The Island

Salt and Crossing

Chapter 4: The Island

Dunmore Island is 2.3 miles long and 1.1 miles wide at its widest point, which is the southern end, where the land flattens into a series of granite shelves that step down to the waterline like the bleachers of an amphitheater facing the open Atlantic, and the amphitheater comparison is not wrong because the shelves are where the island's children have always gone to sit and watch the sea do what the sea does, which is everything, which is nothing, which is the continuous restless performance of a body that has no audience but performs anyway, has always performed, will perform after the children and the island and the coast itself have been revised by the same geological patience that produced them.

The island has 380 year-round residents. This number is precise because the number matters, because an island's population is not a demographic statistic but a vital sign, the pulse that tells you whether the body is alive or dying, and the number has been declining — 412 in 2010, 396 in 2015, 380 now — in the slow, uncatastrophic way that rural Maine populations decline, not by exodus but by attrition, by the children who leave for college and do not return, by the elderly who die and are not replaced, by the houses that become summer houses and then empty houses and then the kind of houses that the real estate agents describe as "opportunities," which is the language of speculation applied to the remains of habitation.

The first crossing of the day carries the lobstermen.

Not all of them — most of Dunmore's lobstermen keep their boats in the island's harbor and haul from there, their traps set in the waters east and south of the island, in the deep water beyond the ledges where the lobsters move according to laws that are not laws but patterns, seasonal migrations that the lobstermen have observed and predicted for generations, the observation passed from father to son and from captain to sternman in the same way that Harlan's knowledge of the channel passed from his father to him, by doing, by being present, by the accumulated witness of many seasons. But some of the lobstermen — four, currently — keep their boats on the mainland, in Port Clement Harbor, because the mainland harbor is closer to their territory or because the harbor fees are lower or because their fathers kept their boats there and the keeping has become the tradition and the tradition has become the reason.

These four ride the 6:15. They are the first passengers. They are the passengers for whom the 6:15 exists, the reason the schedule begins at 6:15 and not at 7:00 or 7:30, because the lobstermen need to be on the water by first light, which in September is 6:00 or 6:10, which means they are already late by the time the ferry docks at Port Clement at 6:37, which means they move quickly from the car deck to their trucks and from their trucks to the harbor and from the harbor to their boats, and the quickness is not impatience but necessity, because the tide does not wait for the ferry schedule and the lobsters do not wait for the tide and the day's haul depends on the day's start and the day's start depends on the crossing, and so the crossing is woven into the work the way the warp is woven into the weft, inseparable, structural, invisible when the fabric is whole and visible only when it begins to unravel.

Paul Ouellette is one of the four. He has lobstered for twenty-six years. His boat is the Mary Claire, named for his daughter, who is twenty-two and lives in Portland and works in a restaurant and does not plan to return to the island, a fact that Paul does not discuss and that the island knows anyway because the island knows everything that matters about its people, knows it the way a body knows its temperature, not by measurement but by feel.

The 6:15 returns from Port Clement at 7:00 carrying the morning's first mainland cargo: the mail, in a canvas sack that the postal carrier transfers from the USPS truck to the ferry's passenger cabin; the Portland Press Herald, thirty copies bundled in plastic, for Mere's store; and the commuters, three or four people who live on the mainland and work on the island, a category that is small but that exists because the island has a school and the school has a teacher who lives in Port Clement and the island has a health clinic and the clinic has a nurse practitioner who lives in Rockport and the island has, increasingly, construction workers who are building a bridge.

The 7:20 from Dunmore carries the schoolchildren.

Dunmore Island School serves kindergarten through eighth grade. It is a single building, white clapboard, built in 1911, expanded in 1958, one classroom with a partition that creates two rooms — lower grades on the west side, upper grades on the east — and the school has had, in its current configuration, as many as thirty-eight students and as few as eleven, and the number now is fourteen, which is a number that the school board watches the way a doctor watches a pulse that has been slowing, not alarmed yet but attentive, aware that there is a number below which the school cannot function and that the number is approaching, has been approaching for years, in the same slow arithmetic of departure and death that governs the island's population.

