Lifesaving Lessons Read online

  Unfortunately, before we had the new stern in dory number three, Alden phoned and demanded that I return the Grace Egretta. I put him off, denying the accusations that I had stolen his boat. But when he called and announced that he was on his way to Stonington and that I had better be there with his boat, or else, I took him at his word and gathered Omega Four and a half (the half being Dave’s daughter Abigail, who at fourteen was damned good at operating the hydraulics). We hustled to move the only remaining seine—the purse—into the sternless dory. Luck was with us in that the purse seine was in very good condition. Other than a few nests made by mice or squirrels, the net was in need of very little repair. My crew was somewhat dismayed that we wouldn’t have the power block or the big boat to work with, but I assured them that Alden had promised to deliver once we’d made a set on some fish. And Alden had assured me that we didn’t need the boat or the block until we had fish shut off.

  I met Alden in Stonington, sent him off in his boat, and returned to the island aboard the mail boat. Then it started to rain. And it rained for six weeks. It poured night and day for a month and a half. The state of Maine set a new record for rainfall that month of June, breaking the number of inches that had held that honor since 1917.

  Our introduction to being members of a seining operation had not been pleasant. We bailed and pumped rain from dories on a daily basis. One day in week five produced a particularly heavy rain accompanied by wind. It was my turn to keep the dories afloat. The weather forecast had called for easterly wind, which suited me fine as that would leave all three dories in the lee of our island, and make for easy access by skiff to pump them out. Well, the wind wasn’t out of the east. And it blew much harder than expected. I watched the two dories I could see from my parents’ house fill with water and begin to wallow in the building sea. It had become impossible to go alongside to dewater now that the boats full of twine were bouncing all over the place. One knock with that weight to the side of my skiff, or even the Mattie Belle, and I might just be swimming for shore. I was kicking myself for not pumping earlier when one of the dories began swinging back and forth until a big wave crested over its stern quarter and capsized it. Down she went, stern first. Because there was flotation in the dory, and the twine apparently got caught on the stern, it stayed vertical with the tip of the bow above the surface and pointed toward heaven. (Being the glass-half-full gal that I am, I naturally failed to acknowledge that the stern of the dory was pointed in the opposite direction.) I learned then and there that there is no more helpless feeling in the world than watching a boat sink.

  The heavy rain didn’t take a breather for another twelve hours. The dory we had placed in Laundry Cove sank, resting fully in the mud on her bottom. The water was so shoal where she went down, all two hundred fathoms of cork line bobbed on the surface like a giant cluster of mushrooms, and the entire dory was quite visible when I drifted over it in my skiff after the gunk churned up by the storm had settled out of the water. Understanding that the Laundry Cove mishap would be the easiest retrieval, we focused on what seemed the bigger problem: the heaven-pointing dory in Robinson Cove. I called Alden for advice on how best to proceed and let him know that I could really use that power block to retrieve two-thirds of my gear. Pulling it back into dories by hand—if we could float the dories—would be foolhardy (not to mention backbreaking). Alden agreed to come with the boat, and gave me some specific instructions about what to do while I waited.

  Alden had seen it all in his many years on the water. He didn’t sound surprised that two of my dories were down. He told me everything would be fine and even volunteered that he’d been in much stickier situations. Our first task was to upright the vertical dory by untying it from the mooring and towing it by its painter. Alden claimed that once the dory was horizontal, and if it was towed at just the right speed, the water would spill out over the rails and stern until it was buoyant enough for us to go alongside with our twelve-volt pump to finish the job. Bill Clark and I went out with the Mattie Belle to give this procedure a whirl. I pulled up to the dory, and Bill untied the bow line from the mooring and tied it to a line on my stern with which to tow. I put my engine in gear at dead idle and waited for the towline to become taut. As soon as the line was straight, the angle of the dory changed just enough to allow whatever was holding the stern down to let go, and the dory literally jumped out of the water and smashed into the Mattie Belle’s stern with enough force to punch a hole just above the waterline. Bill and I were somewhat stunned. To see a big boat launch itself from beneath the surface with enough velocity to deny you time even to scream or hit the deck was simply amazing. It was like a giant fish breaching. I had my usual reaction to the last straw in a string of misfortunes: I laughed. I stopped laughing when a voice on the VHF radio said, “I thought that fish was coming aboard!”

