Lifesaving Lessons (6 page)

Things are normally slow to change on the island, but one significant and conspicuous change has been that many of our staunch summer residents have begun to rent their places out when they don't occupy them themselves. Where August and September are most coveted times for family vacations in Maine, July brings some unfamiliar faces as renters. While I recognized vehicles and knew with which cottage they belonged, I seldom spoke more than a cordial greeting with people who would only be here for a week and possibly never be seen again. Besides, it usually takes more than a one-week stay for offshore folks to get into the Isle au Haut groove. By the time renters realize that it's okay to wave to total strangers when passing, it's time for them to return to whatever city they hail from and continue the practice of keeping a close watch on the exact spot of the sidewalk where their next foot will fall. A small gaggle of renters excited by the rewards of donut day brushed by me as I left the café. It might be a rather sparse spread at the potluck tonight, I thought. Most renters would have no interest in Bungie Head.

The fog of June seemed to have cleansed the July ocean to a sparkle. I turned my laptop computer away from the glare that reflected through my bedroom windows so that I now faced Penobscot Bay. The Camden Hills perched easily on top of the lower, closer island of North Haven, which I had seen nary a shadow of in the pea soup fog bank of the past few weeks. Boats worked their lobster gear in endless, lazy circles connected by quick dashes between buoys. The surface of the water was dotted with the multicolored, bullet-shaped floats that mark the gear that was now so dense I could hear the sailboaters complaining that they “could walk on them.” The very same complainers seemed to enjoy what these nuisances produced, though. I closed my eyes and saw eleven-year-old Aubrey clad in oilskins and boots that were too big for him, pulling the skiff alongside of a visiting sailboat and holding up lobsters in either hand. Who could resist buying lobster from this blond, blue-eyed boy who had hauled his traps by hand? And all-cash sales made it easy to be unable to make change. And change pocketed was that much more to put toward the dirt bike. Next year Addison would have his own traps, I thought. I love when my family is on island. I wished summer could last forever.

Addison was in my dooryard, lying flat on his belly. As I passed, I could see what appeared to be two halves of a snake connected by a very stringy piece of skin. Addison didn't look up from what he was clearly enthralled with and said, “Lawn mower. Johnny.” I took this to mean that Jonathan Barter had run over the snake while mowing someone's grass. The snake wriggled as Addison touched the head, then the tail.

“That's gross, Addy,” I said and kept walking.

“It's not gross. It's cool!” Gotta love little boys, I thought. I would have invited my nephew to join me in a visit to his grandparents, but I knew that even the promise of one of Grandma's blueberry muffins would not motivate him to leave the snake behind. I hesitated and considered asking him to toss what would soon be added to a long list of summer fatalities into the woods. “It's just a common garter, Linny. I mean, it's not like an eastern ribbon. They're endangered.” I recalled a hummingbird that Addison managed to capture and refused to release, calling it his pet bird even after it had been dead for a week. “Just sleeping,” he'd say as he stroked the tiny bird. Of course all of the adults had warned him that the bird would die if he didn't let it go. His response to this was something to the effect that the ruby-throated hummingbird lives a maximum of only nine years. So if
he
had been born a hummingbird, Addison reasoned, he'd already be dead. Before any of us could question how he knew the age of this particular bird and protest that he may well be seriously curtailing its average life span, Addy was already reciting facts about migration and number of beats of wings per second. No sense talking about the snake, I thought. Addison knew much more about it than I did. I shrugged and continued toward my parents' house.

I stepped into the house and over my father, who was lying on his side with both arms under the dishwasher. “Hi, Dad. What's up?” I asked, while I grabbed a coffee cup from the cupboard. Shepard Smith's
Around the World in 80 Seconds
blared from the other room. The endless loops of Fox News were truly endless in my parents' house, adding a strange ambience that forecast their ideological allegiances and led to mild hostility when nonbelievers dared comment. The secondary noise was the music coming from upstairs and an underlying whir of the rowing machine Mom had taken a liking to.

“Hi, Linny. Small leak. I think I have it,” Dad answered. “Your mother is upstairs. Martha! Linny is here!” Dad called loudly in an attempt to be heard over Shepard Smith, Neil Diamond, and the exercise machine.

