cropped long exposure photograph by photographer Jim Nickelson

Island Journal

Alchemy of the Night Sky

The moon’s an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun —Timon of Athens, William Shakespeare I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the window pane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff — and I Lived on, flew on, in… SEE MORE

Island Journal

Islands of the Dawnland

When Gluscabe was young, he watched his grandmother Woodchuck fish to feed the two of them, and saw she had a hard time catching fish. He decided to help her. Gluscabe built a large fish weir across the entire mouth of the river, with a single opening in the middle.… SEE MORE

silhouette of man leaning on railing overlooking ocean

Island Journal

John Marin’s Islands

In his poem “Sea-Change,” the late Philip Booth of Castine pays tribute to John Marin. First published in The New Yorker in 1956, the poem, written in Booth’s pared-down style, opens with the artist’s name then proceeds to accentuate his visceral connection to the Maine landscape: Marin saw how it… SEE MORE

Island Journal

Fishing, Fowling, and Navigation

In this part of the world, the tide comes in and the tide goes out twice a day. Each time the tide goes out, it exposes cobbles, mudflats, tidepools, rockweed, and cool wet sand. Who owns this intertidal zone depends on the law of the land on which the tide… SEE MORE

Island Journal

The Strange Nature of Horseshoe Crabs

Ages ago in the sea-green clear water of Chandler’s Cove on Chebeague Island, strange dark shapes were scuttling around the bottom. My seven-year-old face peeked out over the edge of the wharf, watching them. I remember my hands gripping the splintery planks. Horseshoe crabs, the big people called them. Gliding… SEE MORE

aerial view of Schoodic Peninsula, Maine

Island Journal

The Schoodic Story

Schoodic Point and its acres of pristine shoreline and deep woodlands dodged a bullet more than a century ago when plans by John Godfrey Moore to develop the pristine property were derailed by his premature death. Moore, the son of a Steuben sea captain, made his fortune in the telegraph… SEE MORE

Newfoundland landscape with water and mountains

Island Journal

The Collector of Islands

To get to the Lofoten Islands in Norway, you must take the ferry. But to get to the ferry you must journey by train. The train from Oslo takes 20 hours, traveling through Trondheim and the mountains to the tiny coastal settlement of Bodo. In Bodo I board the Hurtegruten,… SEE MORE

Workshop participants inspect a shell midden in the Damariscotta area

Island Journal

More Than a Pile of Shells

Up a tidal river, around a blue-green bend where the banks begin to steepen, the wooded shoreline is interrupted by a tall white cliff. Weathered bits of shell and dust tumble down the exposed face, revealing layer upon layer of oyster shells. Pockets of charcoal and fire-cracked rock are signs of human activity from millennia ago, when ancestors of the Wabanaki people came together to harvest oysters from the warm, brackish river in what is now known as Damariscotta and Newcastle. On both banks, they deposited the shells, one at a time, basketful by basketful, season after season. Eventually, the piles grew into small mountains some 30 feet tall. Around 2,000 years ago, the local people stopped adding to the piles. Soil and trees grew over the tops, but the middens were massive and the river kept the edges washed clean, and they continued to attract attention after Europeans came on the scene. SEE MORE

Island Journal

The Sound of Island Silence

There was a night on Frenchboro, a decade ago now, when I heard silence for the first time. It was during a February vacation for the school and most families were somewhere warmer on the mainland, even if it was the Holiday Inn pool in Ellsworth. All told, there were likely five or six people on the island. Which is why, I think, my neighbors on the other side of the harbor had invited me over to their house for dinner and a movie: an attempt to keep the lone bachelor sane in the dead of winter. It was late when I left and other than their porchlight guiding my way down the hill, the entire island—itself sitting in an inky sea—was pitch dark. SEE MORE

Nature

Island Journal

Arctic Observations

Last summer, photographer and Island Institute co-founder Peter Ralston boarded a friend's yacht just above the Arctic Circle on the west coast of Greenland to explore that area, as well as the heart of the high Canadian Arctic Archipelago. It was the trip of a lifetime among some of the world's most remote islands, offering a front-row seat in the planet's most dramatic theater of rapid climate change... After our first stop in Greenland at Qassiarsuk, where the temperature on July 25 was a near-record 72˚F, SY Rosehearty visited a couple of Greenland’s smaller ports before dropping the hook off Ilulissat, home of the northern hemisphere’s fastest moving glacier, the Jakobshavn. Our proximity to Big Ice here set the stage for our upcoming month of constant exposure to unexpected indicators of climate change. SEE MORE