  Bill and I stood looking over the transom at the damage for a couple of minutes before moving on to step two. The dory was now horizontal but upside down. Alden had said that towing the dory would right it, and we were already tied in. So we towed. We towed slow. We towed fast, and we towed at half speed. We towed on a short line. We towed on a long line, and we towed with a midlength line. We towed straight. We towed in circles. The dory would not flip over. The only thing it did do was take an occasional deep dive. Each time the bow went for the bottom, I slacked the throttle until it came back to the surface. Up and down; the dory had become a gigantic porpoise. Bill suggested we tow the dory to the town landing, where we could pull one side up with the hydraulic winch on the end of the dock. That seemed like a good idea.

  In the middle of the thoroughfare, I lost all ability to steer the Mattie Belle. I didn’t know whether I had blown a steering line or lost the pump, and there was no time to check it out. Fortunately, we were towing very slowly and Simon happened to be nearby in his boat, Scalawag. I waved him over and asked for a tow to my mooring. He was happy to help. After securing my boat, Bill and I hopped aboard with Simon, tied the stubborn dory to Scalawag’s stern, and asked for a ride to the dock. Within two minutes, the dory was easily rolled over and we were pumping her out. I decided that in the future I would listen to Bill, as he is always quite logical and extremely clever with most everything.

  Later, Dave and Nate had easier success with the Laundry Cove dory, and sustained no damage. Now all we had to do was find the ends of both doryless seines and mark them so that when Alden arrived with the Grace Egretta, we’d be set to haul the twine back into the dories. The Robinson Cove seine was cooperative. The end was in plain sight. I tied one of my orange-and-white lobster buoys to it and headed for Laundry Cove, where I spent six unsuccessful hours. Every time I reached down and grabbed the cork line to pull to find an end, I ripped the line from the net. It was useless. I had to condemn the seine, justifying that it was too rotten to fish, and vowed to cut the corks from it and leave the rest on the bottom to totally disintegrate. So already I had a third less twine than I had started with. And we hadn’t made a set. In fact, we hadn’t seen a single fish.

  Alden came the next day. We quickly hauled the Robinson Cove twine, placing it back into the infamous dory, and returned it to the mooring. So here we were, Omega Four, with a fresh start. The problem was, I was disheartened. My crew had to jump into their lobstering lives to try to salvage a season and make up for time and income lost while frigging with the seining operation. We all understood that the good berths for herring, or places that historically attracted fish, were all occupied by dories of fishermen from Stonington. A dory left on an anchor marks that spot as taken. It’s first come, first serve. And we had gotten into the game too late to claim any fertile territory. Eventually swordfish season rolled along, and I couldn’t leave the island fast enough. The herring gear that served as a daily reminder of my total failure as a seine fisherman was stored away indefinitely. We hauled the dories onto the shore below the schoolhouse and flipped them upside down (with some difficulty I might add). We stowed the twine on the float an
d tied it to a summer person’s mooring. It was early August, and I was headed to the Grand Banks aboard the Bjorn II and spent two months doing something I was relatively good at. Paychecks worked in a wound-licking sort of way. And “out of sight, out of mind” with regard to the seining business rang true until February, when the whole works washed ashore right in front of my eyes, where I could not avoid it.

