Island Journal

Painting Islands: Uniting Community with Art

My project explores participatory art using the photographic technique known as “light painting.” My goal is to bring this public art work to all 15 of Maine’s unbridged, year-round island communities. For each island, the collaboration begins with islanders selecting a subject—a place, a landscape—that resonates most strongly within the community. A team of volunteer islanders then assembles at dusk wielding handheld flashlights to “paint” the iconic scene with light, while I create a long-exposure photograph. Each island’s shoot preparation is with the same general framework: scout the location months beforehand to determine the exact location and angle of the camera, previsualize the subjects and areas to light and others to remain in shadow, and consider where to hide people within the area (behind buildings, behind tress or rocks, and just out of the camera’s view). Each image is captured about 20 minutes after sunset coinciding with the “blue hour,” producing the vivid blue skies. SEE MORE

Art

Island Journal

‘Halfway to Where Somebody’s in Trouble’

It is practically a cliché to call Matinicus Island isolated, but it is. The closest mainland city (and U.S. Coast Guard station) is in Rockland at about 23 miles distant. In the heart of winter, the state ferry may make one trip from Rockland to the island each month. Bad weather here has a more serious definition than it does in the rest of the state. Islanders use cell phones, but no one relies on them. “Here on the island, if you’re not standing in just the right spot or facing the right direction,” says Clayton Philbrook, “you can usually text in a lot of places, but as far as having a voice conversation, it doesn’t work.” SEE MORE

Communities

old color photo of dock with cable spools

Island Journal

The DIY Approach That Linked Isle au Haut to the Grid

Parker Waite moved to Isle au Haut in 1976 “to get off the grid.” Though the phrase may have had as much figurative as literal meaning for him then, today he sees the irony in what occupied much of his time in the years that followed. Waite was the nuts-and-bolts guy who established the electric cable linking the island with the electric grid. These days, the island is moving toward achieving a measure of independence from that cable, but it’s still operating, having exceeded its life expectancy by a couple of decades. Before the cable, the island relied on four diesel-fueled generators. The success of that underwater cable is very much tied to the work Waite, now 73, did before the mainland switch could be thrown in 1983. SEE MORE

Communities

Island Journal

Island Golf Courses

The sixth hole of the Great Chebeague Golf Club’s course, a 110-yard par 3, is ranked the easiest of its nine holes. That is, unless you fail to admire its sweeping views of Casco Bay. Those who disregard the picturesque harbor below, the parade of sail and motor boats in the bay, and the beach roses clinging to the shore, may be levied a two-stroke penalty, by island custom. Maine’s island golf courses have many such quirks. Three of these distinctive nine-hole courses are reachable only by ferry: The Tarratine Club of Dark Harbor course on Islesboro is renowned for its challenging, grass-covered mounds and sweet Penobscot Bay breezes. The North Haven Golf Club course wraps around a historic family cemetery and includes a ball-swallowing tidal inlet. And Great Chebeague’s course features water views from every green and several tees that shoot over a town road. SEE MORE

Business

Island Journal

Smiles, Hugs, and Hospitality

A confession: I never learned to hula hoop. Not enough to keep it from hitting the floor, anyway. It’s a late November afternoon and quiet on Islesford—also known as Little Cranberry, one of the five that make up the town of Cranberry Isles—and I’m about to get my first official hula hooping lesson from Anna Fernald. There are two things you need to hula hoop successfully, Anna says. A good beat and lots of space. After putting on her slippers, she pulls chairs to the edge of the living room and puts on a Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris album of duets. She cranks the volume so you can hear it in any room in the house. “OK,” she says, picking up one of her three colorfully striped hoops. “You’re counting on your body to hold it up, but you want to have the hoop cling to you and do the work.” SEE MORE

Island Journal

Coldwater Coast

The seagull hangs lifeless and gaunt from a rope. The wind is hard out of the east, leaping over the riprap causeway and flipping the water into neat lines of black and silver. The dead seagull twists in the wind, spins, its eyes now as clouded and gray and lost as the Atlantic skyline. I stand on an 8-foot by 8-foot feed scow with the lobsterman named Oscar at the tiller. I hold a shovel in my fists. Over a 1,000 pounds of dead fish lie at my feet. We are being watched by a series of surveillance cameras, and we are surrounded by an electric fence. There is an eagle in a spruce snag and Oscar points a single crooked finger at it as if he knows this bird from all others, and he grumbles, “Asshole.” The eagle turns its head into the wind, leans forward and spreads its wings and swoops over us, arcs over the harbor and out of sight. Ten feet above us, a series of 100-yard-long nylon cables stretch from one edge of the lobster pound to the other. The cables hang slightly convex, like a drooping ceiling, and the feeling is that of being within an inverted dome with a floor made of seawater. When the wind blows, the cables vibrate and like some massive cello, the lobster pound moans and howls. SEE MORE

Lifestyle

old photo of hurricane damage shot from above

Island Journal

Is Maine Still Hurricane-Proof?

The role weather plays in Maine life is as important as the sun rising— and far more likely to be talked about. On the coast, and especially on islands where life revolves around boats and ferries, knowing the weather in advance and preparing for it is vital. Often, it's a matter of survival. But preparations can prove inadequate. High winds, pounding rain and excessively high tides can knock out power lines, smash boats, wash buildings out to sea or fill them with water. When storms include snow and ice, the damage can last longer if power lines go down all over the state. In the Atlantic region, hurricanes are one of the most destructive weather forces. New Orleans is still recovering from the utter devastation of 2005’s Katrina, one of the country’s deadliest hurricanes ever, while being battered by other, more recent destructive storms, and the New York-New Jersey area is still rebuilding after Superstorm Sandy. SEE MORE

Island Journal

Vision Shared: The Painter and the Lobsterman

My eyes are brown. The eyes of my two brothers are pale blue. I see the world differently than they do, but that is a matter of gender and life’s experiences, not in the nature of our eyes. When I was a child, I attended Sunday School in the parsonage of a small Congregational church. I recall one day when sunlight through the tall windows struck dust motes in the air, turning the narrow room into a valley of white light. I was five years old, ensconced on the floor with a bevy of other small children, making the clumsy handicrafts of the very young. The light, however, drew my attention away. The windows and the room were full of brilliance and I was astonished and wordless. At that age, I had no voice for my perception. SEE MORE

Art

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

Island Journal

Making It Here: The Island Educator

The first time Monhegan Island’s teacher, Mandy Metrano, laid eyes on the island she now calls home, she was not impressed. In 1995, as an 18-year-old high school student on a visit to see her boyfriend, a summer resident, she saw Monhegan as “all ocean and dirt roads and nothing happening. The only evidence of nightlife was a bunch of kids playing Hacky Sack under the island’s only street light,” she remembers. A year later, her boyfriend had lined up a summer job waiting tables at Monhegan House, but Metrano had planned to spend her own summer break traveling to India with a friend. When the trip fell through, her boyfriend, Jon, suggested she work with him on Monhegan instead. This time, the island stole her heart the day she arrived. “We took the early boat and even when we got close, we couldn’t see the island because it was so foggy. We could hear the foghorn, though, and as we approached the dock in the fog I heard bagpipes. It was magical.” SEE MORE