9.

A SAFE HARBOR

Every family is an island, but not every family gets to own one. Buckle Island was the backyard of my summer childhood fun. Located about fifteen miles by sea from our home on Mount Desert Island, in Maine, my parents discovered it one day in 1961 while sailing through Jericho Bay. A storm was brewing from the east and they had no motor on their slender R boat. Their chart showed a safe harbor just ahead by Buckle Island. They sailed in and dropped anchor. One of the happiest phases of my childhood was about to begin. My family and the many friends who joined us on the twenty-acre island over the next ten years spent time there without pressure or responsibility. Buckle Island became a safe harbor for us all.

On that first stormy day when my parents rowed ashore, my mother told me she felt a déjà vu. Something about the island caught her fancy, or perhaps she recognized a longing in herself, like Mole in The Wind in the Willows, who smells his home after returning from adventures with his friend the river rat. She sniffed drifts of balsam wafting from the dark woods and pungent seaweed covering mud-soaked clams at half tide. She heard the warning screams of gulls overhead as the sky darkened. The impending storm did not scare her, for she felt safe on the island, as if encountering an old friend.

I like to imagine my parents dragging the rowboat up above the tide line and tying the painter line around a pink granite rock. Farther up onshore they sight the white-flecked remains of Indian clamshell middens partially covered in grass and earth. They explore the dense wilderness of balsam and spruce, mossy outcroppings, and tracks of deer and raccoons. Above the high tide beach they discover a fisherman’s shack and peer through its windows at rusted cans and broken glass on the floor. My mother dreams aloud to my father. “David, wouldn’t it be fun to buy this island and build our own cabin on it?” They stand together dreaming, shoulder to shoulder.

Later that year, my mother bought Buckle Island from a lobsterman for three hundred dollars. Carl Lawson lived on neighboring Swan’s Island, along with several hundred other people, year-round. The ferry between Swan’s Island and Mount Desert Island had been built just the year before, opening up the island to summer people. Each year more sailboats dotted the ocean as cruising became a refined form of wilderness camping.

It was a sunny, blue-sky day when my parents, and Richard and Peggy and I, sailed in my parents’ new Bermuda 40 from Seal Harbor to Buckle Harbor. No sooner had we dropped anchor than Mr. Lawson’s lobster boat came sputtering around the end of the island. We were downwind of it, and the smell of dead fish rushed up my nostrils as he slowed to a drift alongside our sailboat. My parents waved and shouted hellos. Mr. Lawson extended one hand with three missing fingers while his good hand held the wheel. He pulled his boat up alongside ours, and I could see that his well-worn overalls were speckled with fish and salt.

“Glad to see you, Carl,” my mother shouted, ignoring the smell. “How are you?”

“Oh, not too bad, considering all the fog we’ve been havin’.” A toothless smile cracked his stubbled face. “Did you hear about the boat that dragged anchor last night out of Seal Cove and went on the rocks? It took three fishin’ boats to pull her off. You must have brought the sun today.” He spoke with an accent thick as fog, words rolling over his toothless gums, unself-consciously, as he and my parents talked on like old friends. Sometimes he was hard to understand. But one thing was clear as the sky above. Mr. Lawson loved my parents, and his life.

He did not have much in the way of material goods and we knew he must earn the equivalent of minimum wage, but he insisted on giving us lobsters anyway.

“Really, Carl. You mustn’t,” insisted my father.

“Nope. I was hopin’ you’d come by as I had some extra. Glad you’re here.” Mr. Lawson seemed to profit more from our company and the stories. The exchange became a ritual each time we visited.

My mother reached for a box. “We brought you some fresh vegetables from our garden and we need to get rid of this extra beer, for the ice in our ice box is melting.” She knew just how to thank and repay him simultaneously. Mr. Lawson might be poor in pocket, but he was rich at heart and my parents valued his friendship as much as any leader from around the world.

We visited often after that because my mother had bought a prefabricated cabin and planned to erect it on the site of the old fisherman’s shack. This was the beginning of our family project.

