"Islesford: an Island Sojourn"
(excerpt)
Mika Perrine (Director of Creative Writing)
II. Slowness
"...our period is obsessed by the desire to forget, and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed; it picks up the pace to show us that it no longer wishes to be remembered; that it is tired of itself, sick of itself; that it wants to blow out the tiny trembling flame of memory." -Milan Kundera, from his novel Slowness.
The place slips into view, the dune grass and wild roses emerging out of a dense fog. Waves churn against palm-sized stones down this stretch of pebble beach, and Baker's Island looms unseen across a narrow channel known as the "gut," a treacherous passage of submerged ledges and rocks that only the most experienced boaters and lobstermen attempt to navigate. I end up here more often than not, walking. I pass the general store, where I might stop in for our mail and hot coffee to ward off the moist chill of the fog that settles over the island for the month of June.
The fog dampens my hair and leaves a sheen of water droplets on my cheeks, and the wet dune grass stains the cuffs of my jeans. All my summer skirts and tank tops are still packed away in the drawers of our cabin, untouched since my arrival; even summer is slow to suggest itself here on Islesford. At night we light fires in the rickety woodstove that sometimes fills the place with smoke, forcing us to open the skylights to the rain that falls steadily with the onset of darkness. When the rain sifts to a stop, we step out into the fog and walk along the root-studded path to the road that divides after the schoolhouse, one branch leading to Marsh Head where the mosquitoes gather in swarms, and the other, our favored route, leading past the houses of lobstermen, their front yards stacked high with traps, down an avenue of pine trees to the Coast Guard Road.
"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life" Thoreau wrote in 1851, "who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks - who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering." Islesford as a whole moved at a saunter, especially in June, before the busy season arrived, though even at the height of August you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone hurrying. It is this pace of life that attracts artists and writers alike, and it is what I return to in memory most often, reminding myself of the rhythm of those days.
"Art, to me, is seeing," writes the painter Andrew Wyeth, who was often drawn back to coastal Maine as a subject. And walking - or sauntering, as Thoreau would have it - are perhaps our most direct means of attaining clarity of vision. Yet it is easy to forget how much work goes on in the mind before a story or poem reaches the page. Letting my mind wander over the intricacies of a setting that has drawn me in - an abandoned farmstead, a cabin on a northern lake, an island village - is often the starting point of a story for me. Walking is "writing", in this sense, or at least a way of thinking toward the writing.
But places like Islesford are difficult to find anymore, which could explain the intensity of its attraction, and the anguish many of us feel at leaving it behind. The last trip to the mainland on the mailboat, a symbolic voyage for anyone who has been lured in by the island's quiet, drifting pace, is bittersweet. I still have my ferry ticket, punched with holes from the last fourteen trips we took to get groceries. I sometimes slip it from my wallet and rub the worn paper between thumb and forefinger, remembering the salt-musk that rose from the waves splaying behind us, Islesford disappearing from view as we rounded Great Cranberry and headed for the cars and highways that awaited us. In two days' time I would be driving west with a trunk full of books I hadn't gotten around to reading, a computer full of brief sketches and unfinished stories, en route to my first semester of graduate school. Where was all the writing I had intended to do on Islesford? For the first month of classes I felt panicked, afraid I'd never finish anything, scared my work wouldn't measure up. It came to me slowly, the same way my stories do, now that I let them take their time: the writing I'd done on Islesford was of a different sort. It wasn't on the page yet, true, but it was there, murmuring at the back of my mind like the constant sound of the sea, washing against the shore rocks outside our cabin. All I had to do was start listening.
1. P.251, "Walking", from Excursions, by Henry David Thoreau.
2. P.34, The Helga Pictures by Andrew Wyeth.
