Where the Road Smells Like Apples
Labor Day has touched us with its annual magic and has kicked off the downward slide in population. Every cottage owner, vacationer, renter, sailboat tourist, grandchild, buddy-from-work, in-law, Airbnb tenant, houseguest, or rusticator who has children enrolled in school or who teaches school on the mainland has decamped. Most with jobs where penciling-in the vacation weeks ahead of time is required have likewise. We may still see our summer friends on occasion, if the weather happens to cooperate over a few fall weekends. But that is uncertain, expensive for them, and grows less likely as the nights cool off and the youth sports get serious.
A great many Matinicus homes are seasonal these days, because most islanders--even those with the old ancestral names and six generations in the cemetery--either make their living elsewhere, or they live and fish here but travel back and forth to the mainland at will. The image of a year-round island being an inward-facing community of hermits and troglodytes, entrenched folks who still live like it’s the 19th century, or hell-raisers who have resigned from civilization (or never knew it in the first place) is a bunch of precious and lovingly-cultivated hooey.
Every time I include some snippet of basic information about Matinicus Island (such as the above paragraph) in one of my columns, I fear I am boring the regulars. They already know this stuff. Then again, it amazes me how often some random person in Rockland asks, as we stand in line to buy coffee or two-by-fours, “Don’t they shut the electricity off at 10:00 p.m. out there?” or “How many people are on that island?” or “You mean to say people live there in the wintertime?” or “What time’s the morning boat?”
No. Nobody knows. Yes. There is no morning boat.
Despite 25 years of describing this place to the reading public (and no tires slashed for my trouble,) there are still prevailing myths too tenacious to be busted by a few newspaper columns. One of them is this longstanding assumption that there are two kinds of people on the island: year-rounders, also known as “the real” residents--who are presumably natives and who never leave this chunk of rock and wouldn’t handle things well over there “in America” anyway, being marginally savages—and tourists, evidencing all of the cliché behaviors, accents, and costumes of such an easily-stereotyped crowd of perfect strangers, idiots to the last man.
In fact, there are very few of either. Not saying none, you understand, but very few.
Aside from what the human portion of our ecosystem does, there are noticeable changes to the island come September. The scents of the air and the ocean change. The sound of crickets is part of the background on any sunny afternoon. The songbirds are far less of an early-morning presence. The roadside between here and the post office smells like apples, which is delightful. Our telephone rings considerably less (also delightful).
It being September, the lobster-catchers can haul on Sundays now. I don’t know the reason for that old-fashioned rule about not hauling lobster traps on summer (but only summer) Sundays, but the law exists. People like to hypothesize about the reason for that peculiar regulation. It can scarcely be about some notion of a Sabbath, being seasonal, and as these offshore habitations were historically rebellious against state religions from the start. That may be one of those subjects where we waste our time asking “why.” Folks will now undoubtedly write to me, or stop me on Main Street, and tell me it’s about keeping the schoolteachers out of the lobster business or protecting whatever other constituency may have lobbied the powers-that-be, once upon a time. It makes absolutely no difference. Summer Sundays are for lobster boat races, rod-and-reel fishing, and all-day barbecues.
September, for me, is about rolling over and dozing a little longer in the morning, and then padding around in fuzzy slippers, lingering over the second cup of coffee. The bakery, my full-time-and-overtime summer job, is closed for the year. Even if I should occasionally get up in the dark, I don’t usually have to start work right away. There are few things in life more luxurious than a slow morning. Like a calm day on the ocean, or the last slice of pie discovered late at night, most everybody who has the privilege of a slow morning knows enough to be grateful for it.
People come here in the summer and tell us how “it’s so relaxing” here. They are incorrect, and it is not. But summer is winding up (or winding down?) and although there is always more than enough work to do, the island laborer will be under the supervision of considerably fewer bosses and inspectors soon.