As Earl, the fifth named tropical depression of the 2010 hurricane season, organized himself off the coast of Africa at the end of August, and began spinning his way across the Atlantic, he grazed the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean before threatening the Outer Banks of North Carolina and the rest of the Atlantic coastline up to Maine over the long Labor Day weekend. Earl’s major economic damage came not from wrecked boats and property, but from sending countless millions of tourists fleeing the Atlantic coast’s barrier islands and beaches during what is usually the last big cash infusion of the summer.
Here in Maine, the dome of high pressure that settled over us for most of August steered Earl’s eye across the outer reaches of the Gulf of Maine, resulting in waves of sheeting rain, but mercifully few wind-driven waves that might have wreaked havoc on our shores, boats and houses. Nevertheless, lots of people canceled their Labor Day island plans and left a disappointing hole in the pocketbooks of many islanders.
Most of Maine’s island communities are more dependent on the relatively stable economics of summer residents rather than on itinerant tourists who, as the complaint goes, come to an island with a T-shirt and a five-dollar bill and change neither. So the blow, literal and figurative, left by Earl was lighter than along most of the rest of the Atlantic coastline’s communities.
I happened to visit two island communities-Monhegan and Isle au Haut-shortly before and shortly after Earl and was struck by their starkly different experiences with the economics of tourism. According to the report “Island Indicators” published by the Island Institute in 2008, Monhegan, with its private parklands managed by Monhegan Associates, generates over $3 million from tourism, while Isle au Haut, a part of Acadia National Park, generated less than a tenth as much-$250,000 or so-from its tourists.
The simple explanation for this large difference is that Monhegan, with its long history of attracting world-class artists (who need an audience) and a winter lobster season, has embraced the commercial nexus of summer tourism, while Isle au Haut has resisted. Or put a different way, their different histories have set the two island communities on different trajectories.
Monhegan began mixing paint and people at the turn of the 20th century when artists such as Robert Henri, Rockwell Kent and George Bellows began to make the island famous. Isle au Haut became part of the national park system in 1943, when the island’s largest landowner, the Bowditch family, donated half of the island to Acadia National Park. Because the boundaries of the national park on Isle au Haut were not permanently fixed until the early 1980s, islanders developed a deeply ingrained history of suspicion of the park’s potential to dominate their future. Therefore, they successfully resisted most efforts to increase tourists’ access to the park through the town, despite the fact that this is of course permitted since the wharf and roads are publicly owned. While Monhegan’s tourists land at the town wharf and walk through the inhabited end of the island on their way to the parklands, most of Isle au Haut’s park visitors are delivered to the far end of the island in Duck Harbor, bypassing the town altogether.
This arrangement on Isle au Haut seems to accommodate most everyone’s interests. Islanders on Isle au Haut are not besieged by tourists, as sometime even the most tourist-dependent Monhegan islander tires of, while hikers on Isle au Haut’s breathtakingly beautiful trails have the benefit of an authentic wilderness experience. In any event, there is only one business on Isle au Haut (aside from the boat company) that might benefit from more foot traffic, the wonderfully anomalous cottage industry of chocolate manufacturing called Black Dinah.
You come across Black Dinah Chocolate from a dirt road several miles south of the Isle au Haut town landing, and many more miles north of the Duck Harbor landing. Black Dinah, named for the rugged rock promontory from whose heights all of East Penobscot Bay is revealed, is the brainchild of Steve and Kate Schaeffer. Steve and Kate emigrated to Isle au Haut when Kate was hired as the chef at the inn in the converted lighthouse keeper’s cottage at Robinson Point, which marks the entrance to Isle au Haut Thorofare. When that inn closed, Kate, who had already moved from California to Bucksport and from Bucksport to Isle au Haut, told her husband she was not moving again. Necessity being the mother of invention, they decided to start a chocolate business, which given their complementary creative geniuses for baking and branding, has been wonderfully successful. Even Black Dinah’s remote location in the woods of Isle au Haut actually adds to their allure says Kate. When people stumble upon them, they are so charmed by their unbelievable discovery that it becomes quite personal, and so, “We get a customer for life,” says Kate.
Monhegan, by way of contrast, has a café at the head of the wharf, Lupine Gallery, which does a lively business just up the hill, many other artist’s galleries in artist’s homes, three inns, numerous rental cottages, several restaurants and two stores. In addition there are many other small businesses scattered about on the inhabited part of the island. You might think that Monhegan islanders are extroverts while Isle au Haut are introverts. But everyone on Monhegan breathes a deep sigh of relief when Labor Day is over.
Following the non-event of Earl’s Labor Day visit to Maine’s islands, there are expected to be significantly more tropical depressions forming off the coast of Africa, several of which will likely develop into hurricanes over the heated waters of the Atlantic. So far, the steering currents that direct whether any of these hurricanes will strike Maine’s shores have deflected them far to the east to sputter wildly over the Gulf Stream before the cold waters of the North Atlantic render them harmless. But as every sailor knows, winds are fickle and fluky, so it pays to keep a weather eye peeled, even if there are fewer tourists to scare away.
Philip Conkling is the president of the Island Institute.