Indeed.
As I write, it is mid-September, that most glorious time of year in New England. The sky is blue, the apples are red, and the school kids wear new shoes. We have had the most delightful summer in anybody’s memory. The airplane flew nearly every day, the EMTs mostly got to stay home and work their other jobs, the lobsters moved a bit, and the potatoes grew like a jungle. Today is one of those days which invites a general sense of gratitude. It’s been a summer like that–we’ve had much more sunshine, much less fog, far fewer troubles than some years-and we who are privileged to live here would do well to let ourselves feel good about it.
We may have to muster up our well-known islander’s penchant for defiance in order to do so.
The rest of the world, or at least most of the journalists in it, might rather we were foaming at the mouth. Lately, we’ve endured the tabloidization of Matinicus Island. On the mid-summer anniversary of last year’s shooting, the Associated Press slipped out to Matinicus. Absolutely nothing newsworthy happened here that day, but we were still on the front page of the Bangor Daily News, with headlines about “lobster wars.”
The best part was that AP reporter’s failed attempt at subterfuge. He was supposedly only here to interview a local fisherman who is doing it the old-fashioned way and hauling from a Matinicus peapod. He accidentally dropped his notebook in my bakery when he came for an early morning coffee and had to call up, identify himself, and ask me to look for it. No, I didn’t read it. Yes, I figured out pretty quickly why he was really here.
We might chuckle over how some writers, as they search for the dirt on us, don’t know a spruce from a pine tree (odd that one magazine geared toward hikers and outdoorsmen would publish that our island hosts “pine forests”). They plaster on the hyperbole and revel in the violence as if they were writing a screenplay for a B movie. Mean-spirited “quotes” are creatively spliced together to embarrass an unwitting respondent. Carefully rehearsed theatrics directed at easily-suckered journalists are mistaken for heartfelt, spontaneous commentary, and this entire community is portrayed as a snake pit of the first water.
Even the former sternman who writes for one of the southern Maine papers likes to play up our hooliganism. Read it and wince.
Another writer conducts interviews through his oft-denied but still evident pre-existing notions. As a gregarious Matinicus homeowner regales him with excited stories of spirited community activity, he buttonholes her with something like “…but wouldn’t you say that Matinicus is failing?”
Not really.
So, as I wander down the sun-dappled gravel road to the little island store for a pint of ice cream before the place closes up for the season, I mull over the benign concerns of autumn… firewood, planting the next year’s garlic crop, fresh applesauce for supper. Why would anybody want to live here? Good question. After all, we read how Matinicus is a “fist of an island,” where you “hitch a ride” on the mail plane (actually, that’s not how it works), dial four-digit phone numbers (not in the last 15 years we haven’t), think of electrical wiring as “detritus” (never) and where we sit around spouting “red-clawed maxims” (what?).
Look, I’m not unrealistic. I live here. I get as angry as the next person when my feelings are exploited by small-town political manipulation, my lifestyle is imposed upon by a pompous snob with an overblown sense of entitlement, or my safety is threatened by somebody else’s dangerous recreation. All is not sweetness and light on Matinicus, but is it anywhere? This is a real town. This is not a commune of like-minded separatists, not a planned community or a museum piece cast in a block of Lucite. The rough aspects of life are only different in the specifics–say, lobster fights rather than random street crime (of which, by the way, we have none). Islands shouldn’t be held to a higher standard than Portland, just because mainlanders like to think of them as a “simpler life.” That “simpler life” thing is a load of nonsense. The intense colors, the striking beauty, the appeal of this island on a bright fall day are quite real.
More real, perhaps, than all the “renegade crustacean gangs” in the papers.