You Cannot Make This Stuff Up
The folklore is more robust than the granite breakwater.
The conventional wisdom about this storied isle is more solid, more enduring, more adamantine than is the granite ledge beneath our feet. The stuff everybody knows about Matinicus Island will remain part of the oral history until humans live on Mars, I swear. Never mind a lot of it is wrong.
In May, I attended this year’s Maine Association for Search and Rescue training weekend. At that event, attended by folks from all over the state, I was told several things about my hometown which, I will confess, surprised me. One person, a retired searcher who had also held an official, paperwork, City Hall sort of job for many years, remarked on how easy it is to get shot out here. A young man from western Maine assured me with authority that the electricity on Matinicus is turned off every night at 10:00 pm. A friend and mentor—a physician, actually-- very concerned with our health and well-being suggested that the lobsterman’s biggest worry, concerning their industry and their living, must be the Canadians.
The Canadians?
Other things we hear all the time: “the mail boat from the mainland goes once a week,” or maybe it’s once a month (neither is correct. The real state ferry and passenger boat schedules would take this whole 750 words to explain. The mail usually comes by airplane anyway.) “The natives all hate, and not only shun but violently threaten outsiders” (not if said outsiders show up carrying wrenches, they don’t). “Matinicus is a ‘solid Republican stronghold’” (as the registrar of voters, I can attest otherwise. You can count the registered Republicans on your fingers). “Not much has changed on the island since the 19th century.” (Don’t be an idiot).
That business about everybody out here shooting at each other all the time has gotten so old and used up as a cliché that it’s hardly worth the ink to mention it. “Bullets flying in the streets,” report a few of the high-class yachting crowd. Yeah, as if we had streets. We shoot rats a lot. Most any among us, even the most peaceable (just ask him, he’ll tell you) would shoot down a drone hovering uninvited over a dooryard, lobster boat, or the airstrip. Target practice is just a hobby. Murder is not particularly likely.
Wait—the Canadians?
There is some reality behind the mythology, and the power did get shut down for the night at 10:00 pm for a short time, back when Doug Murray was tending the station. Of course, he died in 1979. That nightly shut-down was, I’ve heard, an experimental cost-saving measure intended to conserve diesel fuel by not burning it while nobody was using it, there being no electronics then, or anything else that most would miss in the wee hours, and not even much for late-night television. That nighttime shut-down was only during the summer, by the way, so as not to interfere with anybody’s furnace.
I’ve only lived on Matinicus for 38 years, and there sure as heck was 24-hour electricity when I started here. I was sometimes up half the night in 1987, working up lessons for eight different grades of student. I did teach one-room school, but not by kerosene lamp!
My husband, who ran this island’s power station for quite some time, remembers the 10:00 pm shut-down, although he experienced it first-hand just once. Working at the time at Central Maine Power—or maybe he was still at Southern Maine Tech—he was visiting his parents on Matinicus when he accompanied his dad to the station at 10:00pm, there and then to throw the switch. Driving to the powerhouse, they observed all night-owls with electric lighting but on the way back home they noticed dimmer island windows: a few homes had a candle on the kitchen table, a few ran kerosene lamps or gas lights and in a few, somebody had started their gasoline generator “in order to finish watching their TV show.”
If you read this, any of you who passed along those factoids to me a couple of weeks ago: I am not heckling you! Seriously—I am not making fun. No kidding; it isn’t your fault, and I am grateful for your friendship and your interest in the island. But I’d be fascinated to know where you got your information, especially the thing about the electricity. Who are you related to? What elderly lobsterman is your next-door-neighbor? Because, dude: that information is way, way past its sell-by date.