Pick an Island...

We need to pick an island. To go all in, one one side of the water or the other. For the last year and now into this one, I have straddled the breach between this outport and the main- straining into a split, to make ends meet. While this makes one more flexible, it doesn't allow for much in the way of repose.

Dave is, quite literally, at square one. Renting the same house he started in when he first came to the island 18 years ago. The same house, almost two decades later. One could argue it hasn't aged as well as him, though he might argue they aged apace. At forty-one, he could echo his mid-twenties: buy a piece of land, and build anew while renting this house. Buying an existing house isn't an option, since the starting price for the current "for sale" crop is $600,000. No, I perjure myself. The house we are in is for sale, at a price less tempting than a better piece of land and a home constructed with our own mistakes, more lovingly maintained. Financially, this means paying rent while trying to make enough money to build a new home in a location that requires all materials to be barged out.

Needing to investigate the alternative, we took a day to tour homes on the other island. As we talked to the Realtor about the realities of life on the outer edges of the coast- the costs, the lugging, the sparse services and minimal employment options- it made us wonder why anyone would choose that life, a life that doesn't serve their better financial interests. We looked at homes- our major requirements were a bit of land, a bit of privacy. There was one house, just off a busy street, that sat surprisingly secluded down a drive of disrepair, among the kindest copse of hardwoods one might ever meet. The land was grown up, the house somewhat ashamble- but it was ineffably sweet. A place you could pump money, sweat, and love into, and be repaid tenfold by quality of life. While we were poking and prodding, and walking about, the sky blackened, the clouds cracked, and the rain began to pour down. Sheltered beneath the canopy of the maples, we barely felt a drop. I left not just a little in love.

The visits were somewhat downhill from there, each one a reminder that this was a bigger island, with more people, more conveniences, more cars, more everything- except for what was less. Less quiet, less forced intimacy with the neighbors. More wildness, less wilderness.

It felt- suburban. Downeast suburban, but suburban nonetheless.

After two years on the unbridged island, my sense of scale shifted. After a year of living on one and working on the other, I feel I've lost my equilibrium altogether.

Astronomical Aberrations in the Island Microcosm

Funny thing about assorted town duties- they pile up and preclude the composition of personal essays (especially in Junejulyaugust).

It's now September.

Now normally, summer blazes by: all the energy, work, and closening quarters compressing, compressing into the blue streak fury of August... then

Red Shift.

It takes the island eight or nine months of dormancy to recover.

This year, September did not bring the shift. Yes, the weather changed- the longed for clarity is here. The crowds are less crowded. The day affords fewer hours of light. The season is changing as is meet and proper.

But there is no sense of island-as-sanatorium. Every evening a meeting; every day still some to-do. The summer schedule persists. The frequency of meetings is no less intense.

And we persevere (grumbling) saying "surely in October..."

red like the leaves, the cranberries...

The Idle Ides of August

One of the best fishing laws in this state is the one that disallows lobstering on Sundays in June, July, and August. One. Blessed. Day.

We went to bed on Saturday night, delighted at the prospect of sleeping late: we did in fact revel in our dream time, until the cats woke us up extra early. I myself passed the hours from 4am to 7am pondering town politics, the logistics of getting bags of compost from Barter's Lumber in Deer Isle to my garden, thought about what sort of house design (not mansard-roofed) could carry off a cupola and still suit its surroundings, among sundry other things. A small percent of the time was spent jockeying with Dave about who should be getting who coffee.

Predictably, we waited until 7:30, when we could stumble out of the house, across the yard, and into our neighbor's cafe. The win/win solution is to have Kate (or Steve) make the coffee. Pepe, who had been launched outdoors sometime earlier, immediately joined us on the trip next door- though being furry and prone to curiosity that manifests in surface climbing, he is not allowed into the cafe. So he settled in on the steps outside the sliding screen door.

The magic of Sundays on Isle au Haut is this: the whole time frame of the day is shifted forward by two hours. Locals crawl out of bed at seven instead of five: summer people stir at nine, not seven. This allows for a window at the cafe, from 7:30 to 9:00am, when we can congregate and actually spare some time for talking to one another, rather then just shooting sympathetic glances. Today was a particularly nice gathering, as it was the first wedding anniversary of one of the island's long-standing couples.

Conversation meandered, like it does but its core was very current- the seasonal topic is seasonal visitors. We dissected their pedestrian patterns, their mooring habits, their fascinating expectations about what amenities will be on an island that is generally advertised as amenity free.  Of course, summer people (of every category- day tripper to six monther) come in all of the same stripes as locals- some are gems, some are jerks.  Now's just the time when we're facing a density of them, and some are more dense than others, which makes for good stories. 

