And these did not prevent really restful nights. Well, he just put more in, and they cut them again. Five years ago, a member of the Ames clan, whod left Matinicus years before but never stopped lobstering its waters, began hiring someone else to work his traps. We have seen that before, and nothing to do with a pandemic. In 2005, for three days, he signed on as a third man in a lobster boat, and, he says, a gene flipped on in my head. He left his job; she left hers. Hah; welcome to the real world. Of fires, drownings, lost boats, sea rescues, church suppers, roof raisings, shared food, every neighborly act you could think of. Its more, I think, than the perfect calm of the water, or the hazy, purplish light that must have followed the rain that day. It's true that the. Its all come easy to em. The 2000 census had the population at 51 but in the dead of winter, the population can dwindle to around 20. As of fall 2020, the school has no enrolled students but stands ready to hire a teacher and welcome children as needed. Its as though the clans in their way were a sort of monarchy: a continuum of ascendant families whose generations of canny, devoted stewardship will somehow see the way through. Some traded up to 600-horsepower diesels that could make it to Rockland in an hour or less. So was his wife, Jananwho had seen from her window the men converging on the harbor, and had brought with her a 12-gauge shotgun she would claim she didnt know how to use. Robins, crows, sparrows, cardinals and jays were everywhere as well as a few hummingbirds. But islanders know that no matter how important you are, how rich you are, how loud you are, how much you stomp around the flying service office yelling, Do you know who I am? there is nothing anybody can do about the delay. For most of the morning, hed been working on the engine, but the rain was a torrent now, so we were waiting it out in the truck. Then she stopped. The Bunkers and the Youngs feudingthat goes back. Walks about the island every day. The gravel road, the islands spine, runs its dusty, almost unbending course through the old-growth spruce interior: from the tiny dirt airstrip in its clearing at the northern tip (shorter by 50 feet at high tide, they say), past the empty church and schoolhouse, the sad little pile-of-stones monument to the islands first white settler, Ebenezer Hall (Killed by Indians, June 6, 1757), and the two dozen or so hardy, mostly modest homes that cluster at uncertain intervals at the intersections of dirt side roads. This is not a place fixed up to fit into someone elses idea of what an island off the coast of Maine should be like. More than half the graves belong to the same eight or nine families, the islands anchor names, which Id come to know by this time: Ames, Young, Philbrookthe three surviving alpha families, as one islander calls themas well as Hall, Condon, Bunker, Tolman, Crie. A couple of lobsters and a slew of crab claws for the new school teacher and her special visitor. FORE MORE DATA ON MAINES ISLAND AND COASTAL COMMUNITIES VISIT: Once we loaded three cars, two pickups, a dump-truck (which barely fit), and four passengers on foot, we set sail for the 2.5-hour trip. That's the island way! (Also off the coast of Maine, but somewhat closer to the mainland.) It originally had two light towers: one was extinguished in 1923, the other was automated in 1983. Theres a way of doing things, Philbrook told me, and it just seemed as though the time had come to get things clear once and for all. A friend of mine had recently taken a job on a tiny Island, 24 miles off the coast of Maine. Birthdays, anniversaries, national holidays, religious observances, and scheduled hooliganism are routinely postponed on islands to work around storms, fog, FedEx, visiting grandparents, and possibly the Coast Guard. Hussey is a lawyer in his forties, a slight man with thin features and tousled, receding brown hair. If you cant do that, or you wont, then theres no place for you. There are two private ferries on the island: Matinicus Excursions (207) 691-9030 and Penobscot Ferry and Transport (207) 691-6030. Walking the length of the islandtwo miles, an easy hours walkthe main thing you feel is the stillness. Then shed left, and returned again as a young wife and mother when her husband first took up hauling traps: Weve always had to fight to hold on to what we had, always. The yards are large and flat; a few have small gardens. They preferred the path they had always used before. And we were told that the water taxi service is well run and a good option. State agencies and nonprofit organizations have tried to stem the loss of year-round populations by giving islanders guarantees of a certain. What a glorious natural classroom! Whole families moved away entirely, but still showed up to haul their traps. If one were to follow the South by Southeast heading to Matinicus harbor, steering from Owls Head Light outside of the Rockland Harbor breakwater, and should one manage to miss the landing at Matinicus, the next landfall on that heading would be along South Americas northern coast. Hes hard of hearing and walks arthritically. And Vance Bunker was there; hed arrived with his sternman in a blue pickup with a .22-caliber handgun and an AK-47 assault rifle with nine loaded magazines. A two-man