single deer all season and now, in the first 20 minutes of hunting, he’s reached his limit for the year.

Zach, along with his brother Nate, grew up on Frenchboro. They know every inch of the island, roughly two-thirds of which is preserve land. Their father started taking them hunting when they were young to scout out good spots, and to teach them how to shoot.

“I might have been a little loud and impatient,” Zach says of those first forays into the woods. “Patience is a big part of it. I think I’ve gotten better at that as I’ve gotten older. You realize that the waiting around is the best part.”

Like many hunters, Zach feels the sport is less about killing an animal and more about being outside and feeling the rhythms of nature, as well as having a day off from lobster fishing and away from the stresses of raising five kids and tackling a list of house repairs. But on Frenchboro—eight miles from the mainland, with just three state ferry trips a week—it’s also about subsistence.

“I don’t think you have to go back too many generations to get to where they depended on deer meat,” Zach says. “It’s still a big part of our diet, to make ends meet. We don’t have a store, and there’s not a soup kitchen here in the wintertime. It’s a meat you can harvest right here.”

~

Zach folds up his knife and washes his bloody hands in the water lapping up on the beach of Eastern Cove. Then he texts his wife, Laurette, asking her to wake up their 15-year-old son, Austin, and send him clear across the island on the four-wheeler, to help haul the deer back.

When I first met Austin, the couple’s youngest son, he was an impish second grader at the one-room schoolhouse where I, as an Island Institute Fellow, helped teach him and a dozen of his classmates. Now here he is, almost as tall as I am, but the same island kid.

hunter in field

“I thought Mom was kidding,” he says, working with Zach to tie the deer on the back of the four-wheeler.

Austin had his first day of legal hunting on Youth Day this year, a few days before the regular firearms season started. With Zach’s assistance, he had a head shot lined up on a buck near the apple trees around the harbor, fired, and the deer ran off. They tried to track him, with no luck. But a quarter-mile away, they found three small drops of blood on a leaf. They figured the shot must have grazed him somewhere.

“Look, Austin!” Zach says, feeling around the top of the deer’s head. “There’s a scar! Must be the one you nicked a few weeks ago.”

Austin smirks.

“Glad I didn’t get this one,” he says. “Means I wouldn’t have gotten that big buck.”

Earlier in the season, Austin got a sizable eight-pointer along the Gully Road, and doesn’t miss the chance to remind Zach of his success.

“Okay,” Zach says, starting up the four-wheeler. “See you back home.” Zach drives halfway up the hill, but there isn’t enough rope to secure the deer and it starts to slip off the back of the four-wheeler. Without saying anything, they start scouring the beach for additional rope. Luckily, the beaches here are covered with lobster gear and buoys, with plenty of rope for the taking. They secure the buck and Zach disappears into the trees, his blaze-orange vest and hat glowing in the dark of the woods.

~

In front of Zach’s house, several fishermen stop their trucks and get out to take a look at the deer. Many are hunters themselves, and they trade thoughts about the patterns of the herds and the spots on the island where they’ve seen traces of activity.

For years, most of Maine’s islands did not have deer-hunting seasons, and finally, the numbers got out of hand, with upward of several hundred on one island. On Frenchboro, many became incredibly tame. Zach remembers deer eating bread out of people’s hands.

dead deer in the back of a boat

And they weren’t healthy. Interbreeding produced albino deer. There wasn’t enough greenery to keep them fed, and nobody could grow anything in their gardens, because the deer ate everything in sight, using garden plots as their toilets. And then there’s the increase in Lyme-related illnesses in recent years; in Zach’s family alone, his wife, twin sons, and sister-in-law all have Lyme disease.

When hunting was finally legalized on the island in 2000 as part of a wildlife-management plan that several island communities adopted, hunters were allowed to get up to six deer for the first two years. Buck or doe, it didn’t matter. The idea was simply to thin the herd, and they succeeded for the most part. But as the number of year-round Frenchboro residents decrease and guys like Zach struggle to find time to hunt, the deer population has swelled once again. You drive around at night and the headlights of your truck will pick up half a dozen standing in the middle of the road, eating fallen apples.

