We’ve now been on Vinalhaven for five days. This morning we
took Isaac to story time at the library in town. We were one of three families
there, so Isaac got a chance to pick out several of his favorite books—Polar Bear Night, Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Did you Hear?, If You Give a Mouse a Cooke?—and listened as Mary, the volunteer
storyteller, read and patiently waited for Isaac to fill in lines that he knows
by heart.
Among the things we love about this island are the people:
year-rounders, summer folk, or short-term renters like us. Mary, for instance,
has been coming to Vinalhaven for more than twenty years; she rents a place for
a month and while they are here, she and her husband open their house to
friends and family: “it feels like I’m running an inn,” she said. Yesterday,
while biking on North Haven, we stopped at a local farm, Turner Farm, that we
just happened to pass, and in line for the doors to open at 10 AM, we met Rosa,
a college councilor from Concord, MA. Like Mary, she’s been renting for nearly
twenty years. She provided us with a lovely image of her family growing up
spending summers there. Since her kids were little, they have been living
“free-range” on the island.
Later that same morning, on the way to Mullin’s
Cove, Josh blew out his rear tire, and a potentially dire situation was averted
with the help of two locals: the first, Carol Waterman, drove Josh’s bike the
five miles or so back to town. We learned that her husband’s family has lived
on the island for generations; they used to run a grocery store, Waterman’s, in
the building that is now the island’s (amazing) community center of the same
name. When she introduced herself, Josh reacted as though she was famous:
“Waterman, as in the Watermans!?” She
told Josh that her two sons both went to school on the island in the state’s
smallest K-12 school. Her oldest son was one of two seniors in this spring’s
graduating class! Meanwhile, down at the beach, where Isaac threw rocks into
the surf, complimenting himself on each throw (“Good throw … that’s a good
throw!”), we met Gayle, a grandmother visiting from Augusta. She was there with
her two grandchildren, Caden and Emma (5 and 3). Her daughter married a local
lobsterman, whose family has lived on the island for generations. So the
children’s other set of grandparents are Waterman’s and Brown’s—another family
just as well-known on North Haven. Everyone we run into is so nice, so
welcoming that we feel like we don’t want to leave, ever. (Maybe it’s also the
influence of “Under the Tuscan Sun,” where the heroine travels to Italy, on a
whim buys a villa, and lives a wonderfully full life off her no salary.)
Every day, Josh scans the real estate
listings, and we talk about taking two weeks next year, maybe spending one on
each island. However, there are some warning signs: Rosa mentions that the
island of North Haven feels just like 1965, then pauses and says more quietly,
“for good and for bad”; we notice that there are literally no kids besides
Isaac here who are not blonde—not much diversity, in other words. While at
Booth’s Quarry on Saturday, Anique swam the length of the quarry with a college
dean from Virginia who bought a place up here thirty years ago and now talks
about how much work and money it takes to maintain that property. Just last
year, she finally rented it out for August so that she could take a ten-day
trip to Ireland. Otherwise, she’s always either back home in Virginia or “here.”
The way she said “here” made her vacation home sound a bit like a prison.
Certainly, it injected a fair amount of reality into our real estate
fantasizing.
While it might seem strange to want to keep coming back, year
after year, to the same 12-mile long island off the coast of Maine, we keep
discovering new things that we missed on our previous trips or things that we
failed to appreciate before having Isaac. The shelf of rock sticking out from
the side of Lawson’s Quarry, where Isaac can wade safely without having to wear
his bulking and much-loathed life vest; Polly’s Cove, a beautiful inlet, near
the top of the island, where we spent an hour after dinner last night, where
Isaac threw rocks into the gentle surf, where we saw a bald eagle; even North
Haven, which we finally “discovered” this trip. And, we imagine that these
discoveries will continue to occur with each year we travel here. What’s more,
though, we’ll start to feel like this is our spot. While checking email at the
ARC, a local café on Main Street, Josh spent a few minutes chatting with a
couple of brothers, 12 and 13, from Portland. They’d been coming to island
every summer since they were babies; their grandparents own an old homestead
not far from town. For them, this island is a second home, and though we’re not
ready to drop 20,000 bucks on a cedar shaker cottage or some Victorian-style
fixer-upper in town, we both want something of that experience for Isaac. Every
day, he asks to see the “waterfalls”: by this, he means the spot in town where
one can see the water flow in or go out from the bay into the harbor. We spend
a lot of time at this spot, on one side of the street and then the other. This
place feels like it’s Isaac’s (no one else is standing in line to see it), and
we’re pretty sure it’s what he has in mind when he says that “we love Maine.”
