The Edge of Maine Page 3
I could have wept. Asked again—“Do you sail?”—I would have responded, “Sort of, maybe, not really.” Did mister manly man resent how his woman and sons already felt about the savior with radar, and sense enough to find his way to a safe haven? I did not. My hemanliness, poor pathetic thing, was back there in the Portland shipping lanes, or where I’d lost my wits somewhere near Monhegan, where I’d gone plumb numb.
When the lobsterman came alongside and saw my hands shaking, he suggested, seeing how thick o’ fog it was, that he tow us in. That seemed to me the brightest idea anyone ever had. He towed, disappeared into the murk as the line went taut; I pretended to steer, and the boys and Priscilla went below to talk about something. Criehaven’s a snug harbor, and when we entered I knew from the chart that we passed a breakwater not twenty-five feet to starboard. We never saw it. And till the fog lifted we never saw land from Blackwing.
We hung on a mooring in Criehaven two days, two nights. That first night it cleared, and we saw the Northern Lights. Snug below, I listened to Nick on the forward deck explain with the timeworn patience of an older brother that the flashes were in fact World War III.
Justin, evidently undeceived, said, “I’m glad we’re here.”
“Amen,” Priscilla said from the cockpit.
Next morning: fog. We stayed put. If the fog hadn’t lifted, we’d still be there, believe me. Back then, it was a common idiom of cruising guides to warn that a Maine fog could keep you so long anchored in one place that you’d ground on your own beer cans before you’d dare move. But the fog did lift, as it does. And way short of disaster it could have been worse. Roger Duncan has described sailing in a Penobscot Bay fog so thick that the Vinalhaven ferry coming in from Rockland with radar couldn’t find her slip. As for him:
We underestimated the tide, mistook one headland we had never seen for another equally unfamiliar, got into a nest of half-tide rocks, bounced off one, stuck on another, but fortunately sailed her clear. We anchored, guessed, speculated, blundered about from island to island for three hours, went ashore and asked a party of clam diggers where we were, and at length made a safe harbor in the falling dark. Better we had not tried it.
So now? I feel less and less like a fool, which is striking evidence of foolishness. More and more it has seemed to be a good idea to venture offshore, so we do. But never with Monhegan as a destination. Let’s call it a bad vibe coming from Monhegan, a really weak signal.
ANCHORED: RAGGED ISLAND
At dawn the dripping hatch above our bunk told all we needed to know. To sink my account even deeper in Roger F. Duncan’s debt, here’s his perfectly condensed description of our situation, fog dew drumming softly on the deck in a melancholy, irregular rhythm, the muffled “complaint of gulls standing on their weir stakes waiting for something good to happen.” But good was happening, the quickening experience of waking up in a place you’d never planned to find yourself. Pleasures can come as an outcome of having a trip diverted by weather: A flight meant for Barcelona is redirected to Lisbon, a stop in Reykjavik is forced owing to the inclemency of Gander. We had planned our Maine cruise with compulsive care, but this Ragged Island I had never heard of. I knew of another Ragged Island, in Casco Bay, not far from Cundy Harbor, where Edna St. Vincent Millay had lived.
There are so many islands along the Maine coast—one for every day of the week in Casco Bay alone—that an outcropping here often winds up with the same name as another over yonder: There are six Greens, a pair of Swans, a couple of Calfs and Cows (and a West Brown Cow), and Moose and Mouses and Minks and Otters and Porcupines and eight Rams and nine Hogs and thirteen Sheep. (Some of these Sheep Islands are named for their rough likeness to the beast, but most are descriptive of patches of grazing land safe from predators.) Of Eagles there are three (in Penobscot Bay, Casco Bay, and Blue Hill Bay) and twice that number of Crows. A few Stones and Turnips, a couple of Potatoes. There are half a dozen Burnt Islands, a Burnt Coat Island, and a Burnt Coat Harbor. Maine has seven Harbor Islands, christened no doubt in hasty gratitude by casual explorers who had noticed while at anchor in some safe haven worth remembering a nearby island. Maine has three Crotch Islands and Long Islands aplenty; there’s a Bailey Island and Baileys Mistake and Despair Island. The only Thief Island is kept under control by nearby High Sheriff. The Hypocrites and The Cuckholds have tales to tell. There’s a pair of Folly Islands, telling a pair of old stories. Why the need for a Smuttynose Island at the Isle of Shoals and another near Monhegan? In The Folklore of Maine, Horace P. Bec tells of a pair of small outcroppings near Vinalhaven, Murder and Bury, on one of which a family of settlers were done in by Indians and on the other—“where the digging was easier”—they were buried. Down east near Beals Island—author Louise Rich explains that the U.S. Board on Geographical Names disfavors the use of apostrophes, excepting Penobscot Bay’s Swan’s Island—Virgin’s Breast Ledge and The Lecherous Priest have disappeared from recent charts. Thrumcap is so apt a name—referring to the conical cap of tufty furlike wool worn by sailors—that there had to be two. Bar Islands abound, and there are Bares (as well as Bears). Near Islesboro is a Tumbledown Dick. There are Littles and Bigs side-by-side and far apart, ditto Highs and a Lower. There’s a Bush Island and a Twobush Island in Muscongus Bay and a Two Bush Island in Merchant Row. Isle au Haut, named for its height by the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, was for a time corrupted on British and American charts to Aisle O’Holt, and returned now to its original appellation is fancifully pronounced a variety of ways, including EEL-ee o A-leee. The pronunciation of Mount Desert—named by Champlain Mont Desert for its barren appearance—requires a summer resident with the authority of Samuel Eliot Morison to sort out. In his wry and casual little book, The Story of Mount Desert Island, Morison settles the matter. “We may grapple with the problem … whether we should follow what many people call the ‘Sahara School’ and accent the penult, pronouncing it ‘Mount DEZ-ert,’ or what opponents call the ‘Ice Cream and Cake School,’ pronouncing it ‘Mount Dez-ERT’ with accent on the last syllable…. At the time of writing [1961] the penult accenters are much in a minority.”
