Island: ten minutes GO!

Eliza and I invited David to come with us to the Nashoba Brook Bakery in West Concord this weekend. It was time to let him join in on our "home from college" ritual. We order our sandwiches, usually the Number 9 ( honey mustard, slices of apple, cheddar cheese and a pile of arugla on Harvest Bread) We eat in silent ecstacy. The best sandwich EVER!
Then we clear the decks, get out our notebooks and fast writing pens and write. Yesterday the topic was "island."

Island
by David

I thought first of Tom Schnitzer’s island in Sebago Lake. It almost doesn’t matter that it is a very small island; it’s all his! The very essence of the idea of a place away, a place all of one’s own. This is counter intuitive to the emerging reality of our world today in which we realize we are all connected: socially, politically, and ecologically, as denizens of a shrinking planet. My air is your air, Indiana. My safety depends on your state-of-mind, Afghanistan, Pakistan.

But the idea of “island” remains a powerful symbol - a place to disconnect from the gridworks of global inter-dependency; also permission given to revert to the more primitive critters that we all once were.



Island
by Eliza

It was my haven for summer after summer. I loved it for its sunsets, simplicity, dinghies, lobster picnics and ping pong. Simple, yet every day brought something new, if only a board game on a foggy afternoon. Everyone was happier, more relaxed.

Now, the AMC huts are my island. Something feels familiar about their relative inaccessibility. Visitors arrive, but not by comfortably cruising into a parking spot. No, they come on foot, carrying everything they have on their backs.

I love the huts for the sunsets. The mountain breeze brings an air of simplicity as the complex world bustles below in the valley. Isle au Haut off the coast of Maine was also a simple system to visit. It was buffered by a seemingly vast expanse of rippling ocean.

The island of Lakes of the Clouds on Mt. Washington forced bonds between us. What else would ten kids do, the only ones on a barren mountain. And I felt akin to those with whom I shared the shores of Isle au Haut because there we were, united against the world by our oceanic moat.


Island
by Barbara

It stretches for seven miles on the outer edge of Penobscot Bay. One small road loops around it’s perimeter. Our island for a week.

The cars are old. The date on each license plate indicates when the car was taken off the grid and hauled out to the island on a barge. There is no registry of motor vehicles here. Once a car arrives, every effort is made to keep it running. As far as cars are concerned, time stands still.

We arrive on the mailboat. The Miss Lizzy is piled high with our duffles and all the food we will need for the next seven days. There is a store but from year to year we are never sure what will be for sale there. You can depend of dusty cans of baked beans and rolls of toilet paper and penny candy, but beyond that, you never know. Some years a resident sells fresh greens from her garden. Once locally made goat cheese was available. But these homesteaders give up eventually and go back to the mainland. Winters on this island are long and lonely. The lobster fishermen and their families remain. Island life is in their blood and the price of lobster is pretty good these days.

“There’s not much to do there. It’s not for everyone,” we are warned by our friends who rent us the tiny cabin each summer. Nothing and everything. One summer turned into fourteen as our children grew up and insisted on returning each year. We have our traditions. We scramble up Duck Mountain on the first clear day and look west past the islands in the foreground to the Camden Hills beyond. We can imagine lines of cars inching through the town of Camden where summer visitors are buying tee shirts, eating ice cream and wearing bibs with red lobsters on them. We are far from that. We check our watches and head down, careful to finish our hike before dark.

After dinner, the entertainment will include our books or a game of “Sorry” topped off with a game of “I Doubt It!” when we will all cheat to win. We will hold our cards close to our chests and bend towards each other under the light in our small house on the small island surrounded by a great expanse of sea and a sky full of stars.