Candis Joyce, 57, is director of the Swan’s Island Educational Society (SIES), which is housed in a bright, attractive building constructed in 2011, and which, despite its name, functions as a combination library, museum, historical society and learning center. And in October 2015, when we talked, Joyce was winding down from the lobstering season, because in addition to heading up the SIES, she works as a sternman two days a week on an islander’s boat.
She’s raised two children who were schooled on the island and now has two grandchildren, the oldest attending the island school.
She grew up in Rockland as Candis Jellison, the daughter of a successful fisherman. Her father had ties to the island, and the family moved there when Joyce finished high school.
“We made the final trip from packing up the house in Rockland the day after I graduated from high school in 1976.”
IJ: How do you think living on an island has shaped you as a person?
Joyce: I think I’ve become much more community-centric. I find myself thinking about how things will help the community, rather than how they will help me or my family, many times.
I think about when I first realized what the Swan’s Island Educational Society was as an organization; I just took the job because my kids were getting older and I thought it would be fun. My mother-in-law was involved in the organization. I just spent a few hours behind the desk, and then I realized what a library really was, that it was a historical institution, that we actually preserve the island’s history. And those two things together really formed a very powerful focus for me because we not only provided information for the community, we collected historical information, stored it, and figured out ways to present it to people to enjoy.
I think living here, that’s probably one of the biggest benefits I personally have received. And I wouldn’t have been able to say that years ago.
IJ: What’s the biggest misunderstanding, or misconception, people have about island life?
Joyce: That the locals aren’t very intelligent. I don’t mean that in a negative way. Not the majority of people from away, but there is a significant group of people that appear to think that islanders are not capable of helping themselves. And that’s not particularly true.
The other piece that I find very intriguing is that summer people come here when it’s nice—when people usually go on vacation—and they wonder where we all are. Why we don’t show up at committee meetings. Why we don’t take part in events. Well, that’s because that’s when we go to work.
You know, you get up at 4 o’clock in the morning, and you need to go to sleep at 6 o’clock at night, and you’re just trying to maintain what you have to do. I’ve run into it many times.
The seasonal residents on Swan’s Island really would like to see us make some improvements: the town office, and our government structure, and they want to know what, why and how this all happens. And we just know how things happen.
But they come to Swan’s Island because they like it the way it is. We aren’t commercialized, we aren’t full of tourists. Basically, they like it quiet, they like that it’s a fishing community.
There’s a good handful of the year-round community that can’t see that, how fortunate we are with the seasonal residents that we have.
I’m on a lobster boat at least two days a week, and I hear these guys on the radio talk [disparagingly of tourists], and I just want to reach up and grab that radio, but my friend Vernon won’t let me [laughs].
IJ: How do you get your groceries and other essentials?
Joyce: We have a food coop out here. It’s just my daughter and I, living together, and I kind of see what’s left over from the case lots, and I’ll say, I’ll take a couple of pounds of butter, or whatever. Some of us order Crown of Maine [a farm-to-table food service] through the store, and they get like a 20 percent increase for dividing up the case lots of squash, or whatever we decide to order, and then we go pick it up at the store.
I have an Amazon Prime account [which provides free shipping], I use Amazon Pantry. And when I do go to the mainland, I go to Hannaford and I love the Belfast Coop. I’m a member!
I try to do as much [buying] on the island as I possibly can, and I know Amazon isn’t exactly “island,” but it’s $37 to go to the mainland. Plus gas. Plus at least one meal. And you have to add that to the cost of your groceries on the mainland.
IJ: How many lobsters do you think you eat a year?
Joyce: Not many. Actually, we still have some shrink-wrapped lobster in the freezer from last year that we haven’t eaten. But I’m sure before we take traps up [at the season’s end] we’ll get some and put it in the freezer.
My son usually has lobster on the Fourth of July, and we might have lobster once or twice… maybe five or six times.
After being in a lobster boat all day, I look at lobsters, and think, “Oh, man, that would be really great for supper.” But by the time everything gets sold, and we’re wondering if we want to take a couple of them home, we don’t want to cook them and clean them [laughs].
IJ: So how many times do you go to the mainland in a year? How many ferry trips?
Joyce: I don’t know. Over the past couple of years, it’s been more often. I used to go off if I had an appointment, then I’d do some grocery shopping. Or, my ex-husband and I, what we used to do for fun, we’d take the kids off and go to Subway and go to the movies on the weekend; that happened a few times a year.
But now, since I’ve re-connected with friends in Rockland, I tend to end up over there too much [laughs]. And I’m trying not to do that this year, because it costs a lot of money. To go out to eat, to go to this and that…
IJ: Do you ever think about moving off-island?
Joyce: [Nods]. To get a job. I think the thing that’s causing the most anxiety in my life is not having a stable income. Yep.
IJ: What do you think is this island’s biggest problem, biggest threat? Gentrification, drugs, inability to make a living here…?
Joyce: There are some of us who would like to continue to living here who don’t have the option of being a sternman, or have family that can help support them financially. They find themselves newly divorced, or there’s illness in the family. There’s not that second job that can help them support the household.
If you get a full time job with benefits, you hang onto it, tooth and nail.
Drugs are definitely a problem out here.
It’s the same reason people don’t think we need to diversify our economic base. You put kids in a boat, and they’re making $20,000, $30,000 a year, more than their high school teachers. And they get an ache or a pain, or somebody says here’s this, and they get hooked on opiates, and they’ve got the money to pay for them. It’s hideous, what it does to people.
I think there’s a misunderstanding in the community about why this happens, and that’s a tragedy in itself.
IJ: Twenty years from now, what do you think will be the biggest changes that will be apparent here on the island? If you and I were to disappear and come back in 20 years, what would we see that’s different?
Joyce: What would we see? I’m hoping that you wouldn’t see a lot of difference. That it would still be a working harbor, that people would still be able to have whatever they want in their own front yard. We wouldn’t have any zoning except those things that really help us protect the land and water.
I would like to see a wider economic base and a little bit more visionary leadership in the town that will actually start to look at ways to encourage people to move here. And part of that’s going to be much, much better Internet service, lower utility rates.
Visually, I would hope there would not be a lot of change. But I guess the only thing I would like to see is more of the houses lit up, year-round. And to do that, we’re really going to have to come together as a community and have some hard conversations about what it means to be Swan’s Island, and how we keep that, that same social, cultural structure while we’re in the 21st century.
IJ: Last question: What’s the most annoying question islanders get asked by summer folks and visitors. I’m sure asked some.
Joyce: Do you really want to know?
IJ: Yeah!
Joyce: Do you have running water and electricity. In here [at the SIES], they’ll come and say, “Do you have a computer?” So what I like to do is make sure they understand that we provide every service that every other library on the mainland or New York provides. The state of Maine has been visionary that way.