The descriptive impulse is a culture-specific and nature-contingent motive in the naming of islands: Yesterday’s Burnt might be today’s Green, or vice versa, and Two Bush has a way of becoming One Bush or Hundred Bush. An island namer in the New Meadows River threw in the towel and gave to three islands a single name: Three Islands. Within sight of our anchorage in Criehaven was a Matinicus Island and a Matinicus Rock. Except for Matinicus Rock (home to a thriving colony of puffins), the farthest offshore inhabited land belonging to the United States is Criehaven’s Ragged Island. Its current name was modified by the priggishness of geodetic service chartmakers from its original title, Ragged Arse. Some students of Maine’s place-names have decided that this earlier designation was a corruption of the Indians’ designation, Racketash, or perhaps Raggertusk. Horace P. Bec alludes to its naughty name as descriptive of Ragged’s erstwhile topography and flora: a “bold front … with a broken and battered backside.” On the same page, Bec tells a more vivid story of the island’s earliest English name, on a chart issued in 1790, Cold Arse: “South and a little east of Matinicus lies a miserable, cucumber-shaped rock pile with only a few trees and a tiny, exposed, foul harbor, Criehaven, that now bears the name of Ragged Island. We need no story,” Bec speculates, “to tell us that some poor fisherman was marooned there during a cold winter’s night in the eighteenth century. We know how he thrashed up and down in a vain attempt to keep warm. We know the dark thoughts he had for company in his arduous vigil and we know, too, that he was rescued” and gave the site of his misery its demeaning name. (Residents of Ragged Island know it as Criehaven; neighbors on Matinicus call it Ragged Arse, or Raggedy Ass.)
Rescue and hospitality are recurring motifs in the stories of this last stop before the edge-of-the-world. Like those rulers of Homer’s Odyssey who welcome and feed strangers, the seasonal inhabitants of Crieha
ven take care of wanderers. The overseers of those waters are mostly lobstermen, a dozen or so, who spend spring to fall out there hauling an abundant harvest from the deep waters, returning to the mainland and their families on weekends and for the winter, when cruel gales punish the outlying islands. You’d think that people who had found Maine’s other coastal outposts too crowded for comfort would be suspicious of aliens, reflexively resentful. Mainers label anyone not native to their place “from away,” and how much farther away could we have been from, a crew led by a captain blubbering (on a still day and floating free on still water), help help, we’re lost.
Rescue is an old tradition in remote and severe places. Land’s End at the tip of Cornwall was the site of a legendary lifesaving station whose Samaritans routinely rescued sailors lost or battered or going down in the English Channel. Criehaven was a last-chance kind of place even before the first mainland colonists arrived at Popham in 1607. It was a thriving fishing outpost as early as the sixteenth century and maybe before then. There are unsubstantiated theories that Vikings sailed Maine’s bays and a legend that the Phoenicians found their way there even earlier. If they did, they must have lost themselves in fog, or been beaten up by a gale, and woe to them if they couldn’t raise Criehaven on Channel 16. Nearer in time, in 1939, Alfred F. Loomis, a celebrated chronicler of his exploits as an ocean racer and cruiser, wrote Ranging the Maine Coast. It gives the account of the voyage of his 32-foot cutter Hotspur from Kittery at the New Hampshire border to West Quoddy Head, the perversely named location of America’s easternmost frontier with Canada. (It’s a point-of-view thing.) Loomis gives over a few pages to his expedition to Criehaven with his crewmate Paul Wisner. Contemplating the tricky waters near Green Island and Deadman Ledge, Loomis “squared away for Ragged Arse Island, where Paul had a debt of gratitude to pay.” It seems that a year earlier, en route from Nova Scotia to Buzzards Bay, Wisner and his brother Jack “had become embroiled in a northeaster which gave them sufficient opportunity to reflect on the mitigating benefits of life insurance.” They managed to get lost, confusing the island they were seeking (Metinic) for one they were avoiding (Matinicus). Armed with teeth, Matinicus was showing them through surf breaking on its ledges when they were discovered by a fisherman from Criehaven, who guided them into that harbor where they were “dried out and rendered comfortable during the ensuing days that the northeaster raged.”
