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Monhegan Island

You probably haven’t heard of it.  Not many have.  It sits out there twelve nautical miles off the coast of Maine, visible from New Harbor as a smudge on the eastern horizon and accessible by three ferries which lumber out and back every day from New Harbor and Boothbay and Port Clyde in all weather short of nor’easters and hurricanes.  On each journey your skipper tacks and jukes through armadas of multi- hued lobster buoys so as to avoid plowing over one and grinding away the line leading down to its trap. The porpoises and seals employ their own evasive maneuvers.

In the decades before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, fishermen from Scandinavia, England, France, and the Basque lands fished the abundance in these waters and used Monhegan Island as their base of operations, taking advantage of the encampments long established by the Abenaki tribespeople before them. A familiar story.  

Manana (rhymes with banana) Island flanks the western side of Monhegan, separated by a narrows you could whack a golf ball across with a well struck four iron. That sliver of water provides shelter from the turbulent weather so the harbor is situated there, but the protection falls short of absolute.  Back around the turn of the last century they mounted a cast iron fog bell on the peak of Manana, and a bell keeper’s cottage with it.  Every morning the bell keeper rowed his children across to attend the one room schoolhouse.  No problem in fair weather, but when the seas roughened he had to position his dory at the end of the landing dock so his child could time her step across to coincide with a swell crest when the sea lifted the dory to the level of the dock.  Talk about seamanship!  This worked for the older students.  For a tot, a couple of fishermen positioned themselves at the end of the dock to catch her when dad chucked her across.

Fishing sustained the early European settlers of Monhegan, but not entirely.  They made walls of the rocks and plowed the cleared ground for their crops, sawed ice off a a pond at the edge of town, and hewed the pines for housing lumber and fuel.  No wimps allowed.  What we call civilization encamped.  A school.  A church.  Sturdy houses. A lighthouse at the top of the island.  A post office.  Dances and socials.  Thus the people of Monhegan lived until the early years of the twentieth century when artists and painters ventured across from the mainland, attracted by the island’s radiant light.  Think Greece, whose islands enjoy the kind of atmospheric wonder that defies understanding unless you go there.  Sunrises and sunsets to illumine the soul.  Cottages situated on the rugged landscape.  Beauty.

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As tourists followed the artists, the islanders accommodated them with hotels and inns and guest cottages.  Nowadays a picturesque village sprawls out from the harbor and attracts hordes of summerers and overnighters and day trippers. When you stroll from your cottage to the store or the beach you have to plow through gaggles of plein air painters at their easels.

Real estate developers witnessed the island’s sudden popularity and figured to turn it into Nantucket II.  Lucky for us, Thomas Edison’s son, Ted, loved the place and resolved to preserve it.  He formed Monhegan Associates, an early land trust, and through it bought up the hitherlands to preserve them in perpetuity.  Thanks to his foresight the village ends where the village ends and the rest of Monhegan is dedicated to hiking trails and forestlands and remote beaches and cliff top views of surf exploding on seaside granite.

Village lanes provide access to two sandy beaches facing across to Manana.  Stalwarts amble down the lanes to shuck their duds for a bracing plunge into the clear frigid waters.  After a morning’s hike across to Black Head, you can reward your sweaty self with a wade and a dive, from which you emerge invigorated and clean and hooting.  Wow!  

Somehow a tradition established itself at the ferry landing.  When a ferry departs, brave souls jump off the dock as an emblem of farewell and come again.  At high tide a modest leap.  At low tide a scary drop.  When my ferry tied up for the return trip to New Harbor, a full moon had made low tide very low tide.  As the dock hand cast off the lines, I happened to mention that I had never witnessed the spectacle, so he obligingly doffed shoes and shorts and shirt, climbed atop the dock-end piling, crouched, and launched himself into the living waters.

Thanks, dude.  I’ll be back.