O U T   H E R E   I N   T H E   R E A L   W O R L D

Civic Duty

by Eva Murray

By 8 a.m., the morning of a certain Tuesday in early November, I was mixing up eggs and sugar and flour and apple cider and cinnamon and nutmeg, with the lard heating up in the black iron kettle and, I assumed, several neighborhood dogs already circling the homestead on account of the smell of hot grease. Well, it has happened before.

It has become something of a tradition that we have homemade doughnuts on Election Day, as well as for other island gatherings such as important public meetings, funerals, visits by the State Police Bomb Squad, etc. Usually Election Day is a quiet affair where a few islanders show up to do their civic duty and then sit around and chew the fat for an hour or two, while the Municipal Clerk and two other ballot clerks knit socks through the considerable idle time between the start-up paperwork and the count-up paperwork 10 hours later.

Not this year. Busy place, the Old Schoolhouse, home of all municipal bureaucracy, power bills, school district accounts payable, and where you go to deal with your $250 Vehicle Disposal Deposit, that being this town’s one and only local ordinance. The Old Schoolhouse, now used as the Town Office, was our one-room school until the mid-1960s, and still offers the convenience of a two-holer attached outhouse, with seats at the right heights for the very smallest sort of elementary scholars.

This Election Day, a technician (and by using this term I do not mean to damn with faint praise; I just don’t know Steve’s real job title. To us he is an electrical engineering genius of the first water and I am not being funny) is making a valiant effort to repair the Digi-Weather Automated Weather Observation Station (AWOS). This is the aviation weather station for the Matinicus Airport, the private strip designated “35ME” upon which we rely for mail and freight and emergency response and Chinese food. The weather apparatus is at the airport, of course, but the Internet connection and much of the other electronics is inside the Town Office. Up-to-date weather information is supposed to go out on demand over aviation radio, and be accessed by telephone and by Internet. Steve travels all over the world, to places like Montana and Timbuktu and Greenville and Vinalhaven, to fix these aviation weather stations. We’re very glad he’s here, and we urge him to have a doughnut.

An artist named Howie sits at the big table in the middle of the room, trying to get a word in edgewise every once in a while to explain the island photography project he’s hoping to do, while the somewhat-interested ballot clerks scramble around to finish setting up, making coffee and handing ballots to the occasional voter. Meanwhile, Steve bolts in and out, running between the town office and the weather station at the airstrip ¾ mile to the north, usually in George’s pickup truck. George, the town administrator, then gets stuck on the phone with some dope on a “tech help desk” as he attempts to sort out a wonky computer printer. I lend Steve my jeep, he drives back to the airport, and is gone for a while. Upon return, he calls the air service to get a flight off the island, thinking the electrical problem with the weather station all resolved. He leaves. I then lend my jeep to Howie to go check out possible photography sites. Then, Steve comes back, having discovered on the flight off Matinicus that the weather still could not be accessed by aviation radio. I tell him Howie has the jeep.

Next door, at the so-called New Schoolhouse, now easily 50 years old, the kids are on lunch break. Laura, who helps out in school a few hours a day, has just purchased the piece of property across the road from the school and decides that now would be a nice day to move four cows to their new home. There hadn’t been cows on Matinicus since around 1950, until last year when Laura decided to bring two pregnant Dexters out on the ferry. Anyone with any sense would have advised against it, but she made her little farmstead work beautifully, and now, the herd of four is getting a permanent island situation. Anyway, as we process voters, the two mommy cows and Wanda the calf do a fine job of walking to their new pasture, but Darlene the other calf hangs back, loses sight of the others, and balks. Soon, the road is full of people ogling the stray calf, which doesn’t do much for her anxiety, I’m sure. At this point our fishing village needs a cowboy.

So Howie’s sitting here trying to calmly explain his intentions for a somewhat complicated bit of art, and Steve’s tearing in and out of the building in a dead run trying to fix the wiring on the weather station, and there’s a befuddled baby cow in the middle of the road. Lacey is standing at the ballot box having just dropped her vote in, and sees a cow in the road and says, “Gotta go!” Lacey has an ability few on a remote fishing island possess these days, which is skill with large livestock. She knows she is needed.

People always ask us, “What do you people DO all day out there on that island?”

We had the real honor of some first-time voters this Election Day, including Craig, our new citizen formerly of New Zealand, who brought his passport even though we didn’t need to see it. Voting for President of the U.S. is no small thing to a person who has gone to the trouble to become a citizen, and we all smiled about the big moment. Then we all ate some more doughnuts.

Later that afternoon we discovered that the phones were out. We could call on-island, but not off. This would make reporting the election results to the newspapers a bit difficult. The local TDS Telecom tech guy got a call—probably several—and he somehow got word to his boss up the line (how he did this I am not sure). Eventually we found out that the problem was in the microwave link between Swan’s Island and Bass Harbor. Our phone signal gets bounced dish to dish up the bay and all over the place before it hits the mainland, so there are plenty of places for a problem that we can’t fix here. We were reassured that we could call Swan’s Island or Isle au Haut, just not Rockland or anywhere like that. As no major election-reporting media outlets seem to be based on Isle au Haut, the Town Clerk hoped for a resolution sometime that evening. To put things in perspective, though, the lack of results from perhaps the smallest town in the state would likely not put the kaibosh to the 11 o’clock news.

We did have a backup plan. Every Tuesday evening the local Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service (RACES) group holds a “net,” which is a scheduled radio chat, more or less for practice so that in the event of a communications emergency everybody knows their equipment works. I figured I’d start up my 2-meter radio, tune to one of the Knox County repeaters and, as KC1BBH and a RACES member in good standing, inform the fellow acting as “net control” (usually Mike from the Water Company) that Matinicus Island needed to send election results to the Bangor Daily News by way of ham radio because the phones were down.

However, after a couple of hours and quite a few calls to the Town Office from the TDS Telecom local field service technician--who endeavored to keep us up-to-date, while he also happened to be assembling a large macaroni and cheese for delivery to the polling place--the phone problem at Bass Harbor got fixed. The ham radio guys would not be required to save the day that evening.

About that macaroni and cheese: it has become Election Day custom that Paul the phone man makes us ballot clerks a hot dish supper. Sometimes it’s a homemade mac and cheese, sometimes it’s “beef” stew in the crockpot, which people like even better if the “beef” more or less resembled Bullwinkle once. Other traditions include having the school kids come by and see what goes on, which is easily done with a school population you can usually count on one hand.

On top of it all, George surprised us with homemade chocolate ice cream! After three bowls of macaroni and cheese, following a lunch of basically doughnuts, a bowl of homemade ice cream was absolutely what I needed. By the time 8 p.m. rolled around and we were ready to count the votes, I could just about breathe. The ice cream was astonishing. I dearly hope that also becomes tradition.

Matinicus Isle Plantation had 53 votes cast, which for this place was a damned good turnout. I figure we have between 75 and 80 voters. The uncertainty comes from all the former sternmen on the list, who have left the island and we assume will probably not be coming back, but technically the town clerk can’t just take them off the rolls with a simple pencil stroke. It’s supposed to be hard to get somebody’s name off a voter list, and there are good reasons for that. In any case, we had at least a two-thirds voter turnout, which I have never seen before in a couple of decades of election work.

Maybe the stomachache I had the next morning had mostly to do with overeating, and maybe the headache I had the next morning had mostly to do with staying up late tabulating votes. Sure it was. Uh huh.