A Look Back After Nearly 40 Years Offshore
By Eva Murray
Watching this year’s new teacher moving into the same utilitarian rental home I occupied through the 1987-88 school year got me thinking about things that have — and have not — changed on Matinicus Island since I came here that year as the one-room school teacher.
Eva Murray lives and writes on Matinicus Island.
Matinicus is, of course, a lobstering community. Landings readers don’t need me to reiterate what they see every day in that fishery, but a few changes are obvious to a casual observer. Bycatch is one of those, perhaps chief among those the sea urchin, common as dirt when I moved here. We all know what happened when that “pest” animal suddenly became a marketable harvest. But sea stars were common once, too, and nobody ever decided they were a delicacy. Stars are rare now.
Another notable change is the women in the fishing industry, and how they are not considered an oddity. They are neighbors: Ellen, Samantha, and others. These women do not make a big deal of their unusual job; they just go to haul each day.
There was a store here in 1987, the last remnant of the old Henry Young and Co. general store that had been a part of this community for a long time. The last storekeeper at that location was a bit of a curmudgeon, not terribly interested in fresh vegetables, good candy bars, or encouraging the Old Uncles to hang around and chat.
Other islanders have tried running stores since then, but there is no way to offer competitive prices. We get our groceries from the mainland now, either through an arrangement where Penobscot Island Air delivers from Rockland grocers, or by carrying everything ourselves.
Another obvious change, as one walks down the hill toward the harbor, is the photovoltaic solar field, and with it the quiet. Our diesel engines no longer have to hum away in the powerhouse all day and all night.When I moved here in 1987, no islander was certified in emergency response, and there was no longer a resident island nurse. Residents knew who might help in a pinch, perhaps having had some training in the merchant marine or as a nurse elsewhere decades ago. Five year-rounders started Matinicus Island Rescue (MIR) in 1994, training as Emergency Medical Technicians. MIR is out of business now, but there are still a few neighbors with awareness of how to deal with a medical emergency, and we do have basic first aid supplies and oxygen on the island. CPR classes are taught several times each summer at no cost to islanders.
LifeFlight of Maine did not exist in 1987. That is undoubtedly the biggest change in terms of offshore emergency response. Around 2001, the Maine Seacoast Mission vessel Sunbeam added the position of Registered Nurse to its regular visiting boat crew and offers many health care services to islanders.
There used to be more children here. Twenty-first-century islanders are more transient than their parents were, and the birth of a baby is no longer reckoned a guaranteed kindergartner five years hence. I had roughly one kid in each grade when I taught here. My 8th grader, Jay, now owns a marine supply store in Waldoboro. Second-grader Nick and 7th grader Noah still fish Matinicus waters, as they always knew they would.
This fall three young students ride their bikes to the island’s one-room school each morning and play on the swings during recess.
Municipal leadership work used to be done from kitchen tables, and working as an elected official meant essentially volunteering. I remember the particular kitchen table of Harriet and Warren Williams, an elderly couple who served as plantation treasurer and tax collector in the late 1980’s, with their handwritten ledgers and schoolbook cursive. Even though our tiny town has not expanded, the sheer quantity of bureaucratic obligation has grown by orders of magnitude in recent years and that is no exaggeration. We maintain a physical Town Office now.
In the 1980s, this island was buried in defunct motor vehicles. Around the year 2000, the town hired a barge and crane, and everybody worked all day to move 60 to 70 dead vehicles. That was very expensive, and a unique Vehicle Disposal Deposit program was (slowly) put into play. This requires that everybody who brings a vehicle to stay on the island put $250 on account with the town, held to pay for a ferry ticket and wrecker should the vehicle be abandoned. The positive unintended consequence was that it discouraged people from bringing cars which weren’t even worth $250. The quality of uninspectable old vehicles on the island went up a notch.
The credit for this initiative goes to Sari “S.T.” Bunker, a former schoolteacher (thus the “S.T.” nickname) and lobsterman’s wife, who pressed the state legislature to pass our one and only local ordinance (as a plantation, we cannot enact ordinances).
S.T. also took on the thankless and difficult task of meeting every single ferry for years to confront bullies, cheapskates, and the simply uninformed, strongarming them into compliance. That was an enormous commitment, but it worked, and now nearly everybody understands that the vehicle disposal deposit is just how we do things.
If you get rid of your old junker yourself, you get your money back upon request.
Matinicus is not Brigadoon. It isn’t a snow globe, or a ship in a bottle, where somebody’s precious memories could be frozen in time, expected never to change.
“It’s like stepping back in time,” say some of the tourists, referring I assume to the preponderance of home cooking, clotheslines, and the unreliability of cell phone reception. But they are generally incorrect. We are not an anachronism.
As Sam, when he served as a town official, quipped few years back: “It takes a lot of damned work to stay twenty years behind the times!”
Comments