Lifesaving Lessons Read online

  I had intended to fish my lobster traps alone this season, concentrating more on a newly acquired herring-seining business. But I did plan to hire someone to paint buoys and do a few odd jobs. “Do you want a job?” I asked, looking at Mariah directly for maybe the first time ever.

  There was a short pause while I waited for Mariah to reply. Ken wasn’t patient, and I supposed that came from knowing the girl as only a close relative could. I suspected that he feared what Mariah might say. “She does. She really does. And she’s a great little worker. I just want to teach her the value of hard work and being productive. She hasn’t had much of that in her past.” That seemed noble enough, I thought. I repeated my question.

  I stared at Mariah, whose face was getting quite red, unsure whether the increased color was anger or total humiliation. She still hadn’t opened her mouth, but she finally had to make eye contact. I shrugged and waited. Ken took a step to the side, eliminating the bit of protection she had. She took a deep breath, as if bracing herself for some trauma, exhaled loudly and said, “I guess.” I took that as a yes, and had a fleeting notion that the attitude might be an issue.

  Never one to back away from a challenge, I said, “You can start painting buoys tomorrow. The paint and brushes are in the front of my truck.” I proceeded to show Mariah where to hang the wet buoys to dry, and told her that we’d begin setting lobster traps as soon as she had enough buoys ready. My new sternman looked as horrified as any indentured servant who suddenly realizes there is no escape.

  “Thanks, Linda. She’ll be here tomorrow morning, first thing. You won’t be disappointed,” Ken said as he pulled a fresh pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket. “Thank Linda, Mariah,” he advised the thoroughly disgusted girl.

  “Thanks.” It was the longest, most exaggerated Th sound in history. She couldn’t have been less sincere. It seemed that working for me might have been punishment for something. I had no idea what she had done to warrant what she clearly saw as torture. But I surely knew the value of hard work, and believed that the insolent teen might benefit from some. I hadn’t seemed like much of a prospect as a commercial swordfisherman when I landed my first job on the deck of a boat—or “site,” as we say—at the age of nineteen. Someone had given me a chance, and that had become my life’s work and first love. And I despise painting buoys.

  And so our relationship was born. It became abundantly clear that the only things that suited Mariah about working for me were the schedule and the paycheck. If I were to use a metaphor of my time being a writing project, I’d say that the bulk of the pages produced in early spring had been working on a new fishing venture: leaving lobster fishing small doodle space in the margins of life. I had acquired a herring-seining operation from my best friend, Alden, and had hoped to cash in on catching and selling herring to fellow lobster fishermen to use as bait. Spring is notoriously poor for lobster fishing, and it always appears that the only people making money are those selling bait. As a result, I never entered the margins to set or tend my traps until 10:00 a.m., which suited my new helper just fine. Most full-time, 800-trap fishermen work every day starting before the sun comes up until it sets, but our fishing duty was fairly light. I didn’t set all my traps. We fished only 300, and hauled just four short days each week, hauling 150 traps each time we went out. Coupled with the fact that I had to spend some time writing, I dabbled in lobster fishing in comparison to the full-time guys whose only income comes from what they pull out of a trap.

