The world stands still where we are. And that small piece of planet is ours alone. However cluttered in crowds of colleagues, comrades, friends, or family, we each receive the messages of earth and respond to them, from our separate stance. Eva Murray’s stance on the small island of Matinicus, twenty-two miles out to sea, comes to us loud and clear, sometimes wry or ironic, and always with a realistic sense of humor about the realities of living off the edge of what much of the world considers the normal grid. “When you think ‘Matinicus’ you are probably thinking ‘vacation.’ Instead, think winter.”
Well Out To Sea is a collection of the many essays Murray has written for a number of publications during her twenty-three years as a year-round resident, ever since she answered an ad for a teacher at Matinicus’s one-room school. She taught one year, during which she met and married the island electrician. She went on to raise two children, and soon discovered that “it did not make life easy to appear even marginally un-self-sufficient.”
Matinicus, it is quickly apparent, is not a tourist mecca. It is a destination for hardy souls, able to deal with one unrelenting force: the weather. Many of the one hundred-or-so residents are the descendants of families that have abided by the contingencies of island living for decades. In winter, the population may sink to thirty-or-so people. Many of the lobstermen take themselves and their families to second houses on the mainland, returning in the spring.
Whatever the number living on the island at any time, it is a unifying force, knowing they depend on one another. “Sometimes,” Murray writes, “life is simpler here, I suppose, but sometimes this is most assuredly ‘the complicated life.’ Everybody is a potential snowplow crew. You get the idea…” And how to get in with people? That is, get accepted? “The answer is simply to show up for stuff… when there’s a fire… and not with your flip-flops on….”
From there we get the whole drift of daily life. But first one must face an ultimate truth: the chapter titled “Getting here is None of the Fun” introduces a theme that concurrently runs through every other phase of life on Matinicus: transportation. Getting on or off the island is a constant trial with sparse ferry arrivals and departures, or flights in a small Cessna, which may or may not be able to negotiate the fog or the wind. Shopping trips, appointments, the goings and comings of children in mainland high schools are never a certainty. Resourcefulness is surely bred in these children who have grown up on “The Rock”, as Matinicus is called with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
Murray’s essays are wonderfully intimate in their unvarnished truth. She has played many roles during her time on the island, diving into a multiplicity of jobs that bring her right into the lives of her fellow islanders: she is a trained wilderness emergency medical technician, operates a small bakery, has held several positions in the Matinicus municipal government and been a steady columnist, assuring the world that life does go on, and on, with all its pitfalls and joys, on this small dot in a broad ocean.
And so to have even an inkling of Eva Murray’s inventive, varied, very busy life, consider her total immersion in living with daily challenges-in many ways not so very different than those of a mainland dweller. Except. There is no store on the island, one must scrounge from a neighbor or fax carefully thought out lists to Shaw’s from which orders are eventually delivered by the infrequent ferry or the Cessna airplane. And when someone suggested the answer to the milk shortage would be to acquire a cow, Murray has ready answers for what could be a convenience but would actually be a major inconvenience, considering the lack of agricultural prospects of small Matinicus.
Such a warm-hearted book! It may re-kindle your hidden desires to live out on an island, with ocean vistas, brisk clear air (let’s say gales)-to make life “simpler.” Yes, leaving may require enormous plans-with a plan B and C or more-but then mayhap you will be one who will be hooked, fall into the wild routine and needs of islands. Chance their addictive qualities. Chance that dream deferred.