Of course my mother did not hear this, so I walked into the middle of the living area and called up to the open loft. “Hey! How many more minutes?”

“Two more. I have to do thirty,” she yelled strongly for a woman of her age who was twenty-eight minutes into what sounded like a vigorous row. Mom soon appeared above me with the same wide smile I always received when I dropped in.

“Thirty minutes? Way to go!” I cheered and pumped a fist. My mother turned the music off and skittered down and around the spiral staircase, joining me at her kitchen table.

Battling and surviving cancer twice since the age of seventy had resulted in quite a shrinking of my mother physically. She was never very big to begin with, and was now fairly tiny. But she was short, let me say, only in stature. A gigantic personality with a hugely strong mind, she would never be accused by anyone who knew her of being anything but large. She pushed her silvery gray, chin-length hair neatly behind her ears, adjusted her glasses—the lenses of which appeared not to have been wiped in many meal preparations—and said, “You're not going to that potluck tonight, are you?” I felt my eyebrows rise into high arches and I chuckled. “What?” she asked.

“Gee. You don't have an opinion about whether I should go or not, do you?” Now it was my mother's turn to chuckle. But she didn't answer. “Because it sounds like you might want to influence your forty-seven-year-old daughter's dinner choice.”

“Well, you can obviously go if you
want
to.”

“Thanks.”

“But your father and I will not be there. Gawd, I just cringe at the thought of who and what has gone into some of the food.” Now my mother shuddered as if she had just witnessed something quite gory. “Do the kids still have lice?” she asked quite pointedly. Before I answered, she asked about the confirmed case of worms. When I assured her that these isolated instances had occurred several months ago, she launched into phase two of her justification for not going. “And the whole potluck thing is so uncivilized. Who wants to eat at five o'clock? And you can't even have a drink. Not even a glass of wine.” Now we were getting to the meat of the issue. Five o'clock had been cocktail time in the Greenlaw household since I was old enough to pour the Scotch. And I was doing that as soon as I could reach the ice cube trays. And when I was old enough to start consuming beginner drinks, such as fuzzy navels and Kahlua sombreros, I was advised by my mother: “If you're going to drink, drink adult beverages. That stuff you are drinking is full of sugar—too many calories! Have a Scotch.” So if my mother was urging me to drink Scotch at the age of eighteen, there was little chance I could persuade her to be a teetotaler tonight and consume food that, in her opinion, had been prepared by filthy people in germ-infested environments. We had gone down this road before.

“Well, I guess I'll take one for the team. I'll go and give you a full report tomorrow,” I said as I got up to leave.

I stepped over my father and wished him luck with the leaky dishwasher after my offer of help was politely refused. “You're the one who needs luck! Potluck!” Mom called over Fox News as I closed the door behind me.

Five o'clock wasn't long away, and I was expected to show up at the Town Hall with a dish to share. It was a mistake to be late to a potluck; one that you only make once. First come, first serve. There are certain island cooks whose offerings are “gulled down” way before the middle of the buffet line has helped themselves, leaving other dishes to languish humiliatingly. Nobody will eat Lee Small's boiled hot dogs. Not that it bothers Lee. At the end of the night he grabs the now room-temperature “red snappers” (with “natural” red casings that are close to the color of nail polish), and proclaims, “These little beauties will be lunch—all week.” His two sons—growing boys, nearly men with healthy appetites—roll their eyes and smirk with bellies full of everything other than the snappers. I think it's not too much of a stretch to say that 40 percent of the potluck is elbow macaroni casserole. I searched my pantry and refrigerator for proper ingredients with which to sling something together in a hurry that was neither hot dog nor pasta based.