  I think it is fair to say that Mariah hated every second spent aboard my lobster boat, Mattie Belle. She hated the bait, handling the lobsters, picking crabs from traps, cleaning the boat, and she suffered from seasickness. That is not to say she wasn’t good at all of it. In fact, she learned the moves quickly, and was one of the best helpers I ever hired. I never told her how to do anything. She watched me do something once, then dove in and took over. She watched how I used my legs to throw a trap high onto a stack, and did the same. She watched how I pulled a trap up onto the rail of the boat, clearing the line through the block, and mimicked me, pulling every other trap aboard. We seldom spoke. I do recall her saying on her first day, after throwing up for the first time, “I’ll never like this.” And I still recall my reply being something to the effect that she would learn to love it. We didn’t speak another word the rest of the day. She didn’t have to say a word to communicate clearly to me that she found the entire experience excruciating. The whole summer long, Mariah would show up at the dock at the very minute required, not one second early or late. It was remarkable. Anyone could have set their watch by her bicycle’s coasting down the hill leading to the float where I was always waiting for her in the skiff. The daily skiff ride to the mooring was perhaps the only time Mariah ever smiled during the course of the season. She would perch on the bow, face forward, and let the wind blow her thick, blond hair back straight, looking quite like the bowsprit Kate Winslet aboard the Titanic until we stopped alongside of the Mattie Belle. Her hair would fall, she would quickly gather it into a neat ponytail, exhale audibly in expectation of yet another day of misery, climb out of the skiff, and board the boat. She had her own boots and wore a set of my oilskins, not the highest fashion for a girl of her age who hadn’t lazed into the island’s casual sloppiness yet.

  As the season wore on, Mariah and I did talk. Mostly it was my initiative. I understood that we had little in common and didn’t want to be her friend. But I did become quite fond of her tenacity and tolerant of her poor attitude. I took seriously my part in role modeling. Mariah spent time with other island women, which was great as we all knew that her uncle could be everything except female. And every young girl needs to have adult women in her life, and without a mother around, the island women filled in expertly. Most of the mothering was done by my good friend and neighbor Brenda, which seemed entirely appropriate to me. Brenda looks and, well, just is more motherly than I am in that she engages in more feminine activities than I do and has raised both a daughter and a son. Before moving to the island from the Camden area, Brenda worked as a hair stylist and in a bank. Brenda is always neat as a pin in her personal appearance, even when she is helping her husband, Bill, in the stern of his boat, or collecting the island’s trash to fulfill the contract they have with the town to do so. Brenda is also the island’s librarian. Call me a sexist, but the stereotypical librarian is female, right? Whereas I was the adult tomboy still in fishing gear, Brenda was far from the dowdy stereotype. She’s stylish to the point where I have always marveled at the perfection of her fingernails knowing that she picks crabmeat all summer. Come to think of it, Bill was a wonderful father figure for Mariah in that he shares good advice with those he sees in need (and in my opinion he is always spot on). Bill and Brenda each have families of their own from previous marriages, including several children and a couple of grandkids. Divorced, newly married, and fully established on Isle au Haut, they had all the experience I might have lacked in parenting. Mariah would go to Bill and Brenda’s on a regular basis and bake cookies or do crafts or whatever girl things were occurring at the time. Mariah became close to Bill and Brenda, even calling them Grammy and Grampy, though they’re not that much older than me. Isle au Haut has always been the epitome of how it takes a village to raise a child, even if there are only a handful of them on the island. And Mariah benefited from that in a big way.

  Mariah was a serious kid who rarely laughed. I imagine this was due mostly to the seasickness. The only fun she seemed to have with me that season was when we retaliated for some lighthearted teasing she endured at the hands of a couple of island fishermen who enjoyed taunting her on the radio when they knew Mariah could hear them and they could see her. She had been tagged with the nickname “Pork Chop.” She detested the name—what weight-conscious adolescent girl wouldn’t?—but liked the attention of the men well enough. When they spoke of a “Pork Chop sighting in Moore’s Harbor,” she’d throw her hands in the air and stomp her feet, much to the delight of the
men who watched her antics and then commented, bringing on the next flailing of arms and stomping. It became a ritual on our fishing days. I promised Mariah we would get back at them before the end of the season, and we did.