The high school students — seven of them this year — ride the 7:20 to Port Clement, where a school bus meets the ferry and carries them to Penobscot Regional High School, a twenty-minute ride, so that their morning is: wake, dress, walk to the terminal, board the ferry, cross the channel, walk to the bus, ride the bus, arrive at school, and the total elapsed time from bed to desk is approximately ninety minutes, which is longer than most mainland students' commutes and shorter than the commutes of students on islands without ferry service, islands where the crossing is by skiff or lobster boat or, in one case Harlan knows of, by kayak, a fourteen-year-old boy who paddled three miles across open water every morning to get to school because the ferry to his island ran only twice a day and neither time aligned with the school schedule, and the boy did this for two years until his family moved to the mainland, which was the point, which was always the point, which was the way the islands lost their children — not by dramatic departure but by the ordinary friction of logistics, by the accumulation of inconvenience until the inconvenience exceeded the attachment and the family moved and the island's number declined by one household, by two adults and one child, and the decline was imperceptible on any given day and irreversible over any given decade.

Harlan watched the schoolchildren board. They boarded every morning with the particular energy of young people who are not yet awake but are in motion, the energy that is not alertness but momentum, bodies propelled by routine rather than intention, and they carried backpacks and sports bags and, in the case of Sophie Ames, a cello case that was nearly as tall as she was, the case battered and stickered and beautiful in the way that a thing is beautiful when it is clearly essential to the person who carries it, when the carrying is not a chore but an identity.

The schoolchildren sat in the passenger cabin. They did not sit on the car deck, though some of them wanted to, because the car deck was where the wind was and the spray was and the feeling of the crossing was, the feeling of being on the water rather than merely over it, but the rules prohibited passengers on the car deck during transit and the rules were the rules and Harlan enforced them not with authority but with presence, with the fact that he was the captain and the captain's decisions were not discussed but were accepted, in the way that the tide was accepted, as a condition rather than a choice.

The passenger cabin had thirty-two seats, bolted to the deck in rows of four across, the seats upholstered in a vinyl that had been blue when the Constance was launched and was now the color that blue becomes after thirty-four years of salt air and sunlight and the oil from human hands and the pressure of human weight, a color that was not blue and not gray but the particular exhaustion of blue, the color of blue that has done its job for too long and has been retired in place, not replaced because the budget did not allow replacement and not covered because the covers would mildew in the salt air and the mildewed covers would be worse than the exhausted vinyl.

The windows of the passenger cabin were salt-hazed. They had been salt-hazed for years, for decades, the salt deposited by spray and by fog and by the general maritime atmosphere that coated every surface on the Constance with a mineral film, and the film had been cleaned and had returned and had been cleaned and had returned until the cleaning and the returning had reached an equilibrium, a level of haze that the cleaning could reduce but not eliminate, so that the view from the passenger cabin was always slightly obscured, slightly softened, the shores seen through a scrim of salt that gave them the quality of memory, of things not quite present, not quite past, suspended in the permanent almost-clarity that is the salt's gift to the glass.

By 8:30 the morning's rhythm was established. The crossings settled into the pattern that Harlan's body knew the way a metronome knows its beat — twenty-two minutes of crossing, twelve to fifteen minutes of loading and unloading, the intervals as regular as breathing, as involuntary, as essential. The 8:30 carried the late commuters and the first tourists — September tourists, the best kind, the kind who came after Labor Day when the island was quieter and the light was different and the air had the first edge of autumn in it, the edge that was not cold but was the memory of cold, the anticipation of cold, the knowledge that the warmth was leaving and the leaving made the warmth more present, more noticed, more precious.

The tourists walked the island's roads. Dunmore had nine miles of paved road — Island Road, the main artery, running the length of the island from the ferry terminal on the west shore to East Point on the far side, with branches to the harbor, to the school, to the cemetery on the hill, to the summer colony on the south end — and the roads were narrow, shoulderless, bordered by spruce and wild rugosa and the stone walls that previous generations had built from the fieldstones they cleared and that subsequent generations had allowed to collapse and that the tourists found picturesque, the picturesqueness of decay, the beauty of things falling apart slowly in a landscape that values the slow falling apart, that understands ruin as a stage of existence rather than a failure of maintenance.

