The last present under our Christmas tree was the late Dorothy Simpson’s book The Island’s True Child sent by a friend from the island where we summer and where, from about 1907 to 1944, Dot Simpson had grown up. When our house was quiet again, I began to read her memoirs of a childhood on Criehaven. Four pages into the book, I knew I had a gem in my hands and read through to the last page at midnight.
I found it so plainly eloquent and appealing, so pure in voice. And yet the complexity of feeling it harbors is full of craft. I could barely describe it to others for fear of falsely embellishing a telling that was so true to form and spoke simply for itself. The dialogue fits so naturally. Each different episode or chapter unfolds so seamlessly. It is written for all islanders at heart – particularly those who lobster for a living or spend summers on a working Maine island and ponder what life in the early 1900s was like to live year-round on such an outpost. It is a story she tells with exuberance, humor and mischievousness while sustaining the hard truths and trials of life on a tiny island tossed furthest out to sea in Penobscot Bay. In those days, boats were small and engines not very powerful, so the 20-mile journey between island and mainland was a considerable gulf not often crossed. It wasn’t until Dot Simpson was 12 years old that she made her first trip off the island and across the bay to Rockland.
Criehaven was the small settlement on Ragged Island; and in 1879, Robert Crie (pronounced “Cree”) owned pretty much the entire island, running it as his own private plantation with extensive farming, lumbering and a fish salting and packing operation including a supply store. A school and post office had been established by 1896 and a mailboat/ferry service (a pitifully small gasoline launch) began shortly thereafter. By the 1900s “King” Crie’s grip had loosened, and fishermen and their families were able to acquire land and settle on the island to lobster, fish and farm. The community was then comprised of about 44 residents.
Flowing through Dot’s memories is the compelling portrayal of her stepfather Herman Simpson, one of three tall, imposing lumberjack brothers who, in the late 1800s, set out from Bucksport in a dory for Ragged Island to try to make a living on this remote plot. Charismatic and complex, Herman remained single until his mid-30s when he married her mother Agnes Anderson, who was living on the island with her Norwegian parents after her first marriage failed. Two-and-a-half years old and knowing no other father, Dorothy was drawn to her stepfather, “wandering around in his wake,” captivated by his tales, learning to respect his tolerant values (though not accepting of all of them), and adoring the light of his presence – especially when he returned from weeks away fishing for halibut. In spite of her own stubbornness and proclivity for “Getting into Things,” he allowed her to be a tomboy, teaching her to handline for fish with him in his tubby small boat, to take to the woods in winter to cut trees for firewood, to knit trapheads and baitbags and whittle wood boats. But most of all she liked to row his 15-foot lapstrake dory, taking her brothers and sisters with her to pick up firewood from the cove beaches down the far side of the island.
The strong and seaworthy dory was easy for her to row and, at age 14, represented a freedom from the confines of a large family bumping around in tight quarters. “At night, when the village was quiet, with tired men sleeping soundly, unaware of bright starlight or soft white moonglow, I would slip out of the house and take the dory, rowing toward the mouth of the harbor…There I’d drift…watching the stars reflected in the water, or the path of moonlight broad and golden. I would think of words to describe what I saw… I knew it looked foolish to them [her parents]: Why get out of a warm bed and go out into the night alone? I couldn’t explain it even to myself.”
A one-room schoolhouse provided her early schooling, though it was necessary for a child to live on the mainland for high school. Enamored of books, Dorothy read everything that had ever made it to the island. A married Crie daughter loaned her books from her library; and a summer family yearly left the new books they’d carried out. From the classics she began to understand that she too could salvage her deepest feelings with words. She began to walk and dream with words. So the joyous yet plaintive imprint of the island on her heart became “the lonely beauty that breathed all around me.” Later in life, when she lived on Gay’s Island off Friendship, she would write and see published her book The Maine Islands in Story and Legend as well as six novels for young adults based on island life.
She was the eldest of 10 children. One died young and one was stillborn. It remained her stepfather’s conviction that one ought to “have as many children as the good Lord sends you.” By the time Herman was almost 60 years old, with a big family of young children, he had created a burden that drove them into poverty, with four of the youngest having to leave to live with relatives and never really knowing their own father as she had thought of him – “a proud and gentle eagle” who had tenderly led his eldest daughter through a sometimes stormy childhood. She wrote these journals so that his family might know the strong and kind man he had once been, “wiry and quick on his feet, sharp and keen of eye, full of stories and laughter, and tender as a woman when he rocked his babies to sleep or comforted them when they awoke from bad dreams.”
The Island’s True Child is taken from Dorothy Simpson’s unpublished journals dating to 1930 which, after her death in 1998, were fortunately put in the hands of her niece Dorothy Elisabeth Simpson by Dot’s lifelong friend Elisabeth Ogilvie, the novelist. How sublime that her namesake, who herself spent part of her childhood on Criehaven, took charge of her aunt’s box of manuscripts, old letters and journals and quickly recognized the poignant and enchanting beauty of her writing. We shall hope that more gems will be brought to light.
Robin de Campi spent her first summer on Criehaven in 1940. She maintains that you can’t get there from here; and if you ever do, you have to bring everything with you.