  …

  Of course this could never have happened in warm weather, I thought now, opening my eyes to check the level of the tide. The month of February is typically the coldest and windiest of the year. The water was nearly high, and only one end of the float wagged in the slight westerly breeze as the other appeared to remain hard aground. Westerly wind, even just a little of it, would not help. The dory was pinned on the west shore, so the wind acted to keep it there rather than assist in the other direction. This would give the folks who winter on Isle au Haut something to talk about. Our year-round population had fallen to around forty. Whether the recent decline was a cause or a symptom of certain situations that had developed in the near past, I would never know. But the island had changed. I suspected it was suffering the same identity crisis that I was. We all considered ourselves islanders above all else. And loners. In disconcertingly increasing numbers our staunch lifers were bailing after Thanksgiving, becoming virtual summer people.

  I wondered now what would become of Simon and me. Our relationship had become very odd in the few months since I had begun questioning it. (Teenagers do not corner that market either.) We had been together for nearly the entire decade of my discontent, and acted sort of like an old married couple. But we weren’t married, and I had just latched onto the realization that we never would be. This was depressing. Rounding into my forties, I was beginning to realize that I wasn’t heading for the husband-and-2.3-children model, but that didn’t mean I was content with the status quo. I knew that I needed to somehow go a separate way. But other than not marrying, and being too comfortable with each other, I had no real reason to “divorce” Simon. We had always gotten along famously. We never quarreled. We enjoyed spending time together. And now here Simon was, coming to my rescue as usual. He was always there! I just felt that we (or more accurately I) were missing something. I wasn’t content with the reality that my primary male relationship was one of friendship. Besides, Simon had his family, including an ex-wife with whom he remained friendly to the point of still spending what I considered a weird amount of time. And I suppose that went a long way in making me feel very much alone when I was inclined to feel sorry for myself—like now. In all honesty, my relationship with Simon’s entire family, including his ex, was as easy and natural as his was with the Greenlaw clan. Regardless, settling down hadn’t been what I had anticipated, and I now knew that I had been happier in rootlessness. There’s not a lot of soil on Isle au Haut, so like the island spruces, residents’ roots grip sheer ledge with some tenacity. Add a little rain and wind, and even the healthiest trees are prone to blow down. When “seaworthy” is the most coveted adjective in your vocabulary, life ashore is lacking. I had to admit that whatever problem I perceived in my relationship with Simon was likely a symptom of something that had more to do with me than us.

  The sound of oars working methodically in locks broke my regression. I hopped to my feet to see Howard Blatchford heading toward me in his peapod, which is a small, double-ended boat named for its shape. “I brought a couple of anchors and some line,” he said as he put the bow of his boat against the ledge below where I was standing. I scrambled down the rocks and climbed into the bow. I squatted down low and held both rails to balance the tippy boat. “I think we’d better run two anchors out, one off each of the offshore corners of the float, and put as much tension on the lines as we can,” Howard said. I agreed that this was a good idea, as the tide was already going back out and the float wasn’t going with it. The anchors would, at the very least, keep the float from going farther ashore.

  Howard dropped me on the float and he rowed the first anchor to the west and dropped it in. He rowed the end of the line back to me so I could secure it to the float. He repeated the process with the second anchor, this one to the north. The two of us worked to set the anchors and get the lines as tight as we could. Of all the people who could have come to help, I thought, why did one of them have to be him? Howard was not one of my—or the island’s—favorite neighbors. A known, convicted sex offender, he had served his time and come home to Isle au Haut to live out his days more quietly, adding credence to the belief held by many that our year-round population consisted largely of misfits. Ostracized for years by our tiny community, he was certainly Johnny-on-the-spot today. I wasn’t exactly in a position to refuse experienced, competent assistance, no matter what Howard had done in his past. I was thankful that not many of my neighbors had witnessed this morning’s collaboration. But, shamefully, not as thankful as I was for his help. And where was trustworthy Simon?

  When Howard left I was happy to be alone. I spend a lot of time alone. And reflecting on that, I realized that the very things I liked most about my life were the same things I disliked. The bind I’d put myself in made it difficult to pursue significant change. The float, balanced and confused on the ledge, seemed as undecided as I was about which way to go and when to make a move. Not much of a role model. But then again, I didn’t need to be anybody’s role model … yet.

