Island Rhythms

MAINE'S ISLANDS-July/August 2009
by F. Benjamin Carr
Photographs courtesy of Dean Lunt

The day is just dawning when I turn on the radio at six for the early-morning weather report and news. I listen to familiar voices report on the latest crisis in some city, in Augusta, on the world’s battlefields. I hear about violence against this person or that group. And I am grateful for the safety I feel as I lie back against the pillows, listen to the virtuoso performance by the song sparrow in the birch outside, and know that my little island will never be the target for anyone’s bombs or violence.

Some people find satisfaction, security, even tranquility in knowing where their personal piece of the world begins and ends. Bustins Island offers me a defined space, a unity. Yes, we have seen controversy among our ranks during the last decades with the electrification vote and other upheavals, but our island has boundaries: one step too far and my feet are wet or I’m up to my knees in oozy mud. The sea provides the buffer between what seems my simple island life and the complexities of life ashore. My island is a little world of its own offering its own topography and flora that I know well, its paths and gravel roads, its medley of smells and its vistas, its varieties of flowers, its successive bounty of berries whose ripening is dictated by the season and its own inner blueprint. And, of course, its people.

Some of my reflections are fantasy, of course. They conveniently ignore certain realities.

Wherever human beings gather, issues arise and divide them. Neighbors don’t always act exactly as I think neighbors should act. The possibility may even exist, perish the thought, that I don’t act exactly as my neighbors think I should act.

Some people are always late for the ferry, some people always manage to get their bags into the island truck before others, some ally themselves with this or that clique, some want to hold out land for their children rather than putting it into conservation, some inconvenience others when they tie up the dock excessively with their boats. These are all petty matters, but they do ruffle the placid surface.

The island offers a variety of rhythms, a variety of parameters within which to live life. I am governed day to day by the summer ferry schedule, by the brief opening hours of the post office, whether the tide is rising or falling dictating whether I take the longer or shorter course to South Freeport in my powerboat. Seasons’ rhythms provide a larger framework for life as the hours of daylight lengthen or shorten and as days grow warmer or cooler. When do I look for mayflowers or clintonia; when will the full moon rise over Goose? When will the early-morning sunrise be perfectly aligned with the edges of Sow and Pigs, Pettengill, Williams and Sisters islands on a line down to Mere Point to my northeast?

When will the ferry be full of excited neighbors arriving for the weekend; when will the island be empty and cottages shuttered? When will the first frost surprise me?

In short, the island helps provide refuge, definition, and a rhythm for the world I live in, a world with beginnings and endings, an outer life amongst people and an inner life of the spirit. Being able to encompass beginnings and endings helps make clear the length and breadth of the place for which, and for now, I am steward.

Excerpt from the author’s book, The Story of Bustins: A Maine Summer Island (Islandport Press, 2008).