Marching On
Well, good for us. We managed to get through March this year without anybody taking a swing at anybody else, as far as I know. Nobody showed up at my kitchen door requesting EMS help with a diagnosis of knuckle sandwich. No gossip in the Post Office about any emergency trips to the dentist. That’s a good thing. On the whole, we did alright this year. I suppose it helps that there are so few of us now. Since Christmas it’s been around 17, tops; often fewer. Those guys planning the manned missions to Mars ought to be asking us for advice.
Watching for our seasonally resident snowy owls, tapping a handful of maple trees, talking to foreign stations on the ham radio (that is called “DXing”) and chipping away at my instrument rating helped March of 2025 pass for me without ulcer or fat lip. Island cooks collaborated on a most excellent pot-luck supper toward the end of the month, I suppose to celebrate survival, and I nearly almost managed to keep my big mouth shut.
All that wholesome hobbying proved healthy distraction from the advisories of the busybodies and experts who tend to surface this time of year. Armchair quarterbacking is inevitable when people are bored. In any small group of humans, friends idle away dull afternoons thinking up jobs for other people to do, which is just talk and harmless enough, except that it makes us all want to murder each other. I think (but do not utter) things like, “Next person who tells me what to do, especially when I’m already doing it, gets it right in the shin!” I calm down and remind myself that it used to be much worse around here.
I’ve heard stories from friends who have lived in the arctic—Uranium City, Saskatchewan; Colebrook, New Hampshire, places like that--about how people regularly lose their minds just a little at the very edge of winter, before spring becomes real. My favorite was the tale of the woman who ran out of patience with the failure of seasons to change, so she went out to her permafrost dooryard with a cordless drill and a handful of plastic flowers, drilled some holes in the rock-hard soil, and created the store-bought appearance of spring.
I’ve lived on this island since 1987. Back a few decades, fewer people left Matinicus for the winter, which you might assume was a good thing (having more people here, I mean) but some of them didn’t want to be here, and felt stuck here, (they actually were stuck here, as the economics of lobstering were different then,) and more than a few grew resentful and restless. March was hard. People were in a bad mood. Self-control was an effort. Disney World was far away. Bodies hurt, bank accounts were done for, the four walls were closing in, the boat—oh, the boat needed so much. Attitudes ranged from indolent through pent-up and itchy, to full-on mean-girls-from-school. Nobody was in the mood for any of that church-supper-and-beach-cleanup sort of bonding; March islanders preferred blood sport and hard liquor.
Back in the day, mud-season recreational activities included bickering; squabbling; “dropping dimes” (meaning calling the Marine Patrol on your neighbors;) criticism of people based entirely on their relatives or previous address; general bellyaching about uninteresting realities (mud, mostly;) inaccurate ad-hoc insults; excessive television; rotgut rum, and some of the more chickenhearted forms of vandalism. We didn’t have the internet in those days, thankfully. Slashing tires and hucking rocks through windows were acknowledged forms of self-expression. Everything was somebody else’s fault. People took to removing the battery from their pickup truck when parking at the airstrip, lest somebody else do it for them. Cortisol levels remained elevated. Nobody ate their vegetables.
Don’t think I’m talking smack about my beloved island. Much the same has been said about everywhere with long stretches of tedious weather. Siberia, for example.
I learned some important life lessons back in the 1980’s on Matinicus. One: don’t hold anything anybody says in March against them, because it’s just March, and everybody’s like that. Two: it isn’t your fault. Three: this too shall pass. Four: maybe you’d better duck.
Anyway, March is behind us for another year. Birds are singing, crocuses are blooming, the peepers and the woodcock are making noise. The ferry is full of people coming back, which is a whole ‘nother subject. One of them did ask me, rather warmly, how we managed March. I just smiled.