Zach takes the deer down the boat ramp to rinse it off in the shallow water of the harbor. Then, with Austin’s help, he strings it up in his fish house.

The sun that was warm and welcoming earlier this morning has all but disappeared and the wind is picking up again. Time for another cup of coffee.

Around the kitchen table, I ask about tagging. Every county in Maine has a handful of tagging stations where hunters are required to fill out paperwork and pay a $5 registration fee, to make the deer legitimate in the eyes of the state. Of course, on the islands, it’s easy to get away with bypassing this altogether. With no game wardens—let alone a police force—on Frenchboro, who would ever know? But Zach wants to do the right thing. As his kids start to hunt on their own, he wants to set a good example.

“I know for a long time the tagging was done at John’s house,” I say.

“Yeah, now it’s at my brother-in-law Mikey’s house. He’s in Machias and won’t be back until tomorrow. Gotta have it tagged within eighteen hours of shooting it, but that’ll be close enough.”

“You know,” Laurette calls out from the next room, “I don’t think Mikey will be back until next week, after Thanksgiving.”

“Oh, boy,” Zach groans.

Taking it to the mainland would mean an hour-long trip to Bass Harbor on Zach’s boat, loading it into the bed of a borrowed truck, and another half-hour to Trenton. And then in reverse, the deer in tow. Out of the question.

Zach is immediately on his phone. After texting a few guys on Frenchboro, he calls Les at Underwater Taxi, a wharf and store on Swan’s Island.

“Hey, you know who tags deer over there?”

The fishermen’s co-op does, and 20 minutes later, we’re on the angela rose, Jay Fiandaca’s lobster boat, which he’s taking over to Swan’s to show to a potential buyer. The deer fits easily on the stern end, Jay’s dogs taking turns sniffing at it.

When we pull up at the co-op, there are cheers from the wharf, people congratulating Zach. He steps off the boat and pulls out his wallet, faces us, and grimaces.

“Left my hunting license on the kitchen counter,” he whispers.

“Geez, Zach!” Jay says, laughing. “This just isn’t your day!”

“Maybe I can sweet-talk ’em,” Zach says, walking up the ramp.

Inside the co-op office, Kenny begins putting the paperwork together while Zach describes the hunt, the size of the deer, his reason for being over here to tag.

“But you’ll never guess what I did,” Zach says slowly.

“What?”

“Forgot my license at home.”

Kenny shakes his head and drops the forms.

“Can’t do it then. Can’t tag it without that little piece of paper.”

Maybe Paul Joy, who’s about to leave for Frenchboro to show the new mail carrier the route, can pick it up from Laurette on the town float?

“He won’t be back for more than an hour, and we’re supposed to close in twenty minutes.”

“Can she send a photo of it on the phone?”

“Nope.”

“Got a fax machine?”

“Yeah, upstairs.”

“And that’s legal?”

“That’ll work.”

A couple minutes later, the fax comes through with a copy of Zach’s license. They get the paperwork in order and walk outside to put the tag—nearly identical to the state-issued plastic strips that are looped through the wire mesh of their lobster traps—on the deer’s hind leg. But the boat’s gone. Along with the deer. Jay had figured the paperwork would take a while, one of the co-op workers tells us, and has headed into the middle of Jericho Bay to show off the boat.

“Well,” Kenny says, “guess we’ll be here a while.”

Although it’s lunchtime and he’s off the clock for the rest of the day, Kenny is legally bound to tag the deer now that it’s registered on paper.

So we wait.

Not in a tree stand or a ground blind or even in the woods, but on a wharf, waiting for the red of the angela rose to appear around Hockamock Head, watching as Swan’s Island lobstermen stack traps in the back of their trucks.

two men tagging dead deer

Scott Sell is the Island Institute’s media specialist and a former Frenchboro Island Fellow.