  One day, after having been off island for a shopping trip the day before, Mariah coasted down to the dock with a rubber pork chop she’d bought at a pet store. As we hauled traps that day we saved the garbage that comes up in them that is usually discarded. On our way back to the mooring, we sneakily hauled a trap belonging to the biggest instigator of the teasing and stuffed it full of sea cucumbers, sea urchins, crabs, seaweed, even a broken pump that we found aboard the Mattie Belle. When we couldn’t fit another piece of bycatch into the trap, we topped it with the plastic pork chop that Mariah had placed in the man’s bait bag. We forced the trap closed, and it took both of us pushing as hard as we could to get it back overboard. The trap splashed, and Mariah had a look of satisfaction as she cleaned the Mattie Belle all the way to the mooring. The sabotaged trap was directly in front of my house, so I was able to watch it being hauled and give Mariah a play-by-play account over the phone. It was great—we were both laughing hysterically. And that was the one and only time I heard Mariah laugh all summer.

  And it was, I thought, a shame that Mariah wasn’t more of a happy-go-lucky sort. There were times when I wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her, and tell her to look around. It was summer! All the other island kids were elated at that time of year, along with everyone else. Summer is idyllic on our island. Summers on Isle au Haut are like those you read about: romantic and fantastic. The year-rounders are out of hibernation with the exuberance of daffodils proudly pushing through newly thawed ground as if sprung from tight coils. The youngest kids, year-round and seasonal alike, scramble from tidal pool to tidal pool, delighted with shelled treasures and undaunted by wet sneakers. The time line of growing painlessly is measured from those tidal pools and periwinkles to outboard motors and mackerel. For children the island is a paradise where their safety is checked at the high-water mark with life jackets worn below and helmets above. It’s a free and special existence where parents worry only about bruises and barnacle scrapes in a place that harbors no other threats to children.

  Not just a paradise for kids, the island has the ability to bring out the kid in all of us. Sun-filled days end with colorful sunsets crowned by starry nights, eliciting contented sighs accompanied by goose bumps that rise in answer to the breeze cooled by its travel across Penobscot Bay. Vacationers are somehow lighter in the absence of cell phones (which rarely work here) and e-mail and responsibility. The Island Store (the only grocery game in town) is bursting at the seams all summer long with people and conversation and laughter. The absolute hub of activity, the store is quirky in its shelving of goods (baked beans next to the duck confit). An island that isn’t high on regulations or standards knows nothing of exceeding legal or even practical occupancy. This is obvious not only in the store but also at Sunday service in the only church, potluck dinners at the Town Hall, dances with “island music,” or the annual pie auction where people are ridiculously happy to pay three hundred dollars for whatever Pat Marks has concocted with peaches to pay for whatever the schoolteacher has in mind for the next field trip. Seemingly responsible adults are enthusiastically and unapologetically childish in summer. Even so, the kids always come first.

  The entire island took interest in each and every kid’s well-being. While I had always been aware of this characteristic, it grew stronger with each day that passed while Mariah and I fished together. Friends and neighbors thanked me for giving her the opportunity to spend time with me. I thought it was odd that people would actually thank me for doing such an obviously right thing (however reluctantly I had done it). But I did appreciate the sentiment, and her uncle had been right—she was indeed a great worker. Even the summer people took notice of the beautiful young girl who seemed to be blossoming and flourishing before their eyes. I took it upon myself to urge Mariah to apply to a private boarding school on the mainland. She did, and was accepted and granted full scholarship money. The island school only goes through the eighth grade, and the option other than a boarding school is the forty-minute boat ride and twenty-minute bus trip back and forth every day to attend the closest public high school—not a good schedule for a girl who clearly craved a bit of extracurricular life. We started to think of other ways to help out. A friend split the cost of a much needed orthodontist, and Mariah was soon in full braces. When it came time for new school clothes, summer people pitched in generously. “Our” little girl was thriving and we all took great pride in sending her off to school. Nobody was prouder than Ken. He paced nervously back and forth across the deck of the mail boat while the entire island community wished Mariah well and prepared to wave good-bye to the beaming girl in the stern of the boat.

  Some of us had even shed tears as we watched her step aboard the mail boat with suitcase and uncle, not to return to what had certainly become her home until Thanksgiving. When it was my turn for a hug, she had whispered, “You lied to me.” I backed up to arm’s length. “I never grew to love it.”

