Safely Out to Sea

Writers discover Matinicus again, and again, and again…

10/30/2008.

"Go out and get me another ‘covered bridge’.” One of my summer bakery customers, a vacationing editor, told me once that this expression is (or was) common parlance in the offices of at least one major east-coast newspaper. If a high-ranking member of the editorial staff realized that column space looked plentiful in a middle section, and a travel, human-interest, low-stress environmental, or arts -and-culture piece would neatly fill the gap, a reporter or freelancer might be dispatched to New Hampshire or Vermont or the Berkshires, sure to return with a pleasant slice of life far from the metro area. He explained how the writers all know the drill....

Tweeting Island News

04/02/2010.

The Twitter phenomenon, and the way Twitter “connects the world” is (according to the little magazine supplement that we find in the Sunday paper) one of the past year’s “Big Things.” That technology, closely aligned with thinking out loud, seems hardly equal to the other major news items these days. Some Americans have been neglecting the latest in electronics communications innovation. I don’t have a Facebook page, hope my same cell phone lasts for years, write lists on the backs of envelopes instead of employing a personal digital assistant, and would probably grow resentful of the stern directives of a GPS unit in my car. I do not tweet.

Town Meeting

04/25/2010.

We’re getting ready for the Annual Town Meeting of the municipality of Matinicus Isle Plantation, an entirely humorless gathering always held on the last Saturday of April. In some ways the event might remind one of the Norman Rockwell “Freedom of Speech” painting from the “Four Freedoms” series. This well-known image from the 1940’s may or may not have been inspired by a New England Town Meeting, but it certainly resembles one. A man in work clothes stands up among his better-dressed neighbors and speaks his mind, an annual town report stuffed into his pocket.

Anybody who’s ever done that knows that it isn’t always easy.

The Blacksmiths of Auburn, Maine

03/01/2009.

The NESM blacksmithing/bladesmithing program defies easy categorization. Sort of a trade school, sort of an art studio, the school is a venue which brings together respect for traditional craftsmanship, artistic vision, some just-for-fun hobbies, and the satisfaction of hard work.

Safely out to Sea

12/25/2009.

We are, in a sense, “safely out to sea.” Well, maybe not entirely safe, but warm anyway, and preparing to enjoy Christmas.  We will, if necessary, have to produce our own road crew or fire brigade, our own rescuers, our own boilermen and transport and meals-on-wheels. Women squint out into the gusts to gather and knit and drink wine while some of the men nurse aching backs. We fry doughnuts, check the powerhouse, trade holiday goodies around, we shovel snow off our neighbors’ steps, we plow snow with four-wheelers, we lug in firewood and check other people’s furnaces while they are off-island....

Resistor: Pass it On

10/01/2009.

Doctor Bob is a stilt-walker. He puts on his multi-tailed jester’s hat and becomes a clowning reveler at parades and country fairs, up on his long wooden stilt-legs. He is also a retired professor of something, one science or another, as best I can tell; his car bears the “DNA” license plate. It is from him that my family first heard the story of Lech Walesa and the Polish resistors.

A summer fluff piece: telling our Whoopie Pie stories

08/01/2010.

The whoopie pie is a Maine tradition, but let’s not get ridiculous about it