boat would come in with a three-day haul of 4,500 pounds, worth $14,000 or more. Breakfast was supplied by Bill and included his homemade English Muffins. These were not adorned with floating docks at the end of convenient ramps swinging up and down with the tides, made for small boats, deep water anchorages and a lot of maintenance. And we did. As the evening of our second night approached, while we waited for a fisherman to deliver a bucket of 4 lobsters, we heard outside the rumble of a lawnmower. Not like today, with computers, where the process works in reverse , And you know what? One couple, in addition to having an amazing vegetable garden, has the only cows on the island (4), as well as chickens, ducks, and turkeys. Be sure to check the most recent online schedule. Theres a war going on in coastal Maine, where renegade crustacean gangs are forcing people to grope for their guns, was how one national magazine painted the scene, ludicrously, late last year. A man is partially paralyzed. At some point Janan Miller yelled Hey! and pointed the shotgun at the stepbrothers. But it was never far away. Id heard by now the story of his familys early years: how his grandfather had been a rumrunner on the island during Prohibition, hiding the bottles in deepwater puddles; of his father, a lobsterman, and how hed met Vances mother, whod come there to work as a nurse; how hed started pulling traps as a teenager and never stopped; how it used to be that when you had an argument with a neighbor, you got over it real quick, cause you needed each other more than you needed to stay mad.. There were 188 people living on Matinicus in 1950, roughly half that 20 years later. In past columns I have remarked once or twice that people who have something to say about an island not being part of the real world have a strange idea of the real world, as in, the real world is where you have to pick up your dry cleaning. Out past Isle au Haut, past Monhegan, past Metinic, approximately 22 miles out in the middle of the Gulf of Maine, sits Matinicus Island, a 750-acre granite tooth covered with black spruce. Seurasaari ( Swedish: Flisn) is an island and a district in Helsinki, Finland, known mostly as the location of the Seurasaari Open-Air Museum, which consists of old, mainly wooden buildings transplanted from elsewhere in Finland and placed in the dense forest landscape of the island. He graciously had us at his home for a couple of nights. Miller is Vance Bunkers son-in-law; he married Bunkers daughter Janan several years ago, bought a house on Matinicus not long after, and had been lobstering island waters ever since. He collapsed in a pool of blood at his stepbrothers feet. Producer/Host: Crash Barry This week on Tough Island, Maine, a tragedy strikes the sheep living on Wheaton Island and an island wedding where Captain Edwin and Crash show up wearing the same outfit. The wind gusted to 70 mph on Sunday near Matinicus Island, about 20. The plane banked and then passed back over the island providing a great view from a vantage we obviously had not previously enjoyed. This is why so many of the ferry trips run in couplets, two days apart. With the cod and haddock now gone as predators, the Maine lobster harvest had more than doubled: from 20 million pounds a year to close to 50 million. One of them brought in some old buoys, maybe from when he was a kid, Im not sure, and showed us how they were made. Then it didnt matter if it was your worst enemy; you were there for thembecause you knew youd need the same if it was you. In the end, though, it is the islands willfulness, more than anything elsemore even than its isolationthat sets this place apart. And the old gasoline engines got traded in for diesels; the boats were faster now, so you could set your traps twice as far out. He would survive: his hands mostly paralyzed, his left arm no longer of much use, his lifetime earning power reduced by $2.4 million, according to the lawsuit he would file. A nurse visits the island homes, and there are telemedicine facilities on board to e-link in doctors as needed. He had a bad reputation. They also provide sporting events, cultural enrichment such as concerts, island schooling for kids, scholarships, a food pantry and other vital services to these places. Or maybe Vance Bunker cut them, or maybe both of them did, or neither; it can be foggy off Matinicus in the early mornings. Together we drove up Maines coastal highway, Route 1, initially encountering the morning shift heading to the Bath Iron Works, but little in the way of summer crowds since this was still before Memorial Day. This isnt a place that could exist on the mainlandor, probably, even 10 miles closer to it. Its about building long-term memorylike the way farming used to be, when the kids still learned from their elders. Enough to make a living, but never much better than that. Working his way around Saris occasional outbursts (Yes, Im bitterI dont expect my closest friends to go against my family, and do it publicly Easy now, youre getting yourself worked up ), hed told me his story of how it had all come to pass: how his son-in-law had played by the rulesHe married my daughter, they bought a house thereand had still been run off the island; how hed gone to see Chris Youngs stepfather, futilely, to try to settle the dispute; how hed feared for his life, and later for his daughters (The man threatened to kill me); how Youngs and Amess civil suits, (the former settled this year, the latter still making its way through the courts) could take most of what he and Sari had; and, finally, how the island was no longer home to him, and his friends were no longer his friends. 