The Edge of Maine (5 page)

Wooden Ball Island, a mile-long grassy rock a few miles east of Matinicus, supported a couple of inhabitants many years ago (more than can be claimed by nearby No Mans Land). The two men lived in uneasy amity until one somehow offended the other by leaving undone a chore. Umbrage ensued, followed by fisticuffs all through a moonlit night. The bout was scored no decision, and the following morning one of the erstwhile friends got in his rowboat and headed east, away from Matinicus, and the other got in
his
and rowed to Matinicus. I have a hunch he was the surly one.
^*

With the exception of the legendary Abbie Burgess—the daughter of the keeper from 1853 to 1861 of Matinicus Light, the station farthest offshore in American waters—the hired inhabitants were famously disenchanted with having been stranded on a surf-beaten puffin colony. Abbie's standing in the state's folklore is unsurpassed. She was fourteen when her father, invalid mother, and little sisters came to the Rock, lured there by a salary of fifty dollars per year. She trimmed and fueled the wicks, adjusted the optics, stood watch, raised chickens, nursed her mother. During a winter storm in 1856, with supplies and medicine running low after the supply ship had unaccountably neglected to stop at Matinicus Light, Abbie's father left the Rock to journey twenty-five miles to Rockland. A northeast storm stranded him ashore, while it battered the lighthouse. Abbie twice saved her mother's life by moving her to higher ground. The following winter, while her father was again trapped ashore, a terrific gale battered Matinicus Rock, breaking waves over it and sweeping away the light keeper's house. The towers stood, damaged, and for almost a month Abbie attended to her family and even her five hens, rescuing four. She rationed food, went without sleep, and kept the light burning. In 1861 a new keeper, John Grant, was given this plum of a job by Abraham Lincoln, and Abbie married his son, Isaac, and for fourteen years she remained on the Rock, where four Grant children were born.

From 1827 until the light was automated the year following our unplanned visit, its succession of tenders failed to romanticize their service. A successful landing on the volcanic pile could be achieved only during flat calm or with good luck. Bill Caldwell, in
Lighthouses of Maine,
quotes an 1891 description by the government Light House Board of the procedure: The light keeper “effects a landing by steering his boat through the breakers on top of a wave so that it will land on the boat ways, where his assistants stand ready to receive him, and draw his boat up so far on the ways that a receding wave cannot carry it back to the sea.” The light's purpose, to cast a signal at least nineteen miles and to sound a signal through fog, was compromised by the battering the lights took, and by poor light design. For a time Matinicus was to distinguish itself by showing two lights from two towers, but even at short ranges these appeared as a single illumination, confounding mariners. Then the Lighthouse Board specified a red signal, but this severely truncated the light's range. A fog bell was tried, but no one at sea could hear it.

The final string of exiles on the Rock—so-called stag-light keepers posted there by the Coast Guard—publicized their unhappiness, complaining to the rare visitor, writing letters of bitter regret and recrimination to the editors of such periodicals as the
Maine Coast Fisherman.
Louise Dickinson Rich, in her often rapturous and sometimes sardonic
Coast of Maine
(1956), an “informal history and guide,” catches the spirit of the Coast Guardsmen's dispatches: “pathetic letters … telling how nice it was back in Minnesota, with the wheat fields blowing and one's best girl just down the road.”

In the 1890s a lonely keeper, William Grant (son of Abbie and Isaac, born on the Rock), brought a cow to the island, having her ferried over from Matinicus Island. Bill Caldwell quotes a journalist writing, after a visit to Matinicus light in 1897, for
Century Magazine.
Gustav Kebbe describes the cow, Daisy, “standing on that mass of barren rock, the only living thing in view, the wind furrowing up her hide. She would gaze out at the waste of wild waters with a driven, lonely look…. Often the cow looks over in the direction of Matinicus Island and moos pathetically…. She formerly found some companionship in a rabbit, with which she was accustomed to play at dusk, but the rabbit died.”