  CHAPTER 3

  I Am a Rock

  It’s staggering how much actually goes on in a tiny community while seemingly nothing is going on. All that winter, when I had chance encounters with anyone, which were indeed rare during the short days and long nights of blustery weather, there would be little news to report. “What have you been up to?” was nearly always met with a shrug and “Not much.” My end of any conversation always included the thickness and quality of the ice on the island’s freshwater pond, as skating had quickly become my favorite procrastination to lure me from the writing project I was falling behind on. Unseasonably warm days were challenging until someone told me that three inches of ice were enough to support a team of horses. I had no idea what that actually meant, but figured that even if the “team” consisted of just two small ponies, they outweighed me.

  Spending time spinning alone on the ice was a daily ritual that I kidded myself into believing was essential for stimulation. Well, I certainly wasn’t getting a lot of stimulation from people. I could go around the island in my mind, house to house, and do a head count. Every time I did, I came up with a different number. But none of these virtual trips ever produced more than forty-two fellow occupants. Even on days when the island’s only grocery store (or store of any kind, for that matter) was open for a two-hour, biweekly shopping spree, I never saw more than five people. I wondered where the other thirty-seven were hiding and imagined that they must be more industrious than I was to be so busy as to not make the store hours. Even if they had no intention of buying anything, it was the best social life on the docket this time of year. I guessed, because I never saw much traffic, that my fellow islanders didn’t need to fuel their cars. But they had to eat. And I saw boxes of groceries from a mainland market coming over on nearly every mail boat. Not that the recipients were on the dock to meet the boat and collect their food and drinks. They must come when no one is looking, I thought, and wondered why they were not as eager as I was to meet what on most days could be considered the only sign of life. And I wasn’t relying on the boat for my sustenance, just activity.

  Once in a while I would see someone shoveling a driveway or another getting wood for a stove, and I’d nearly scare them back to their houses with my enthusiastic greetings. Not that I wasn’t normally friendly. I was. But I had never really gone out of my way for it, especially not in winter. In fact, a wave from a distance would have usually sufficed. Not now. Not this winter. Funny, I had assumed that being alone was what I needed to be productive. Everyone imagines an author in seclusion pounding the keys and tearing through the pages. This had
been my mode in the past and had propelled me through the writing of all my books to date. The notion that total solitude was needed for me to perform well the job of creating written material required that I keep everyone at arm’s length. I had worked to keep everyone at bay each book-producing winter, and had been unapologetic about it. I had admonished a neighbor for a friendly, unannounced visit and had hung a sign on my door, “Do Not Disturb.” I had trained my family not to call me during writing hours, and I had been absolutely rude to my mother when she just couldn’t wait until lunchtime to let her fingers do the walking.

  But this winter things had changed. I stared at blank pages, wishing I had someone to talk to. I found myself hoping to run into Ken so that I could ask about Mariah and how she was doing at school. When I caught a glimpse of Mariah during a school break, I thought she avoided me, and excused this as her not wanting me to ask her if she was looking for any work. My newfound need to communicate must have been because I was alone more than usual; alone by choice and needing to communicate is a strange contradiction that I cannot explain. Every winter since moving to the island eight years prior, I had split time between my place on the island and in Vermont at Simon’s house. When I wanted to write, I was home. When I wanted to play, I went to Vermont, where I could have fun with Simon and his group of friends. This year I had made a conscious effort to remain home as much as possible. I used my writing as an excuse not to venture anywhere or do anything that required leaving “the rock.” I knew that I was looking for the exit ramp in my relationship with Simon and this required separation. So I seldom invited Simon to hang out with me. In Simon’s absence, I found myself striking up conversation with anyone who made the mistake of making eye contact. My pain being self-inflicted didn’t make it any more tolerable. I actually pulled my truck to the side of the road one day to chat with an itinerant laborer who had come over on the early boat to do some chain-saw work.