The general store sat at the intersection of Island Road and Harbor Road, the island's only intersection with a stop sign, the stop sign installed in 1987 after a summer person driving too fast in a rental car nearly struck a child on a bicycle, and the stop sign's installation had been, at the time, a subject of intense debate, because a stop sign implied traffic and traffic implied a density that the island did not have and did not want, and the stop sign was a concession to the mainland's way of organizing movement, a way that assumed speed and volume and risk, none of which the island had experienced in sufficient quantity to justify a sign, but the near-miss with the child had provided the justification and the sign was installed and was now, thirty-five years later, as much a part of the intersection as the road itself, the debate forgotten, the sign accepted, the child grown and gone.

Mere's store. A white building with a green-painted porch, two gas pumps in front — the island's only gas, delivered by tanker truck on the ferry every Thursday — and a sign above the door that said DUNMORE GENERAL STORE in letters that Mere had painted herself, black on white, the lettering neat and square and entirely without decoration, because Mere was a woman who did not decorate, who believed that a thing should say what it was and look like what it was and that the saying and the looking were sufficient, were more than sufficient, were in fact superior to any embellishment, because embellishment was a form of apology, a confession that the thing itself was not enough, and Mere's store was enough.

The store stocked what the island needed. Canned goods, dry goods, bread — baked on the mainland and delivered on the morning ferry, the loaves still warm if the delivery was on time, which it usually was because the delivery driver was consistent and the ferry was consistent and the consistency of both produced bread that arrived in Mere's store at 8:15 most mornings with the particular warmth of a thing that has been recently made, and the warmth was not just temperature but was also connection, evidence of the supply chain that linked the island to the mainland, the chain whose links were the baker and the driver and the ferry and Mere and the customer, and the chain was 1.4 miles long at its weakest point, at the point where the water intervened, and the bridge would eliminate this weakness, would make the chain continuous, unbroken, and the unbrokenness would mean that the bread would arrive differently, not on the ferry but in a truck, not at 8:15 but whenever the truck arrived, and the whenever would replace the consistency and the consistency was, Mere knew, the thing the island would miss, not the ferry itself but the schedule the ferry imposed, the rhythm the ferry created, the discipline of tides and times that organized the island's day as surely as the sun organized its light.

Milk. Eggs. Butter. Coffee. Beer — twelve-packs of Budweiser and Shipyard and, since 2018, a rotating selection of craft beer from a brewery in Camden that Mere stocked because the summer people expected it and the summer people's expectations, like the stop sign, had been resisted and then accepted and then absorbed into the store's identity, so that the craft beer was now as much a part of the inventory as the Budweiser, and the coexistence of the two was the store's way of holding the island's two populations — the year-round and the seasonal — in the same space, on the same shelves, served by the same woman who knew that the Budweiser customer and the craft beer customer were both her customers and that the distinction between them, while real, was not as important as the fact that they both came to her store, both stood at her counter, both participated in the transaction that was not just commerce but community, the exchange of money for goods that was also the exchange of presence for belonging.

The noon crossing was the quietest. By noon the morning's business was done — the lobstermen were on the water, the commuters were at work, the schoolchildren were at school, the tourists were walking or eating or sitting on the granite shelves watching the sea — and the noon ferry carried the miscellaneous: a plumber from Port Clement coming to fix a pipe, a woman returning from a medical appointment, a UPS truck with packages for the island, the packages that had traveled from warehouses across the country to arrive at this dock, on this ferry, on this island, the last mile of the last mile, the final increment of a logistics chain that ended at Mere's store or at a doorstep or at the post office, the small white building beside the school where Doris French sorted the mail and knew every name and every box number and could tell you, without looking, whether the package in her hand was expected or surprising, because she had been sorting the island's mail for nineteen years and the mail was, like the ferry, a daily account of the island's life, its bills and its letters and its catalogs and its medications and its verdicts and its invitations, the paper record of 380 lives carried across the water twice a day in a canvas sack.