It is little wonder the marooned were bitter. A fine nesting ground for puffins and petrels and terns and shearwaters and peregrine falcons, Matinicus Rock is a god-awful misery of granite cliffs and shingle, treeless, shrubless, grassless, and fuzzed with peat. In the winter, sea smoke as thick as fur made even the shore disappear from sight. Its keepers—their lungs stabbed by wind-driven frost—had to chip ice off the lens ninety feet up to keep the light visible. On calm summer days some intrepid Audubon Society “puffin-grubbers” tried to land to observe the appealingly clownish sea parrots catch fish (more than a dozen stuffed crosswise in their beaks), but the incessant swells rolling in unbroken across the Atlantic had a nasty way of swamping or capsizing their dinghies. Forty feet at its highest natural elevation, the Rock is hammered silly by winter gales, rolling ten-ton boulders around like marbles. Legend is that one solitary keeper hanged himself in the light tower. Horace Bec tells in
The Folklore of Maine
that his ghost was malevolent, creating “all kinds of mischief, breaking dishes and slamming doors, and making a general nuisance of itself, causing the light to snuff itself or the foghorn to fail to blow.”

Neighboring Ragged Islanders, with much to resent, mostly treat strangers and themselves well. Our lobster-fishing hero, after he finished pulling pots the next day, directed us around the walking paths of his island, giving the equivalent of a letter of introduction: “If anyone looks at you funny, say you're visiting Tom.” Tom's island, which he shared with commuters like himself based on the mainland, together with a few summer people who came from as far away as New Jersey, has the unapologetic starkness of Brittany. What grew in that fog-damped soil seemed indestructibly rooted. The walking paths wandering south a mile from Criehaven—through wildflowers and wild rose and wild strawberries, through gorse and heather and neglected apple orchards—were almost tentative, as incidental as animal tracks. The late afternoon light was filtered by brume, but from an overgrown meadow at the southern edge of Ragged we could see through our binoculars the spume of breakers hurling themselves against Matinicus Rock, a few miles to the southeast. The wind whispered and rustled stunted trees at the beach's edge; waves slapped against Brig Ledge and wheeling terns and guillemots quarreled.

We knew a bit about Ragged and Matinicus from the cruising guides we carried aboard
Blackwing,
but Tom had added details. The first Europeans who gathered in the outer islands came there to catch and dry and salt fish. John Smith sent fishing schooners on successful ventures to Ragged and Matinicus Islands from the Jamestown Colony in Virginia; the returning fishermen told of abundant stands of spruce on the Maine islands. The first settlers were Harriet and Robert (“King”) Crie, newlyweds in 1848, immigrants from Matinicus Island. The Cries and their children and in-laws were industrious farmers and fishers, lumbermen and sawyers; they raised hay and grazed as many as three hundred sheep, and the place thrived. A two-masted black schooner,
Conqueror,
called regularly from Boston, bringing food, hardware, and a few luxuries heading Down East, loading up on lobsters on her way home. By the beginning of the twentieth century Criehaven was attracting a summer colony of writers and artists and layabout rusticators. There was regular mailboat service from Rockland, and Louise Rich tells that doctors were easily summoned by carrier pigeons bearing messages to the mainland. Louise Rich lived elsewhere, though Dorothy Simpson's baby brother died in part because of the delay in diagnosis and treatment caused by his father having to cross twenty-five miles of open ocean in a lobster smack to Rockland, and return with a doctor, who commanded that the sick child be taken to Rockland, where he died and from where his coffin was borne across twenty-five miles of open ocean to Criehaven. Ragged Island supported a school and a church. In 1937 there were twenty houses and fifty-five full-time residents; Criehaven had a gas dock and store and post office. In 1956, at the time when Rich wrote about it, Ragged Island had “simmered down into a comfortable and pleasant middle age.” By 1990 the island was overrun with rabbits, someone's bad idea, which flourished without predators. In 1996, Hank and Jan Taft's
Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast
reported of “beautiful Ragged Island” that “there's no store, no school, no post office, hardly any way to get there.” World War II did Ragged Island in: the Army carried away its last teacher, so the schoolhouse was closed. The children moved ashore to go to school and their mothers followed. With fewer customers on Criehaven, the storekeeper shut shop. Without addressees, the mailboat, lifeline to the island, quit coming. Finally the men came ashore.

Depending on who's counting and what they count, Maine has about three thousand islands. A hundred years ago, three hundred islands had year-round communities; today the number is fourteen. Ragged Island's social and economic decline was gradual but inexorable. It was the last island community in Maine to “go extinct.” The Tafts quote George Putz, who wrote for
Island Journal
an essay about the phenomenon of desuetude: “Though island communities are elegant in their social orders, they are for the same reason more prone to reverses brought about by only one or two events. The death of an influential man, the loss of a mailboat, a teacher, a store, or a breakwater (breached by the infamous Groundhog Day storm of 1976, wiping out Criehaven's fleet and wharves) may have influence out of proportion to comparable events in mainland communities where more options are available.” In 1982 we experienced a near ghost town. The 2000 census reports a “total population of zero.”