Skiff Sunday

They got one regulation right. No fishing on Sundays, June through August. Unable to work, we took the day for ourselves in the skiff, to see what we might salvage. Picked up the traps on Trial Point I hauled off the rocks last October, scanned the shorelines for Dave's buoys lost to knives, props, and other circumstances. Ended up finding two bundles of gear belonging to other fisherman, but not a whole lot of Dave's, so those'll wait on his float for reclaimation. Did find a lobster crate though, which is the universe bringing balance- someone recently stole one of Dave's. A very nice time, though it ended up being the death of my camera, which fell victim to the water in the bottom of the skiff.

The Right Words

Like most people, I find learning something new to be semi-fraught with frustration. Looking at it superficially, sterning is not the most obvious thing for me to be trying my hand at. I am smallish. Have generally worked at some sort of desk. I didn't grow up around boats, really. Oh, I'm an old hand at rowing- but running an outboard, tying knots, slinging around traps... ha. Welcome, Morgan, to the shallow end of your aptitude pool.

Last Friday found us setting two loads of traps- high tide was running at about 5 am and 5 pm, so those hours found us at the town landing, him in the boat receiving traps, me on the dock unloading them from his truck and passing them down. The traps are fished in pairs, and the order in which the traps are loaded makes a difference. At this point I had helped him take up most of his 800 traps last fall, and had then helped him put in the few hundred we'd managed to make time to set this spring. And yet. I still couldn't tell sink rope from float unless they were different colors. And I couldn't remember which had to be loaded first. It was all chicken and egg to me. While he can be very impatient with himself, fellow fisherman, his boat, and his gear, Dave is generally very patient with any sort of student. But at this point, at 5 am, on the third load of traps, after god knows how many seven-day work weeks, his patience was wearing thin.

"I'm sorry, I just don't know how to explain it better..."

My mood wasn't any better- I was feeling utterly inept. In almost everything academic, I've been a quick study, but all things mechanical, I am a drooling idiot. I don't know the jargon, I might get the big picture, but the little things escape me. I forget things easily if they aren't repeated daily.

After a while he says "The ones without the toggle in them. I need the ones without the toggle in them first."

No matter my trap dyslexia, no matter how bad I am at telling float from sink, I can definitely identify trap with a toggle attached to its coiled warp. I can also identify a trap without toggle.
We didn't say much, but quickly the process was smoother.

Later that night, dead tired, and about to get in some curative cuddles before dinner- the ones we were hanging on for all day, the phone rings. Cue the ex-wife ranting about how Dave needed to go find out who took her leaking propane tank- and why didn't he already know? For twenty years he has been letting her method of communication roll off his back. Her bizarre demands (it is still his job to deal with her problems?) coupled with her tone (strident puts it lightly) just raises his eyebrow and cues his selective hearing. I haven't had the time to learn that response, nor do I think it would ultimately be my style. I heard, as loudly as if the phone were up to my own ear, completely irrational demands. Which a.) makes me irritated and defensive, and b.) makes me want to set very clear boundaries. As to point b., I worked with a lot of poorly parented kids, so what can I say?

I wanted him to tell her exactly what she could do with her expectations. The more I listened, the more any sort of potential for an evening of relaxation slipped away. By the time he got off the phone, having somewhat placated her, I was strung out in the very special way that can only be brought on by intense ex-spousal contact. They are his boundaries to build, but they affect me, whether I like it or not. And whether he likes it or not.

I was, perhaps, visibly riled up. Which engendered his question "are you mad now?" One for emotional honesty, I replied "yes." So he rolled over to go to sleep. And I took a breath, and asked him to fill me in on whatever information he had managed to glean about his daughter who was having boyfriend trouble. That was what prompted the call- she was returning one he had made concerning their daughter. The opening line opening was literally "oh, whatever, she's fine- you need to find out who fucking took my propane tank..." To my overtures, he ruefully responded "nope, you're mad at me, and you don't want to hear it." And rolled over to his sleeping side.

Awesome. A long day, all we wanted to do relax together at day's end, and because of one phone call, we end the day unhappy. He is tired, and falls asleep, leaving me alone with my mood. I am tired, and do not fall asleep. Because now I am even more upset that Dave has ignored my attempts to move through my mood and to bring the evening back to normalcy. Pretty much all I wanted was for him talk to me, and to get back to sleepy limb-entwinement. Even when discussing the stressful stuff, we can generally do it well, in a mellow and reflective style. But we can't do that with either back turned.