The 2:30 was the afternoon crossing, the crossing that carried the rhythm's turn, the day beginning to lean toward evening. The light changed. September light on the Maine coast in the afternoon was long and lateral, coming from the west, from behind Port Clement, so that the crossing from the mainland to the island was a crossing into the light, into the glare that the water amplified and that the wheelhouse windows filtered and that Harlan navigated by squinting and by knowing, by the knowledge that did not require sight, that could close its eyes and find the channel anyway.

The 3:30 return carried the schoolchildren home. They boarded at Port Clement with the expanded energy of young people released from school, the energy that was the opposite of the morning's momentum, that was not routine but relief, not propulsion but escape, and they sat in the passenger cabin or, when Harlan was feeling lenient and the weather was calm, on the benches on the afterdeck, the open deck at the stern above the car deck where the wind was and the spray was and the feeling of the crossing was most acute, most physical, the water visible below and the wake spreading behind and the island ahead, growing, approaching, home.

Sophie Ames played the cello in the passenger cabin sometimes. Not performing — practicing, the same passage repeated and repeated, the bow moving across the strings in the enclosed space so that the cabin filled with a sound that was not music yet but was becoming music, was in the process of becoming, and the becoming was audible to Harlan through the wheelhouse floor, the sound traveling through the Constance's structure the way vibrations travel through any body, through steel and wood and glass, and the cello's becoming-music mixed with the engine's hum and the water's sound and the wind's sound and the result was not cacophony but composition, the crossing's own music, unintentional, unrepeatable, the soundtrack of a particular afternoon on a particular day in a particular September.

The 5:00 carried the afternoon workers home — the teacher, the nurse practitioner, the construction workers. The construction workers boarded at the Dunmore terminal with their hard hats and their high-visibility vests and their lunch coolers and their fatigue, the particular fatigue of people who work with their bodies in the open air, the fatigue that is not sleepiness but weight, the heaviness of muscles that have been used, and they sat in the passenger cabin and some of them slept and some of them looked at their phones and none of them looked out the salt-hazed windows at the channel, because the channel was, for them, not a crossing but a commute, not a passage but a delay, the twenty-two minutes between work and home that they endured rather than experienced, and their endurance was not indifference but was the way that frequency diminishes wonder, the way anything done daily becomes invisible, becomes the background against which other things are seen.

Harlan did not judge them for this. He had no right to judge them. He crossed the channel sixteen times a day and the channel was not, for him, invisible — it was the opposite of invisible, it was the most visible thing in his life, the thing he saw most clearly and most constantly — but this was not virtue. This was vocation. The channel was visible to him because the channel was his work, and when a thing is your work you see it with the clarity that only work provides, the clarity of attention paid not once but daily, not as a visitor but as an inhabitant, and the clarity was not wisdom but habit, and the habit was not a choice but an accumulation, thirty-four years of the same channel producing a vision of the channel so detailed and so intimate that it could not be called seeing anymore but something else, something closer to knowing, something closer to being.

The 7:00 was the evening crossing, the crossing in the changed light, the light that was not the day's light but the evening's, the light that was leaving, that was pulling itself from the water and the land and the sky the way the tide pulls itself from the shore, gradually, reluctantly, leaving behind the particular color of its going, which was not darkness but the threshold of darkness, the moment before darkness, the moment when the world is still visible but only just, and the visibility is precious because it is ending, and the preciousness of the ending is a thing that only the ending reveals.

The harbor. The moorings. The boats at rest. The store closed now, Mere's lights off, the gas pumps dark. The school dark. The church — St. Anne's, Episcopal, white clapboard, the steeple visible from the channel on clear days — dark. The island settling into itself, into its evening self, which was quieter and smaller and more itself than its daytime self, because the daytime self was the self that engaged with the mainland, that sent its children and its workers and its lobstermen across the water, and the evening self was the self that remained, that stayed, that was the island without the crossing, the island in its own company.

