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In and Out of Focus

by Eva Murray

The frequently foggy Quoddy Head Light in Lubec. About 125 miles east, as the crow flies, of the less well marked Matinicus. NOAA photo

I’m sitting here, watching the fog go up and down, or “scale up” and “sock in,” if you want to be meteorologically precise. This common atmospheric phenomenon causes the 100-foot TDS Telecom tower to go in and out of focus like a bad amateur video. That telephone tower, its big dishes bringing the microwave communications signal beamed over the water from Stonington or Owls Head to island land-line and Internet subscribers, is one-third of a mile from my window, roughly, and it is our “weather stick.” Sometimes the weather is “I can’t see the telephone tower.” That means more than a little foggy.

The process of being stuck on this rock generally involves pacing the floor, hovering around the telephone, remarking on the blurriness of the aforementioned large piece of communications infrastructure, thinking every faint hint of neighborhood engine noise might be a far-off airplane, and a generous amount of teeth-grinding. One feels obligated to a continuous monitoring of aviation weather surface observations and NOAA marine forecasts and cute, colorful weather websites, as they update each hour, as though one had nothing else to do.

This is all about trying to get off the island, and not because I particularly wish to leave right now. I actually don’t, as my husband is here, and he’s a nice fellow and he has ice cream. But I have a job to do that requires me on that side, and that is to procure a U-Haul. I will then load it with several people’s large freight items--stuff not ideally suited for delivery behind the seats of a Cessna 206, like a bed, an armload of 12-foot drip edge, and a pallet of flour-- truck it to the island on the ferry, unload with the help of a dozen able volunteers to whom I will later owe sticky buns, load the same truck with a ton and a half of neatly sorted garbage, drive back aboard the ferry as the deck crew impatiently throws the lines off, and sail for the dump.

As you can probably make out, it has not been flyable for several days. Tomorrow doesn’t look too promising either. As you may or may not already know, we don’t exactly get a ferry every day.

Various neighbors stop by through the afternoon to deliver sundry tidbits of negativity and gloom. One friend assures me my options look bleak. Another fellow comes by and says he doesn’t think there’s any point anyway because he doesn’t think they’ll run the ferry because it’s supposed to be “breezy.” That is a polite euphemism for blowing a gale. I hope he’s wrong. We only get 30 ferries a year, and we need this trip.

The airplane can’t get here because of the low ceiling, and the regular passenger boat captain is in Texas doing his annual veterinary continuing education requirement, because said captain is also a veterinarian. As it happens, he is also a carpenter, an emergency responder, and most of City Hall, but that’s how it is around here. Anyway, about fifteen people have announced to me that they have discovered that George is in Texas. “Yes, George is in Texas.” Some of them seem to suggest, “Well, how inconvenient.” Let ’em go ahead and think that way when their dog is sick.

Jim, the other passenger boat captain, does not seem to be within earshot of his telephone. At first, we suspect he is probably on Criehaven. We commence to bothering other people from Criehaven to see if anybody knows where Jim is. Before we eventually find a ride across the bay we will have managed to pester pretty much everybody. Turns out Jim is not on Criehaven.

Each time the fog thins a bit, and the telephone tower gets slightly more crisp and distinct, and the sky tries to blue up overhead, I stare at the phone like a 9th-grader hoping the cute boy will call. If I stare at it hard enough, will it ring? Of course, a small patch of blue sky does not Visual Flight Rules make, and there is something distinctly dangerous about the temptation known as the “sucker hole.”

I call Kevin, the boss at the air service, way too many times-- but not to nag him to send a pilot toward Matinicus on just my say-so. Unlike some other air taxi customers I will never, ever misrepresent the conditions here to encourage them to strike out just because I believe my need to travel overrules common sense, the past experience of seasoned pilots, Part 135 of the Code of Federal Regulations, and any instinct toward self-preservation. Some, inexplicably, do not always see it that way. While loitering around the Penobscot Island Air office at the Knox County Regional Airport, a thing I do with some frequency, I have heard people on islands lying through their teeth over the telephone to the dispatcher on days when the horizontal visibility was about a fathom and a half. You can make your own assumptions about who those aeronautically-undereducated, Type-A people might be. At any rate, it’s likely that my only reason to be there was to stash my milk and butter in the air service’s refrigerator, because the bush pilots could no more fly to an island than they could fly to Neptune. “Oh, no, it’s fine out here, nice and sunny, fair and clear, of course you can fly. Come get me!” the impatient travelers insist, thinking themselves terribly clever. Uh huh.

At any rate, as the civilized hours for the running of businesses wind down, and the telephone tower disappears entirely in the white murk, I begin working up plan B (or C or D or X.) It is only the trucking of garbage and appliances; somehow, we will make it work. Meanwhile, I’ll have some of that ice cream.