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To Have and Have Not

by Eva Murray

People often talk about the islands, especially the smaller and more remote islands, in terms of what they don’t have. I think this is intended to make them, or maybe I should say “us,” sound either fragile and quaint or else really bad-ass. Oh my goodness: no store! Wow, really? How do you manage? Oh, and by the way, no doctor (“How do you dare raise your children where there is no doctor?”) Also no sports (Ditto: “How can you possibly raise children where there are no sports?”) No police (now, that makes for some interesting speculation). No high school. No restaurants. Nowhere to buy the New York Times (or, for that matter, the BDN). Would you want to live in such a desolate and uncivilized hamlet?

I’m not sure what amusing paperwork comes across George’s desk in the Town Office these days, but back when I worked at City Hall not long ago I had to fill out forms requesting the streetlight inventory, and answer questions about which ski areas and nuclear power plants stood within the municipal boundaries.

We do not have any ski areas or nuclear power plants. We have a streetlight.

We don’t have a café or a gas station or a zoning board or a harbormaster. We don’t have a daily ferry or mailboat or any way across the water that isn’t both expensive and weather-dependent. We don’t have paved roads or RFD mail delivery or cell phone service or reliable TV reception. Through the 2014-15 school year we did not have any elementary school kids, but our little school is most emphatically not closed.

It is true that we have no law enforcement, and they say we have no rules. “No rules” means I can have a soft-coal-burning blacksmith shop in my backyard and we nerds can contemplate a regular forest of ham radio antennas. Without the busybody-meddling of condo associations and strict covenants, we pile up lobster traps, hang out our undershorts on the clothesline, scatter work trucks around the premises like some people collect lawn art, and sit bollicky-bare-nekkid in our hot tubs with none to spy us except for Google Earth and the International Space Station. Of course, “no rules” also means the neighbors have no rules, and not everybody was raised to be particularly considerate. Oh well; freedom like this does have a price.

But this tiny community which lacks so much is gathering for movie nights at the school, CPR and First Aid classes, meetings about broadband internet and LED lighting and other improvements, and just-for-fun stuff ranging from yoga classes to the Saturday Night Fights. We’re looking into what would be involved in starting a library (we have a committee, two hundred bucks, and a list of people we could potentially name it after). We just bought a new tractor for the very informal public works so we can move snow better next year, should we get another Arctic winter. We’re having community suppers just because it’s a good feeling to get everybody together and eat, and damned if we aren’t a bunch of hellish good cooks out here. There is music at Rock the Dock and Wreck the Deck, and we had an over-the-top Fourth of July, and we’ll soon celebrate the 21st annual Feast of the Strawberry Daiquiri in honor of this island’s famous and ancestral Red Dahlias.

We also have resources not every larger town can offer. When the nor’easters and hurricanes come through, and trees come down on the power lines putting customers in the dark, citizens on other islands-- those with cables to the mainland--as well as folks way down the peninsulas or way up in the woods have to wait. They might wait a long time. People could be tempted to think to themselves, “I sure wish we had a bucket truck right here, close by, in the neighborhood, and somebody who knows how to shut the power off at the station, so all us regular guys can go out and clear the trees, and then our own local lineman can go up there and replace those line fuses and we can get back to normal before the meat spoils in my deep-freeze.”

We have that. Our power outages are typically short because as a rule we can find and fix the problem and get the lights back on just as soon as the weather permits safe work. Not bad for a place considered nearly third-world by those who care which newspaper they read.

What would you give to live in a place where every little child in school has a close and warm relationship with their teacher? Where the electricians, plumbers, appliance repairmen, telephone service technicians and Internet guys can be prevailed upon to figure out some sort of emergency fix, even on holidays and weekends? Where the death of an islander results in all the neighbors pitching in to dig the grave, clean the church, transport the relatives, and make the refreshments? Where kids always have the option of playing outside, riding bikes or scrambling across the rocks or building “forts” in the woods?

How would it feel to live where all of your neighbors come running when you get hurt? I can tell you because I know: it feels pretty danged good. Four years ago, late in the afternoon of a (thankfully) hot sunny day, four of us found ourselves in 90 feet of briny deep to the north of this island, bashed up to varying degrees and clinging to a piece of floating fiberglass. I need not and will not recount details of the accident but would like to brag about this remote outpost of supposed outlaws and every-man-for-himselfers. Before long a line of boats that resembled nothing so much as the Stonington Boat Races came for us. The first two vessels took us aboard, but that heroic bit would have been done by any mariner. Once on land, we who were wet, cold, and injured were cared for by a great many folks who never dreamt when they woke up that morning that they would be “first responders.”

Here, where we have so little, we have so much more than most people.