The 9:30 was the last crossing. The last ferry from Port Clement to Dunmore. After 9:30 the island was an island again, fully, completely, accessible only by private boat, and the inaccessibility was not isolation but sovereignty, the island's assertion of its own separateness, its own identity as a place apart, a place that could not be reached by simply driving, by simply arriving, but that required the intention of a crossing, the commitment of a ticket and a schedule and a 22-minute passage over water that was dark and cold and indifferent to your reasons for crossing it.

The last crossing of the day carried the remainders. The late diners returning from restaurants in Port Clement. The high school students who had stayed for practice or rehearsal or the simple desire to be on the mainland longer, to be among the larger population, the greater number, the more. An occasional stranger who had missed an earlier ferry and who sat in the passenger cabin with the slight anxiety of a person who is not sure the last ferry is really the last ferry, who keeps looking at the schedule on the wall — a laminated copy of the hand-lettered board in the Port Clement terminal — as though the schedule might change, might add a later crossing, might offer one more chance.

There was never one more chance. The 9:30 was the 9:30. After the 9:30 the Constance docked at Dunmore and Tommy swept the car deck and Harlan shut down the engines and checked the systems and made his final entries in the log and walked up Island Road to the apartment above Mere's store where Tommy lived, and they parted at the door without ceremony, without conversation beyond the necessary, and Harlan walked back to the terminal and boarded the 10:00 water taxi back to Port Clement, Eddie Crane's skiff, the reverse of Tommy's morning commute, and the water taxi crossed the dark channel in eight minutes because the water taxi was smaller and faster and did not carry the weight of eighteen cars and the responsibility of two hundred passengers and the history of 131 years of scheduled service.

Nine round trips. Eighteen crossings. 396 minutes on the water. The day measured in 22-minute intervals, each interval the same and each different, each carrying its own cargo and its own passengers and its own light and its own tide and its own weather, and the sameness and the difference were not contradictions but were the crossing's essential quality, its nature, its way of being the same thing over and over in a world that was never the same, and the being-the-same was not rigidity but faithfulness, not stubbornness but devotion, and the devotion was the ferry's and the captain's and the channel's and the island's, all of them devoted to the crossing, all of them sustained by it, all of them about to lose it.

The island at night was dark in a way that the mainland had forgotten darkness could be. No streetlights except at the terminal and the store. No traffic. The roads empty, the houses lit from within, the windows bright against the dark, each window a statement about the people inside — here we are, still here, still on the island, still home — and the statements accumulated into a constellation that was the island seen from the water, seen from the Constance's wheelhouse on the evening crossings, a scattering of lights that said: inhabited, alive, present.

Three hundred and eighty lights. Fewer every year. More every summer. The fluctuation was the island's heartbeat, the systole and diastole of a community that expanded and contracted with the seasons, that breathed in the summer people and breathed them out in September, and the breathing was the island's commerce and the island's compromise, the deal it had struck with the mainland — you may come, you may stay, you may buy our houses and drink our beer and walk our roads, but you may not stay forever, because the staying-forever is ours, the year-round-ness is ours, the winter is ours, and the winter is when the island is most fully itself, most honest, most bare.

The bridge would end the breathing. The bridge would make the island always accessible, always reachable, always connected, and the always-connected was the thing that some islanders wanted and some feared and some accepted and none fully understood, because the always-connected was new, was unprecedented, was a condition that Dunmore Island had never experienced in its 200 years of settlement, and the unprecedented is, by definition, unknowable, and the unknowable is, by nature, frightening, and the fright was in the air this September the way the salt was in the air, invisible, pervasive, tasted on the tongue.

The island slept. The Constance slept at her dock. The channel moved between them in the dark, the water doing what the water did, what the water always did, what the water would do after the ferry and the bridge and the island's current name and the island's current population had been replaced by whatever came next, the water's indifference not cruel but geological, not cold but ancient, the patience of a thing that has been crossing this channel since the glacier left and will be crossing it still when the glacier returns.