Island Journal

Salvage and Regeneration: Stories of adaptation and loss from two barrier islands

David Thomas, a fisherman from Little Cranberry Island and I are heading to Portsmouth Island, one of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, skimming across the top of the water at 15 knots in a flat-bottom boat. We bear northwest out of “the creek” on Ocracoke Island with Rudy Austin at the helm. He is assured and relaxed, much as his father Junius would have been in the 1950s and ’60s, when he ran people across to the Portsmouth hunting and fishing club. It is a quick crossing, 20 minutes or so. Through the crisp winter air we pass duck-hunting blinds, family-managed pound nets, and, on Casey Island, just off of Portsmouth, we pass a camp for fishermen who are “hiding from the wife” as Rudy puts it, laughing as if speaking from experience. We cross Ocracoke Inlet, with Pamlico Sound to starboard. Beneath us the shoal waters shift with the tides, while on the horizon a place frozen in time comes into view. SEE MORE

Islands From Away

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

An aerial view of the Front Street Shipyard in Belfast.

Island Journal

From Sardines to Yachts, Belfast Transforms Its Waterfront

It may have been inevitable. A part of Belfast’s waterfront characterized by graffiti-covered, decrepit industrial buildings wouldn’t remain so for long, given the safe bet that is investing in Maine harbor-front property. But the story of how Front Street Shipyard became established on that same property—now characterized by multi-million dollar yachts parked in and outside large green, steel-sided buildings—might seem like an overnight success story. In fact, it’s a story that owes its happy ending to two groups of people who saw opportunity, and who were willing to work to find a way for each to win. Cliché though it might sound, the Front Street Shipyard and Belfast’s city government truly achieved a win-win. It may not have come to fruition without a bit of legal innovation with a name only a lawyer could love: contract rezoning. SEE MORE

Business

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

aerial view of MDI biological laboratory

Island Journal

The Laboratory by the Sea

In the late 1800s, biology was becoming a real science and profession. The discoveries of Alexander Humboldt, the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and the classification work of Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz had spurred interest in diversity and evolution. One place where biologists could easily access many life forms was the marine environment. At the turn of the 19th century, marine research stations were being set up all over the world. One of them, the Tufts Summer School of Biology, opened at Potts Point in South Harpswell on Casco Bay in 1898. The first summer, eight students and their teachers hauled seawater half a mile to a small cottage that served as laboratory and dorm. In 1920, affluent Bostonian George B. Dorr, the main driver behind the creation of Acadia National Park, decided there should be a marine research station on Mount Desert Island. He knew about the South Harpswell laboratory and came up with a plan to move it to the former Thomas Emery Farm in Salisbury Cove. He touted the property’s beneficial qualities: “good wharfage opportunity, its picturesque character, its old farmhouse and the pure water…coming in a deep continuous channel from the open sea.” SEE MORE

Science

Island Journal

Grabbing the Digital Future

Malcolm Fernald’s internet service has been just fast enough to maintain a web site for his family business, the Islesford Artists Gallery. But if a potential customer wants to get a closer look at a painting or two online, he’s out of luck. “Trying to upload high-quality images to email to a person would either take forever or not happen at all,” says Fernald, 34, a lobsterman who is chairman of the board of selectmen for the town of Cranberry Isles. For Fernald, even beyond boosting business, an internet upgrade is critical to sustaining the way of life that has always felt like a refuge for him, and to maintaining his family’s ties to Islesford that have endured for generations. He’s banking on fast, reliable internet service to open up new social and economic opportunities for the town and reduce its reliance on fishing and tourism. SEE MORE