Summer has come to an end in the Cranberry Isles. The Beal and Bunker mailboat and Cranberry Cove ferry have shortened their schedules for the off-season and the Islesford Dock Restaurant is closed until next June. Though there are still daytime visitors who come by boat to wander the islands for an hour or so, our populations are back to their year round size of fewer than 100 people for each island. Quite a reduction from the 300 to 400 residents who stay here during the height of the summer!
Clear sunny days have accompanied the arrival of fall. We have spent the summer sharing our islands with friends who represent a cross section of a much larger world. At the season’s end we say good-bye to friends who have had us over for dinner, friends who want us to visit in the winter when we finally get some time off, and friends whose children will be lifelong friends of our own children. They have brought us tales of faraway places and eagerly listened to our stories of everyday life on the island they love. Sometimes the group of people we only get to see once a year is so concentrated that we lose sight of what a treat it is to have them here. We eagerly await September’s advent, sure that it will bring us a chance to finally catch our breath. When it does arrive, it brings with it an atmosphere that is hard to describe. There is a peculiar sense of yearning, a wistfulness to be endured before allowing ourselves to fully enjoy the incredible opportunity of spending the fall in the Cranberry Islands.
The change of seasons begins subtly during the last two weeks of August. One by one, at the homes of families whose presence we’ve come to take for granted, the yards seem abruptly bare. Bikes and Garden Way carts are stored for the winter, windows are closed, and the pleasant household sounds, carried out to the road by the breeze of a summer day, are stilled. It’s too early to head back to school… isn’t it? You wake up one morning to notice that the wonderful variety of bird song has been replaced by the chirping of crickets. Instead of the rhythmic assortment of morning runners you may hear the footfall of only a few going by your window before you get out of bed. The groups of women who laughed and chatted as they burned off calories on their fast walks are replaced by solitary walkers who are tuned into iPods, or silent in their perambulatory meditation.
The new school year has begun with 13 students at the Islesford Elementary School on Little Cranberry Island. Between the kindergarten and eighth grade classes there is at least one student in every grade except third. Three of the students, Sofie Dowling, Casey Gustafson, and Joe Flores, commute daily by boat from Great Cranberry Island. Sofie, Louise Chaplin and Nathanael Philbrook are the new kindergarten students. Community members gathered in the schoolyard on the first day of school to watch the new students arrive. It has become an informal community event; a time to start catching up with the friends you knew would be here in the fall as you flew by on your bike in the summer giving them a wave and a weak desperate smile while rushing to get somewhere else.
I spent the first 23 years of my life coming to Islesford as a summer person. I cried every year when I left and dreamed about the island and our summer house until it was time to come back in June. I so envied the people who stayed on the dock and waved good-bye. To me they were the lucky ones with the idyllic life. In my childhood self pity at having to leave vacationland, I never thought about what it was like for my peers who stayed behind. In truth, my transition from summer vacation to the real world was pretty much finished by the end of a 14-hour car ride. I came home to a world I had forgotten about. There were friends and activities that were pretty exciting after a three-week hiatus.
My sister-in-law, Kelly Fernald, who grew up on Islesford, recently told me of her first childhood visit to the Massachusetts home of a summer family. She couldn’t figure out what was going on when she heard bells ringing in the distance and watched her friends race around the house to look for loose change. It was her first experience with an ice cream truck. “I thought I had died and gone to heaven!” she recalls. From then on it was a bit harder to take the tears of her departing friends seriously; “Sure, its so sad for you all to leave the island and go back to your ice cream trucks!”
Now we have been adults for a while. I am still married to Kelly’s brother, Bruce, the man who gave me a job as a sternman on his lobster boat when I moved to the island 31 years ago. We have grown sons who were raised on the island and graduated from the Islesford Elementary School. Kelly owns a successful sportswear business, Nomads, on Commercial Street in Portland. She lives with her partner Allison in a nice little neighborhood in South Portland where the ice cream truck really does come down her street. What do you know? We each got to live in the kind of place we dreamed about as children, when summer would end and we wistfully waved good bye. q
Islesford
Sept. 17, 2007