2023 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved. On Matinicus, where the lines were drawing tighter, they told Vance Bunker that his son-in-law, a mainlander, was no longer welcome to set his traps. He made a call to a lobsterman who also had the islands inventory of propane tanks. Become an online member today: To manage your account, just hover and click on your name above. Matinicus Island can be reached by sea or air. Without a grid tie to the mainland, the Matinicus Plantation Electric Company generates all the islands electricity with diesel fuel. They invited us over on Sunday to watch the Patriots game, using an old-time antenna to receive the signal. And so theyd made it formal: If youre born here, you can fish hereor if youre the child of someone who was. Metinic Island is approximately 2 miles long and is less than half a mile wide at its widest point. Being an early retiree, with lots of time on my hands, I was happy to accept her invitation to visit and experience the island life. Its larger than youd expect, and more formal: probably two or three acres, a fenced-off square of grass and old granite, with its tiers of headstonesseveral hundredgiving way to a small, shaded bench in the rear. Their cottage was slowly deteriorating; eventually it will collapse into the island and disappear if not bought, restored and maintained. Matinicus Isle is the most remote year-round island in Maine, located 20 miles off Owls Head in the Midcoast. While Matinicus Rock is not a hospitable place, it was a necessary place for a lighthouse, situated as it was in a busy shipping lane roughly twenty miles off Maine's shore. It was a majestic Autumn day with blue skies, crisp air, clear water, and lobstermen plying their trade. Every man and woman on the island showed up with an ax to clear a fire line, a shovel to dig trenches, or a box of sandwiches; old men too feeble to swing axes strapped packs on their backs and sprayed down nearby trees. Anyway, heres wishing us all peace in the New Yearand a month of Sundays, and the plumpest tomato, and maybe just a little scheduled hooliganism. It was the most sophisticated piece of equipment we would encounter for the next 50 hours. Refreshments can found at a coffee shop and seafood is available at an outdoors beach shack and even in a very fine restaurant. They began buying their groceries thereand the island store, open a century, went under. For groceries, islanders can place an order with a grocery store on the mainland and have them delivered on the daily mail-plane for $8 per banana box and left beside the landing strip with their name on it. A few families raised potatoes; almost everyone had a garden. Not even one. You almost have to be devoted to choose to live in such a place: some 15 miles off the coast (23 miles by ferry from Rockland); no year-round stores, or bars or eateries, or doctors or policemen or paved roads, and only one industry; where the fog drops around you like a curtain for days at a time, the same three families have been fighting the same fights for 200 years, and the ferry comes once a month in winter. I was struck by the variety of wildlife and plants. Apple cider, hard from aging a year in mason jars, was served and enjoyed. But he passed on the news that the ferry was broken, they were waiting for a part and there was a 50/50 chance it wouldnt run that day. The runway is usable year round, and permission is needed to land. In the summer there might be 200 people staying on the island; in February, as few as 35. There was a time, Philbrook says, when he had thoughts of leaving the island: He went to college, took courses in aerospace engineering (I thought maybe I wanted to go into space), switched to biology, then to photographybut nothing clicked. Islanders have also reduced their electricity and heating use though community-wide initiatives for weatherization and lighting upgrades. Nowadays you can even text in a photo of that hangnail. Hes the last guy on the island I would have expected this from. A mile and a half down, past all but the last of the houses, where the island starts to narrow and you begin to think you can smell the ocean again, you come to the cemetery. This was not a story dating back to an earlier era, 100 or even just 50 years ago. We would have received a ride for ourselves as well had either of us thought we could manage to jump into the back of a pick up truck already filled with a lot of stuff, plus other people. Which was around 15 minutes. He came home and got a job as a sternmanan assistanton another islanders lobster boat, then other boats after that. They come to these islands and personally call on anyone wishing to be visited. Your support is even more critical during rapidly changing times, when communication is paramount. A gentle, funny giant He drove a boat like it was an extension of his body Kind and generous, tough and strong ).
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