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Revenge

by Eva Murray

I have a few regular readers who have endured a number of my columns, convinced themselves that they’ve seen “everything I’ve ever written” (highly improbable), and have appointed themselves the arbiters of style. They are no doubt a gentle and erudite crowd, these guys with the red pencils, and they are obviously entitled to write my editors with their opinions—and to find the typos—but here’s my worry: a couple of them have called me out for foisting onto the readership that most tedious and overworked of Maine folkloric themes, the Anti-Tourist Screed.

I plead not guilty, your honor.

I have typed a lot of words about Matinicus Island in the past 18 years of working as a regular columnist for a variety of newspapers, but I have never written that “we don’t like tourists here.” It would be the peak of pretense for me to use “we” in this context anyway, as I am not a Matinicus native and I know it. The stereotype is that Matinicus is violent, hostile, and historically unwelcoming to anybody new. There is likely no topic that I have addressed so frequently as the fallacy of stereotyping.

But, having digested more than they’d like of me sassing the starchy and the boorish among those who sojourn here, a couple of letter-writing subscribers have made the assumption that I am going after the tourists or the people “from away.” I must be making fun of the more poorly-behaved summer visitors because they are summer visitors. Those terms define a low-hanging fruit in Maine lore and—yawn, how boring, how trite. Sorry, dear reader: that wasn’t me. Besides, like I said—I’m from away, too.

The word “tourist” is used in Maine to refer to any dope from out of town who doesn’t know what you know. It’s a broad-brush word intended to be insulting. No, it is not whether you are a tourist that could see you ribbed in my humble scratchings; it’s whether you are a pain in the neck. There are year-round, native-born fishermen who fit this category at least as well as any cliché “outta-stater.” A few of them are spoiled, entitled blowhards who believe that command of forty-odd feet of work deck makes them Admiral Nelson at Trafalga. They were raised to believe that the sun rises and sets around their, uh, sterns, and they couldn’t wait their turn if their lives depended on it. These guys also respond to any source of stress (say, somebody getting badly injured and needing to be airlifted off the island, or the grill running out of propane) by running around shouting orders at the wind with more bluster and theatrics than Yosemite Sam in the “Mutiny on the Bounty” sketch.

There are plenty of other people I’d rather twit than tourists, anyway. A couple of the other writers who have taken my hometown as their subject have offered their readers an island steeped in drunkenness, vigilante law, sexual impropriety, harborside squalor, and a paranoid insularity that manifests in a village life resembling a junior-high school clique. I find this depiction exploitive and hackneyed. Get off my block.

The fact remains that most people are good people, and mean no harm, and most tourists—like most lobstermen—aren’t doing anything for which they need be judged. (The jury’s still out on most writers.) The few idiots who torque our jaws, hurt our feelings, and rattle our nerves are like that one brat kid in school: the teacher doesn’t go home with a headache muttering about the 25 other children, by far the majority. It’s just that one hellion who hogs all the attention.

It is not a crime to be from somewhere else. It is surely no sin to be on vacation, to need directions, to not know how to break open a lobster or to pronounce Damariscotta. Rude people are not rude because they are on vacation. Nobody becomes a nag or a know-it-all by going on a trip. The people who are rude on vacation—who harass baristas, swear at ferry terminal ticket agents, take up two parking spaces, lecture storekeepers on how to run their businesses, and make impossible demands of the maintenance staff, the air taxi pilots, and the marina guys—these good citizens behave no better at home. Their coworkers are grateful right now that these pests are away on vacation someplace.

There isn’t much we can do, when harried by the pretentious and hectored by the pompous, except to make fun of their behavior later. Also, writing newspaper columns offers no retirement contribution, no health insurance, and no doughnut cart. The only fringe benefit is revenge.

Do I heckle people? Occasionally, but not for anything to do with where they come from. If you are a writer making bank on stories of our arrested development, our salt, and our alcoholism, I reserve the right to earn a few bucks twitting you in return. If you are a one-time visitor whose idea of pleasant conversation with strangers is to criticize things over which we have no control, I reserve the right to defend our public works in the public press. And, if you are a native whose ancestors arrived here on Noah’s Ark but you are a bigot and a bully, I see no need to doff my cap as you pass by.

Sometimes we can resist the idiots by quietly flexing our imaginations. For example, I have a T-shirt which bears the legend, “You are dangerously close to being written into my detective story.” In smaller print it continues, “…and trust me, you are not the detective.”

As for the mishaps of tourists generally, I’ll leave those to my friend Tim Sample. Travel is fun, and we all ought to be tourists from time to time. Let’s just be considerate ones. My own affection for the bottom of the Grand Canyon and the top of Mount Washington, the coast of Labrador and the Golden Gate Bridge prove that I have no right to pass judgement on people who leave their home environs and ramble just for fun. I am definitely a tourist.

If you don’t want to get in the papers, don’t be a jerk.

Eva Murray is the Recycling and Solid Waste Coordinator for Matinicus Island. Eva’s last lobster license was dated 1990, the year her son was born, and cost $53.00, which at the time she thought was an awful lot of money.