I do not recall what I contributed to the potluck dinner that night, but the facts that were dispensed are still fresh in my mind. The whole Bungie Head chapter in the book of our island will forever be thought of by me as the Bungie Head Bait-and-Switch Caper or something that implies sleight of hand. The heirs of a firmly rooted summer legacy had decided to sell off some of their inheritance. The Maine Coast Heritage Trust had some interest in purchasing Bungie Head. Its sale was brought to its attention by a small group of our summer residents who were nervous about what might happen if the land fell into the “wrong hands.” My answer to “What can we do?” is, “If you're concerned about what is going to happen, buy it yourself.” If the trust acquired Bungie Head, the land would go into a charitable trust, which meant that it would be removed from the island's tax base, and would never be developed in any way. Public access would be mandatory—which, for all intents and purposes, was the equivalent of extending Acadia National Park's border to include the privately owned piece currently for sale. The park now held just under 50 percent of our island—and by law that percentage cannot be exceeded because our forefathers thought it necessary to leave the town and community some room to grow. A comprehensive plan had been written and adopted back in the 1970s, and that plan spelled out a view for our future as a community. Thirty years later things hadn't changed much. The problems were still the same: The human population was shrinking while the white-tailed deer were taking over the island, and our lobster fishermen were still being squeezed by nonresident fishermen. Of course it is more complex than that, but those are the biggies.

While I was at first perturbed by the coalition of summer folks who claimed to be preserving the Bungie Head property forever and keeping it as wild and undeveloped as it had always been, I have come to envy the masterminds of the plan, wishing that I had thought of it myself. This coalition, which I will refer to as “the land pirates,” ostensibly brokered a deal to sell Bungie Head to the Maine Coast Heritage Trust while carving out and securing house lots for themselves at a fraction of fair market value. Basically, the trust is in the business of buying up large tracts of land and putting them into “conservation,” which means there will be guaranteed public access and no development. Once the land is in the trust, it can't be taxed. So the land pirates managed to almost steal buildable lots with the assurance that their new places would be bordered by free and wild and nondevelopable land. Pretty smart, I'd say. This simplified version, which is more a statement of my capacity to grasp it than an attempt to keep the telling painless, has had plenty of time to cool.

And to all of the arguments and questions that arose during the potluck regarding the loss of tax revenue and loss of potential jobs that could have come from some form of development, the answer was that there were now four house lots. These four lots would be built upon by using local labor. Lots would be cleared, roads would be built, septic systems designed and installed, houses constructed . . . And these four new homes would certainly pay more in taxes than the undeveloped land had. And these new homes would be connected to the local electric power grid, further bolstering the island's economy. And of course all of the materials needed for construction would be ferried over by our mail boat, which is always in need of a cash infusion. And just maybe one of the houses would be a year-round dwelling with a family of many children to attend our school. And just maybe a section of shore frontage could be obtained for the island's commercial fishermen on which to construct a dock and increase tenfold our access to working waterfront. And if we had a dock to work from on the south end of the island, surely we could win back some of the fertile fishing ground that is fished only by outsiders.

Well, the bottom line is that by the end of the potluck meeting, it was clear that the real estate transaction was a done deal and we'd better figure out how to make the best of it. It's too bad that so many of the year-rounders had such a bad taste in their mouths about it, because it seemed to me that the pirates just wanted pats on the back for jobs well done. They were somehow saving the island and getting no thanks. Saving from what or whom? I guess most of us are just too stupid to understand that part (yes, that is an attempt at sarcasm). Lee Small left with his platter of hot dogs. I left as frustrated as most of the year-round population, and wished I had taken my mother's advice. Oh sure, we had fun with the topic as a conversation piece at the café for a week or so. But it was soon August and we were on to other things.

August is thirty-one days of sheer joy! And this August began with all of the usual hoopla and held promise to pan out pure gold. The weather early in the month was stellar: days of T-shirts and nights of a blanket pulled right up under your chin. August is by far the most social month. There are cocktail parties, dinner parties, welcome parties, farewell parties, and impromptu parties that pop up like the patches of blueberries decorating the island in swatches of purple that are as festive as the parties themselves. My all-time favorite party is a “rafting up,” which is basically a floating, clam-digging, fishing picnic. Rafting up is when two or more boats tie up together and share one anchor. All boats are filled beyond legal capacity with fun-loving people who are relaxed enough not to fret about the shortage of life jackets. Essentials are beer, food, a grill, an outdoor propane burner, a clam hoe, and fishing rods. This particular August my sister Bif and I organized a raft to beat all rafts: six boats and a skiff! We hosted rafters who ran the gamut of ages from eight to eighty. I laugh when first-time visitors to the island (upon learning that we have no shopping mall, movie theater, theme park, golf course, swimming pool, restaurant, or video arcade) ask, “What do you
do
here?” My answer to that is, “Follow me.”