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Moveable Feast

by Eva Murray

The gale, the fog, the mounting seas, and the lack of a ceiling acceptable to the Visual Flight Rules have messed with more than a few holiday celebrations on Matinicus. Folks on islands adapt. Creative responses to logistics challenges, and acceptance of the inevitable even while mumbling a few coarse oaths at the marine forecast, are what separates the hard-core salt from the starry-eyed tourist.

You haven’t lived on an island until you’ve honored some heartfelt moment four days late because of small craft warnings.

Holidays, with their complex meals, ironclad traditions, and family get-togethers, are perfect suckers for meteorological sabotage. A Thanksgiving dinner shared by three half-families in a combined effort because each had relatives who got stuck on the wrong wide of the water with some of the customary dishes, resulting in a lovely table laden with three apple pies, zero local farm-raised organic turkeys, and an inexplicable preponderance of bacon, sounds perfectly normal to us.

And no, we don’t eat lobster for every holiday. Lobster gets boring.

As we make our preparations for the revels of the season, we know that we’re going to have to work around the weather report. Some of our old December customs are losing ground as the population of Matinicus becomes increasingly transient. It’s hard to carry off a good Secret Santa swap when half the participants honestly don’t know whether they’re going to be here. And nothing panics a teacher, trying to direct a painstakingly-rehearsed school play, like the knowledge that their star actor’s family may bail for Grandma’s on the mainland earlier than planned, taking the lead angel with them.

As I recall there was once a little series of one-room school Christmas plays riffing on the Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer story. The weather threatens all deliveries and Santa is rescued by some humble underdog in torn Grundens, a curmudgeon of a lobsterman or even the lobster himself. The Rudolph story, with its impenetrable fog and the threat of no deliveries, is daily life here. Fedex and UPS cannot expedite a darned thing when the storms boil up, and decent heroes have radar. Captain Kris Kringle would by now have GPS, AIS, and ADS-B Out.

Getting teenagers home from their high schools on the mainland has been a challenge since island kids first started going to high school. It is common for island kids to get scholarships to boarding school, and our public school students attend wherever they might have friends or relatives with a spare bedroom, so students might be traveling some real distance to come home for the holidays. One year that teenagers Emily and Eric, in the little green Subaru, collected Lydia from her high school back in the woods of Vermont and drove her to Spruce Head in hopes of some truth to the rumor of a boat ride home on Thanksgiving morning.

Keep in mind that this whole business of catching up with a fisherman at whichever mainland co-op, bait-encrusted buyer’s wharf, or public landing he or she routinely uses is a something of a leap of faith. Rare is the fisherman who begins with, “I will be there at 2:00 o’clock sharp, I won’t leave without you, and here’s where you should park.” No. It’s more commonly something like a third-hand unsubstantiated rumor completely devoid of specifics. “I heard some guy down to the post office telling Bob that ol’ Joey was thinkin’ about goin’ to town today. Maybe you could hook a ride back with him.”

That particular Thanksgiving the kids did manage to get their friend aboard Troy’s boat bound for Matinicus. It was cold, wet, rough trip, and there was the threat that Troy might decide to haul a few on the way home, but she got here. If I remember right she had her family’s turkey in her baggage.

We generally are willing to feed any and all who find themselves stuck here, of course, including the Sheetrock installer stuck here one Christmas and any other sternman, carpenter, uncle, or Dish TV repairman. Sometimes it’s easier to welcome a complete stranger than it is to make merry with some of the regulars, for that matter, there being no history of grand theft auto, trap molestation, or carpet tacks in the driveway.

Birthdays are easily moved. If you can move George Washington‘s birthday you can certainly go ahead and move mine. The whole theme of the children’s book “Island Birthday” was exactly this. If the weather shuts down and there are no freight deliveries, and you’re worrying about your birthday present not arriving, you can be sure that somebody else is worrying about his repair parts, or his dog chow, or his mail, and for the same reason. Or his rum, but that wasn’t in the book.

Technology has its place. I recall friends Lana and Josh, not yet married, unable to meet for a planned special dinner because Lana worked on Matinicus and was stuck here. They pulled together a “Skype date” where they both assembled the same nice meal, each lit a candle on their table for the ambiance of a romantic meal, and gazed into each other’s eyes over the internet connection before being unceremoniously dumped offline by a power glitch.

Even weddings are not exempt. Another friend tells the story of her island wedding when the weather proved far worse than forecast, stranding the mother of the bride and the officiant—the beloved Reverend Ted Hoskins, minister on the Sunbeam—–on the mainland. The right sort of fearless berserker was sent for the mom--his lobster boat being large and well-fitted with every available device-- and as luck would have it a fellow who had retired out here was a minister of one sort or another. Said clergyman was drafted into service at the last minute, and despite the monsoon, the knot was tied on schedule.

I certainly don’t mean to make out like islanders don’t take their holidays seriously. Some Independence Days we’ll detonate more fireworks out here than the City of New York and the Colebrook Kiwanis Club combined, and that’s saying something. It just might not be on the actual Glorious Fourth, should the fog or the wind make demands.

Island holidays are reliably focused on the food anyway, which explains the wonderful Super Bowl parties among groups of friends who care so much about football that they ask who the Red Sox are playing, and Chinese New Year which is a case for egregious and shameless acts of cultural appropriation at least in the kitchen. Both of these feasts happen to fall in mid-winter which makes them especially meaningful to us if you consider the psychology of long winters in small places.

Thinking of psychology, I’d suspect that astronauts on their way to Mars, should anybody ever strike off in that direction, will celebrate every single holiday that comes with an appealing national dish. They will if they’re smart.

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.