I got up. Moved to the couch with my iPod and a comforter. And my cat. Contemplated going out for hike but realized I was way too tired physically for that to be a good fix. So I cocooned myself, and waited for my mood to go through metamorphosis. And for Dave to wake up.

He woke up just as I was beginning to doze. Comparatively puny as I am, he did not see my shape in the crumpled covers on the couch, and thought I had gone outside. He grabbed a beer and went to check the garden, and by the time he came back in, I had moved up to the bed where I hoped to get actual sleep. The cat (who had been giving me the requisite cheering cuddle) had left me when Dave had opened the door, so the couch had lost its charm.

So there we were. Me all catless and tired, him with a broken beer bottle. Both miserable. We curled up again and worked on definitions.

Prior to this night he assumed that when I am feeling any negative emotion he is to absolutely leave me alone. Sadly, I have two modes of crankiness, each needing opposite antidotes. When I am "annoyed," as when he repeatedly asks me what I writing (invariably I am writing something long-winded, so each time he asks, I am still writing the same damned thing I was writing when he asked five minutes prior), he should leave me alone. Or possibly he could put food in front me, and quietly back away. Irritability on my part has to do with tiredness, low blood sugar, and yes, repeated questions. It is trifling, and given a little bit of space (and a snack), I quickly swallow it. I don't like being irritable. When I am upset, it is over a particular and generally important issue: I want to work through things, preferably sooner rather than later. I don't like being upset.

So that was that. Is Morgan annoyed? Leave her alone. Is Morgan upset? Don't leave her alone. As to determining which diagnosis applied, he need only ask. When I am annoyed, he does get that one free question.

We quickly fell to being glad we were done with miscommunication for the day, and joined forces to determine the much more pressing matter of what in god's name we'd have the energy to prepare for dinner. Then to sleep, then to another 5am load of traps.

As to the propane mystery? A new friend of hers had loaded it onto his truck, so he could load it onto his boat, to take care of it for her.

Staring at Uncertainty -or- Rubbernecking at Wrecks

On of the potential side-effects of being a stern person is bait-box vision. Which is somewhat like tunnel vision, only bleaker. Yesterday was like that.

Technically, I could have been working at my job on the mainland- it was the penultimate day for teachers and support staff, but as it was make-up exams, I was able to convince the principal that it would be much more sensible for me to be out on the water (joining the ranks of the sprung students who stern) than to be sitting in an empty classroom. So it was a bonus day, hooky, a stolen trip.

And it was a gorgeous morning. Clear, calm. On the ride down to the dock, however, we did come across what one citizen now calls "an event that marks the beginning of summer on IAH": a vehicle totaled in some overt act of drunken driving. We passed this year's stellar example- a truck belonging to a construction crew. It had the appearance of an abandoned wreck, but we backed our own truck up, to check and make sure there wasn't anyone in it. They'd run well off the road, fetching up on a boulder. That was good, because it slowed the impact of the tree. So the hood was only dented in about a foot and a half. It was, as we suspected, abandoned.

The blood wasn't too bad, some soaked into the passenger seat, some spilled on the ground. Dave, a born story-teller, instantly assumed doom. I diagnosed a busted nose on the part of the driver. Unpleasant but hardly fatal. The fallout would be more about public humiliation than harm.

So we tisked, wondered if the driver (we could guess the culprit) went off for treatment, and headed back to work. We did meet Ed (awake? Sober?!!) at the landing and shared the news- Dave talking about the blood everywhere, me hedging his description with my theory. Later in the day we saw Ed at the store (awake, not so sober), where he crowed "Girl, you were absolutely right! Broke his nose!"

But writing about wrecks was not my point. My point was that it was a beautiful morning, and that new bait bags suck to work with. The way Dave purchases bait bag material, the mesh is machine made- one infinite and compact length of bottomless bag, cut by the company and spooled, then cut into shorter lengths by the fisherman, and clamped with a hog ring at one end. The finished product is a royal pain in the ass to open for the first time. I like my bait bags like I like my jeans, a baseball glove, or apparently my men- nicely broken in. But since it was my job, I got to it, keeping the thought "this fucking sucks" to myself. Dave said it for me a few minutes later when he came back to bait a few.

The bait itself was a good news/bad news sort of thing. It was getting a bit old, but being Canadian and therefore not as stringently regulated for size, the herring was comparatively little, and easy for small hands to shovel into the stiff pockets with their narrow openings. The bags began to pile up in the fish box beside me, which was satisfying, but peripheral. My main view was the bait box.