  “You’ll beg me for your job back next summer,” I said smiling.

  “Not a chance.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Restless Waters

  There is a certain look in a person’s eyes when he or she says something that will never be retracted. “Never say never” is well and good, but there are exceptions. And I knew without a doubt that Mariah would never work in the stern of the Mattie Belle with me again. She had, I supposed, learned enough about the meaning of hard work to know that she wanted no part of it. That is as valuable a lesson as any for a young girl headed off to school. She was now armed with the knowledge that she did not want to be like so many island kids who know hard work to the exclusion of higher education. For some, fishing is their life’s work, and love. For others, it is a rut they fall into that family ties keep them from ever climbing out of. And yet here I am, someone most people consider an anomaly—educated, and still working like an idiot, much to my nonfishing family’s dismay.

  All in all, I felt good bidding Mariah farewell, as I knew I had at least provided her with a real-life example of gender being a nonissue as well as the merits of finding work you can love. I do like what I do. Well, most of the time. I was in the midst of making a few changes in my life—both personally and professionally—mostly in the spirit of remaining a rolling stone. (So much for the notion of settling down.) I deeply regretted not figuring out that I wanted no part of moss gathering in the decade that I’d tried it. But that’s me for you. Ten years seemed like a real mark, a decade in which a line graph would indicate a straight line, marked on either end by acute angles. I had changed my life quite dramatically ten years before when I moved to the rock longing for the stability of family from the more fluid, nearly twenty years of blue water fishing. In the period of living and breathing salt water and swordfish, I had always been accused of being irresponsible because all I owned fit nicely into a garbage bag that was easily flung from back of truck to deck of boat while my contemporaries practiced capitalism and consumerism. In the decade that I tried to fit in, accumulating all the requisite household bills and chores, I had a long-standing (if mostly long-distance) relationship with a really good guy, Simon; had built a house; and bought my own boat and fishing gear. Mortgaged to the hilt, and seemingly settled down with a nice guy, I learned that responsibility didn’t hold a candle to what I had given up to try it out. Now, at the far end of the decade, I once again longed for real change, change that looked more like total irresponsibility. I knew the impetus for change was the calendar. A decade had been long enough. A decade had been ample time for Simon to propose marriage, which he had chosen to not do. We shared a fun, healthy relationship. But I wanted more. Simon is more of the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” type. So had I wasted ten years? Wasted seemed too harsh, I thought. But I sure wish it hadn’t taken so long to el
iminate Simon as a possibility. Yup, my future would look different.

  I would be fishing even fewer lobster traps in the future. I certainly would not have enough work to employ anyone in that business even if Mariah did an about-face and wanted to go. I had recently been purposefully navigating toward a future less about lobster and more toward other things. I would write and promote my books, get my herring-seining business up and running, and spend the fall at sea in the blue water chasing swordfish. I figured that Mariah, in time, would steer her future in some direction, and I’d hear about that through the usual island chain of communication when it happened. But for now, she had four years of high school to complete before the next big decision. She would be guided by her uncle, her guidance counselors and advisers at school, and of course her huge island family.

  The island kids were all back in school—some away and some staying close to home. The summer residents all trickled off the island—those with schoolkids leaving as early as August, and retirees hanging on until Columbus Day weekend. I got thirdhand reports of Mariah’s exploits at boarding school, all of which sounded absolutely normal. She was back on the island for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I ran into her both times briefly, exchanged hugs, and offered work, the latter of which she politely refused. From our short conversations, I gathered that she hadn’t found her niche yet at school. She didn’t have anything she was very enthusiastic about (unless boys count). I understand that endless questions of a fifteen-year-old high school freshman from so many caring adults must certainly be tedious at best, so Mariah’s lack of animation was not surprising, seeing as I was likely the umpteenth person to quiz her. I continued in our few chance encounters to be upbeat about work—still being as good a role model as I could. Not that she noticed.