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

A Telephone, a Water Pump,
and John Lennon

by Eva Murray

Our telephone rings pretty continuously during the summer months. I run a bakery in July and August and my husband runs around effecting various rescues with a full complement of wrenches. I remember last July when a call came in as I was up to my elbows in bread dough. I nudged the receiver between my ear and my shoulder as I wiped off my hands and heard something to the effect of, “Need help, mumph, urp eep blurble, water pump!”

Ah; a cell phone. “You’re breaking up real bad. Say again?” Then, silence as the call dropped.

Five minutes later, they tried again. “Mungabunga, blue boat, meep map merp, Paul Murray.”

“Listen, if you can hear me, I can’t copy you…”

“Argle bargle, water pump.”

Silence.

We go through this with some degree of frequency. Cell phones work on this island better than they used to, which is to say a little, once in awhile, here and there, depending upon the weather. About the worst possible place to try and make a call with your mobile is from the actual harbor, which faces more or less toward Portugal and has the mass of the island between it and every cell phone tower in America.

One of those marginal transmissions made mention of a boat, so I jumped to the only logical conclusion and assumed the folks in distress were calling from the harbor. Unfortunately, my VHF radio had died. “Listen,” I shouted, with unnecessary impatience and perhaps too loudly, into my hard-wired phone, coily wire and all. “If you can hear me, there is a phone box on the wharf, on the telephone pole on the wharf. Please go to the wharf and try again on that phone! Your cell phone does not work!”

The telephone on the Matinicus wharf reflects rather gamely on the creativity of the local phone man. It takes no coins or cards, but consists of a household telephone installed inside a gray Stanley tool box bolted vertically to the pole. By far the biggest user is George, the water taxi captain, trying to make contact with his delayed passengers, but it has been used for 911 calls, rousting up lumberyard truck drivers who are late getting back on the state ferry, kids who want their friends to come swimming, and orders for blueberry pie.

Anyway, when Paul came home from whichever utility he was committed to that morning I relayed his messages, among them that somebody, presumably aboard some vessel of unknown name and description but which we think is blue, has a problem with a water pump and is in hopes of a mechanic coming to the rescue out here in the Third World. Muttering something about “yacht people” and how they would no doubt be needing parts, Paul turned his truck toward the harbor.

A few hours later he returned, a good deal less harried.

The owners of the Jubilee, a 43' Hinckley sloop, were not, after all, the stereotypes of the fussy and high-maintenance summer sailor, but had in fact made a considerable effort on their own before calling for help. They had parts, and tools, although unfortunately the wrong spare impeller. After everybody performed contortions and stood on their heads due to the inhumane location of said pump, the decision was made that an impeller from Hamilton Marine was required. How does one get repair parts on Matinicus? George had already started out in the Robin R. for Rockland, so Paul rowed back to the wharf, picked up the land-line telephone, called over the microwave link through the ether to George who was far enough from the island to have cell reception aboard his boat, and shouted over the din of George’s engine a friendly inquiry as to whether he had time for a quick run into Hamilton’s for a part. A few hours later, all was back together aboard the Jubilee, emergency over and smiles all around.

However, in the process of climbing around and struggling with parts it came up that John Lennon had sailed aboard that boat in 1980. In those days she was called the Megan Jaye, but the logbook was legit and the documentation reliable. A plaque down below included the words:

DOUBLE FANTASY

John Lennon sailed on Jubilee (Megan Jaye) sleeping in this berth from Newport, RI to Bermuda, arriving June 11, 1980. While staying in Bermuda he wrote 30 new songs, the first in five years and his last. Several of these new songs were included in his last album Double Fantasy with some of these clearly influenced by this ocean passage…

I read just recently – in one of those other free papers which you can pick up in any ferry terminal and waterfront hangout around here – how somebody with a radio show about boats had the Megan Jaye’s Captain Hank Halsted on the air talking about discovering John Lennon aboard for a trip to Bermuda in 1980, that same trip. Lennon was keeping a low profile and made no claims about being much of a sailor, but turned out to be the only one among the passengers who didn’t get seasick. He got a tremendous amount out of the thrashing he took as a “novice helmsman.” The assertion was made in the other Rockland newspaper that few would be able to top that story. Perhaps not, but this is a very small world indeed, and a few decades after Lennon’s voyage the Matinicus Island emergency repair guy did fix his water pump.