Incidentally, for a country that seems to quietly have its shit together, Canada's fishing regulations are miserable and almost non-existent. As a disgruntled American, I want to hold the place up as a utopia, but their lack of fishing regulation, be it for herring or lobster, pisses me off. More bait into the bag...

One thing I have noticed while working with piles of dead fish, is that bait juice is actually kind of pretty. Stay with me here- I swear it would make an excellent nail polish color, as long as you didn't name it for its inspiration. It's a shade of taupe, and because of the fish oil released, when it eddies and whirls it looks like a molten precious metal.

Though today, this oil, full of fatty acids people buy as health supplements, reminds me of other oil, increasingly unfit for consumption. When work gets tedious on the boat I lose myself contemplating the bait- the patterns in the juice, the iridescence of the scales, the geopolitics and ecological/economic ramifications of herring: when work gets tedious on the mainland, I lose myself in the net. Where I recently looked at images from the blowout in that other Gulf.

It was about the time my mind cycled around to the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, that we reached our first pair of traps. I was reminded that my job is not just about baiting bag, after bag, after bag. The point, and the payoff, is finding out what is in the traps. The shift in my duties brought my gaze out of the bait box, back at our bay. Where the sky and water is blue, the spray off the boat is crystal. I can't fathom our shores draped in a deadly sludge. And none of us can understand how a government which can fine fisherman around 25k for an apparent oil sheen around their boats and disallows Dawn on board (though everyone still carries it for cleaning up at day's end), does not seem to have paid much attention to off-shore drilling risks, and allows emphasis on chemical dispersant (Dawn). Wells vomiting up crude do NOT get dry heaves, unless you take a geologic view of time. Dismal thoughts for a bonny day. Switching my attention to the traps was a welcome distraction.

Our first pair offered up a male hard-shell lobster- a monster just on the legal side of the gauge- not quite so big that he had to go back for breeding stock. I kissed him on his salty carapace. This is not the good part of the fishing season, and what little we do get over the course of the morning is primarily v-notch females, eggers, and shorts. All go back over the side, curses from Dave and well-wishes from me. We probably got more sculpin than lobster.

We kept three of them, Dave slamming their heads against the boat for a quick kill. Near the end of the haul, when we've wound our way up to Moores Head, we feed the eagles. Between Moores Head and Trial Point, there's a nest, and both eagles flew down to Dave's whistle. The day's setbacks (a lost pair, cut by some anonymous jerk's prop, and unsuccessfully grappled for; another pair dragged and stove up by careless neighbor) lost their grip on his mood. "We fed two eagles!!!" With that, the storm clouds were swept from his face, and his day was once again on better footing. We went into Stonington to sell while the price was still on the high end of low, and before there would be two prices, one higher for the shippable hard shells, and one lower for the more delicate shedders.

My mood did not improve greatly, except to be glad that Dave's cleared up. The fresh air, the sunshine, the pleasure of having the boat under me, and my mind free to wander was all undercut by where my mind was wandering. Here comes summer, like a trap up through the water- I guess we'll just see what it brings.

The Soil and the Dirt

It is Spring. After the equinox. Beyond April, even. There are million pieces of empiric evidence to back me up, here. It is the grand emergence of all things- eyes wide to take in the verdure, pupils narrowing against a strong new sun.

When old the year has run its course, and the next is newly, truly born of the remnant muck- it is always a shock to me. Newsflash: the world can be soft, warm, and full of colors from pigment, rather than light. Old friends show up, friends who seem like they stepped out of a book, or a fairy play: Snow Drop, Forsythia, Quince, and Daffodil. Apple Blossom.

I step out the door and don't believe my nose, I don't believe my skin.

Maybe this is hard for me to believe because this year, spring actually matters in material ways. Traps to be got in the water, plants to be got into the ground. Plans to bring to fruition. And the saying, "work is love made manifest" suddenly applies to my life.

But to everything here, there's the inversion. There's the soil and the dirt. Every season new seeds of delicious suspicion are cast, watered by slavering tongues, and allowed to bloom, damaging weeds in a delicate garden. Rumor, doubt, disdain. Yes, who in a small town doesn't also have a long acquaintance with them? Diverting to cultivate, perhaps, until they ruin the soil.

Dark thoughts for a sunny day, no?

Would there were a ready tool to pluck those weeds. But since there isn't, I will focus on these fleeting friends, who are kind enough to drop by.