Island Journal

Hauling in The Puddle

My lobstering career started the day old Chet Wall cut off a finger while repairing wooden traps in our barn. It was mid-July, the height of one of the best lobster seasons we’d had in years. Chet had been working for my father, lobstering around Pleasant Island. Daddy supplied him… SEE MORE

Island Journal

His Common Touch

Peter Ralston is a brilliant photographer who is also one of the most engaging conversationalists you’d ever want to meet. It is almost impossible to dislike the man, and he has never met a person he did not instantly consider a friend, with the possible exception of a few pompous… SEE MORE

Island Journal

Island 360

As a filmmaker, I’ve always loved to discover new ways of seeing the world. A new shot with a new camera. A new perspective. A new format. I love matching a new capacity with experience. How do other people look at what they experience? How could we? How do animals?… SEE MORE

Art

Island Journal

Keeping the Lights On

There’s a joke on Monhegan that the name of the island can be loosely translated as “island of many waitresses.” Like the hundreds of 20-something women that have preceded me, I showed up on this rock to wait tables after finishing college. In between polishing glassware and reciting the daily… SEE MORE

Communities

Island Journal

A Secret Threat

At this very moment, every pool of water on the planet—from the Pacific Ocean to the puddle in your driveway—is undergoing an invisible, inexorable change: It is becoming more acidic. Every day, human beings pump 21 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere from the burning of… SEE MORE

Island Journal

It All Changes in a Heartbeat

Doesn’t matter which island you’re from or headed to, it’s always The Island. My island was and is and always will be Gotts Island. The one Ruth Moore was remembering when she talked about the place you were homesick for even when you were there. I’d been back and forth… SEE MORE

Island Journal

Diver Ed

In considering the life of Ed Monat—the Bar Harbor–based marine educator often referred to as Diver Ed—I began to think of Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s assertion, “How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.” In the course of Monat’s life as a lobsterman, underwater nature trail… SEE MORE

Island Journal

Islands Are Character Magnets

As a kid, I wanted to be normal. Anything that kept me away from this ideal—namely, my parents—was a threat. Middle school can be rough, and the closer I was to everybody else, the easier life would be. It took me a while to appreciate “characters,” which as far as… SEE MORE

Island Journal

The Omni-Competent Beverly

Some are born to the island life; others arrive on an island and feel like it is a place they know by heart. On a beautiful fall day last October, Beverly Johnson began relating the story of how she came to Chebeague Island as a teenager as we stalked a pair of nondescript brownish birds on the shore that she had not seen before. Crouching down in the wind with camera in hand, pieces of Beverly’s improbable journey come into focus. Beverly Ross, now Beverly Johnson, did not grow up on Chebeague, but came to the island with her father, a law-yer in Wayland, Massachusetts, to attend a client’s funeral. He discovered Chebeague had a golf course, and that did it for him; he bought an island house and brought the whole family back in 1964 for the summer when Beverly was 15. Because the family first arrived at the island for the funeral in the fall, after the summer people had left, Beverly right away made friends with the year-round islanders. It was only later that Beverly met summer people, and al-though technically she was someone “from away,” she never considered herself a summer person. SEE MORE

Island Journal

Caring For Their Own

“The family became so destitute that they were obliged to seek alms from the town. An official from Stonington took the child when she was six years old and started with her for the Poor Farm on Deer Isle.” — Dr. Benjamin Noyes, Island Family Histories: 1890–1945 Fortunately, this story… SEE MORE

History