My family has owned a house on an island in Penobscot Bay where we have gone in the summer since the 1930s. Summer people are never fully accepted into the community by the locals; except, with some dispensation for the fact that “my Grandmother knew your Grandmother”. At the height of the depression there weren’t many options for a “proper” vacation with four children on a professor’s salary. The first year, while Grandpa taught on the mainland, Grandma took a boat to the island and she and children and luggage were all dropped on the muddy sand of the harbor at low tide. How long was it, wondering what kind of mistake this might have been, until an oxcart would gather them up and take them to the cottage in the cove? The islanders came to respect her deeply and look forward to her return.
When I dropped out of college the first time, I hitch-hiked to Maine and stayed in the house until it became too cold that winter. The caretakers, a lobsterman and his wife, took me in and I paid them my respect by repairing a couple of their caned chairs. John Mitchell was old, elemental and full of grace. We went to the cove together to gather flat stones as weights for his traps. As we stood on the bank a small bird landed on the tip of his rubber boot. He smiled and slowly reached down to the bird which did not protest when he held it in his hand. Then, he let it go. Gladys Mitchell told me that when Edna St. Vincent Millay stayed with her Mother she slept in the room and bed that I was in. I assume this was true. Her poem about Matinicus, “Hearing your words and not a word among them”, is proof enough that she shared my experience of the place.
Hearing your words, and not a word among them
Tuned to my liking, on a salty day
When inland woods were pushed by winds that flung them
Hissing to leeward like a ton of spray,
I thought how off Matinicus the tide
Came pounding in, came running through the Gut,
While from the Rock the warning whistle cried,
And children whimpered and the doors blew shut;
There in the autumn when the men go forth,
With slapping skirts the island women stand
In gardens stripped and scattered, peering north,
With dahlia tubers dripping from the hand:
The wind of their endurance, driving south,
Flattened your words against your speaking mouth.
— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sonnet XXXVI