 

S
OME LAUNDRY SNAPPED ON A LINE BEHIND A FISHERMAN'S
house. No kids played down on the waterfront, where we saw piles of nets and traps and coiled lines, the tools of the only business that continued to make economic sense so far offshore. Lobsters from those waters are prized as the tastiest in Maine. The water is so cold that they shed later, which is thought to keep their meat more tender. We put this reputation to the test when Tom quietly materialized behind us as we stood studying Criehaven's rickety wharves.

“Let's eat,” he said. Then he fed the four of us half a dozen lobsters and tucked into the rum and canned peaches we brought ashore. He shared his house with his nephew, a shy kid from Tenants Harbor who served as Tom's sternman, hauling and baiting traps for a cut of the take. The house, directly on the harbor, was a two-story clapboard cape with a sagging front porch, long past hoping for a coat of paint. It was just the kind of place you might find for sale these days in the back of
Down East
or
Maine Boats and Harbors,
going for $350,000, say, with 350 feet of waterfront. The interior was airy, with two big bedrooms upstairs. Tom wasn't planning on weekend guests, because he went home to Rockland every weekend to visit his wife and kids. No running water, and the kitchen, with a propane stove and ice box, was a museum recording Maine's taste in linoleum during the forty years since World War II. The place was uncluttered and spotless, lit by kerosene lamps. He had a generator, but fuel for it was a challenge to transport, he said—a few minutes before he insisted that we take five gallons of diesel to make sure we had enough to get us to the mainland.

Before we returned to
Blackwing,
Tom told us a story that made me feel smart … or at least lucky. The tale was from that line of legends that ascribes subhuman fecklessness or superhuman wisdom to Mainers who take to the sea, especially touching on their powers to pick their way through fog to a desired destination. These people, proud of their fog, bristle at the suggestion that any place else in the world—the Aleutians, say, or Cape Disappointment off the mouth of the Columbia River—might be as gloomy. “Even the birds be walkin',” Tom had said of the conditions yesterday. To cruise the Maine coast is to hear tales of fog. The Boston-Bangor steamer
City of Bangor,
for instance, ran right up on Monhegan in 1902 and
then
heard, as from many leagues distant, the foghorn close enough to hit with a cat; passengers were hurled from their bunks but none injured, excepting an acrobatic trick bicycle rider from Michigan. Piloting back then, when many ships moved fast and on schedule carrying freight and passengers, was an art. Local knowledge was valued: A few captains cutting close to shore would whistle, time their echoes, and fix their positions accordingly. One captain was said to identify his place by the particular bleating of particular sheep. Of these stories some are true. A sailor did ram a school bus in Muscongus Bay—it was on a ferry, with kids aboard, moored to a buoy in thick o' junk o' fog. The master of a steam yacht clanked full astern twenty feet from the front door of a colonial farm house—being transported in dense fog from Phippsburg to Beauchamp Point—in forty fathoms off Seguin Island. Some of the tales may be apocryphal—of fog so dense you could walk home on it; fog so dense you could hang your laundry on it; fog so dense you could hammer shingles to its walls. The estimable Marshall Dodge and Robert Bryan, the 1950s Yalies better known as “Bert and I,” made a nice living and gave much pleasure telling in a Down East dialect of the misadventures of the captain and mate of the lobster boat
Bluebird.
These characters were forever grounding out in the fog, and on one memorable occasion they went high and dry on a whale. A staple of the lore that fed this comedy routine was the misapplication of that quality so prized by sailors, “local knowledge.” Sailing through toothy waters in a windy pea-souper with all canvas flying, the anxious helmsman is under orders from his captain, napping below, to press on at top speed, every so often casting the lead line and bringing to the captain a sample of the bottom. At the business end of a lead weight secured to the heaving line was a gob of tallow, and the seafloor's mud or sand or grass would stick to it. If the bottom was granite, it came up clean. In fable, the captain so reliably knows the composition of the bottom of Maine waters that this peculiar sand of just this density alerts him to his exact position, one and one-sixth leagues sou'west by south of Mistake Island. The punch line to these tales of wonderment is routinely ironic. Examining the residue the captain shouts out, “Keep a sharp lookout, boys! Accordin' to my figgerin' we're ten yards alee of Seth Eaton's barn.”