Like all island dwellers, Criehaven’s year-rounders were alert to the lucky breaks of outsiders’ unlucky breakups at sea, flotsam driven by the caprice of wind and tide to their shores. Dorothy Simpson, author of The Island’s True Child, an account of her demanding childhood and early life as a lobsterman’s daughter on Ragged Island from 1911 till World War II, tells of her community’s fevered gathering of planks, including varnished pine and hardwood—the detritus of a wooden ship crushed by a winter storm. Everyone, grandmas and toddlers, grabbed pieces of the treasure. In an economy that obliged children to scour beaches for bits of driftwood to fire the wood stoves, such a bonanza might make islanders eager to enjoy the fruits of strangers’ mishaps at sea. But there are instances aplenty of the geniality of Ragged Island’s citizens. In the November 1995 Down East magazine is a story by Steve Waterman, an ex-Navy Seal, diver, and lobsterman from South Thomaston who, the previous November, had rescued a single-engine plane, a Lake Aircraft amphibian, that went down thirty-six miles offshore after flying from England to Maine by way of Newfoundland. The pilot had been lifted from some mighty chilly water by the Coast Guard, a rescue Waterman picked up on his police scanner. He decided to salvage the airplane, and the story of his enterprise and unlikely success came complete with a photo of Lake Renegade #N26LA hauling at its mooring in Criehaven harbor after a three-day winter blow that kept Waterman and his friend hostage in the fishing camp of one Buzzy, a Ragged Islander. It’s a good story, a cautionary tale of how quickly and awfully prospects can deteriorate offshore. Not only did Waterman have to seek refuge in Criehaven at night in a sleet storm, the tug sent out by an insurance company representing the interests of the airplane’s owner managed to foul its propeller in a ground line that stretches from shore to shore, serving to secure the harbor’s moorings (the bottom is slippery, hard sand and granite).
Many a warning’s been issued in cruising guides about that ground line, and the three-foot ledge smack in the middle of Criehaven’s field of moorings. Such ground lines—communal chains stretched across the harbor floor—are customary in some of the offshore islands favored by fishermen. It is ill advised, if not impossible, to anchor at Monhegan owing to the tangle of chains crisscrossing its harbor, and neighboring Matinicus Island is notorious for its inhospitality to cruisers, owing in part to limited anchor room. The Cruising Guide to the New England Coast warns sailors against hooking up to absent fishermen’s moorings: “Keep off them unless you get permission, for a seiner returning at 4 a.m. after a night’s work to find a yachtsman asleep on his mooring can be a bit surly.”
Islands are fragile by their nature, and remote islands are especially provisional. A small patch of terra firma bounded by water allows little tolerance for bad luck: natural calamity, ill health, a crashing market in fish or lobsters, social friction. For a restricted and insular population the consequence of error or ill will is aggravated. The strain of being a good neighbor in such a tight space is acute, and the damage done by a careless or selfish outsider (mainlanders as well as those “from away”) is magnified. A few visits from sailors who demand fuel and water from islanders who haven’t much of either and who never invited the visitors in the first place, a laissez-faire approach to island property—walking across a yard, picking someone’s blueberries—can ramify to form a generalized prejudice among the hosts. And the amplification of grievances echoes, so that certain islands become legendary among outsiders for the biliousness of its inhabitants. A story is told of a Matinicus lobsterman who suspected an off-islander of cutting his traps, either from malice or territorial belligerence. Matinicus has a modest airstrip and the lobsterman had access to an airplane. He flew over his enemy’s lobster boat and dropped on it a boulder the size of an unsheared sheep; the offending vessel sank.
But to give Ragged Island’s lobstermen their due in comparative bellicosity, they reserve an acute animus against Matinicus Island’s fleet and its inevitable overlapping of their sea floor. In the 1950s, as narrated by Colin Woodard in his Lobster Coast, “hundreds of traps were destroyed” in these waters, “fishing shacks were burned to the ground and a few fishermen shot. ‘My Lord, those guys on Criehaven were shooting over the heads of any people from outside their island who tried to put traps there,’ recalls … Maine’s fisheries commissioner at the time. ‘Finally I had one of my wardens come back telling me he had to get way down in his boat because the bullets were coming so close to his windshield…. They played rough in those days.’” As recently as 1999 a melee broke out at the town dock among Criehaven lobstermen, one of whom had been ostracized as a maverick for setting as many traps as he pleased, wherever he pleased, in waters whose territories were understood to be marked by unwritten but sacred agreements. The dispute had been on a low boil for a couple of years until the offender was suspected of having made obscene drawings on the trap buoys of a neighbor. “A bunch of the old boys decided to teach him a lesson, and he stood up to them,” in the words of the outlaw’s attorney, whose client was charged with aggravated assault. The Maine Supreme Court, in a finding of fact, reported that “a verbal confrontation ensued with, according to the record, a number of salty Down East expressions being exchanged.” The old boys were armed with pitchforks, and the counterattacker came at the eldest of them with a gaff, a sharpened boat hook, and blood was shed.
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. Umb
rage 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.