We came in the forty-foot motorboat, bringing boatloads of wood, nails, bags of cement for footings, tar paper, saws, hammers, and other equipment. None of us except Donald, who drove the motorboat, had built anything like this before. Donald knew engines and carpentry like Mr. Lawson knew lobstering. His modest nature and hands-on experience made him a natural teacher and guide. He knew how to stay one step behind us, allowing us the pleasure of discovery. Yet he was there with a measuring tape when plans went askew.

The summer we began, I was twelve, Richard was fifteen, and Peggy was sixteen. It was 1964. My parents were in their forties and my older siblings had all left home. There was something for each of us to do and we had enough combined energy to work for hours at a time. Once the shack was removed, my mother held up a window frame to determine which view she wanted to build the house around. Then we laid the foundation.

The project spanned several summers. In addition to the cabin, we constructed a rock wall around a small vegetable garden and built an outhouse about one hundred feet away. The cabin was furnished with a table, benches, chairs, and bunk beds, all made by my mother and Donald. We put a woodstove in one corner and set a wooden barrel outside to collect rainwater for washing dishes. Kerosene lanterns hung from the walls and my mother chose sturdy colored tin cups and plates along with iron frying pans and pots. Eventually, we attached an additional room with a double bed. After the final touch—a pump organ for music—we named our cabin “Buckle Botel” as a pun on hotel. We could not house many people at a time, but it was a home of our own making, and, having been one of the builders, I edged my toe through the door with fresh confidence.

Once the cabin was built and furnished, we cleared trails around the island. When we got too hot we separated boys from girls, found our respective beaches, and jumped in without clothes. Maine water wakes you up in a hurry. After a skinny-dip we took time to let our tingling skin dry in the sun.

My mother was more at home in this landscape than any other. Buckle Island became the realization of her dream of independence and freedom. She absorbed herself in projects of her own choosing, and whenever she talked about them, rapture spread like dawn upon her face.

Our adventures stretched into days and weeks and dreams. Buckle Island occupied my thoughts as I worked on math problems over the winter. It brought me to the page of my poetry long before I knew I could write. It was a place where fantasies blazed trails through the darkest part of the island of self. Buckle Island was a safe harbor for all kinds of exploration. Friends who had never spent time in the countryside or wilderness learned how to get their hands dirty, digging clams with their fingers or making rafts out of driftwood and recycled nails. It was an island without plumbing, electricity, or stores. But it had all the ingredients for a good life.

Over time, we got to know Buckle Island in every season. One February my mother took my brother Richard, my friend Holly Duane, and me to Maine for our school vacation. The temperature had been well below freezing for several weeks and my mother was looking for ways to occupy us. She decided it would be fun to spend a night in Buckle Botel. Visions of ice-encrusted windows, cold feet, and the stir of adventure ran a shiver down my spine. I loved camping and backpacking but being on an island in winter was going to be a first for all of us. “This will be an adventure,” said Mum. Nothing pleased her more than to brave the elements in hopes that normal schedules would be disrupted. Excitement was in the air as she put together the food. We each packed an extra set of clothes and bundled up in long underwear, blue jeans, flannel shirts, mittens, hats, and parkas. Richard and I wore the red Scandinavian sweaters Mum had knit for us. She drove us to the dock and we trundled down the ramp like overstuffed penguins on a migration march. The cold air bit my nose.

The only boat able to take us through the freezing and partially frozen water was a scallop dragger. It was ten o’clock in the morning when it drew alongside the family dock. We hoisted our few duffel bags and baskets of food into the boat and headed out to sea. Holly and I soon joined the others inside the cabin of the dragger. We gazed in silence at ice floes skimming the water and waves. They formed ice chips and flew off either side of the bow.

Beneath the cold we could smell the stench of aging scallop juice. Holly and I wrinkled our noses at each other and giggled, as thirteen-year-olds do when tasting the unfamiliar. Richard, who was three years older, was intent on the scallop man, watching him deftly navigate the ice and swells. My mother cleaned her fogged-up glasses and kept a conversation going with our captain. “It must be awfully cold to work at times like this, Marvin,” she said, one eyebrow arched.

“It’s not too bad most of the time, but today’s some cold.”

The conversation chopped from one subject to the next. My mind drifted to visions of wood in the stove and hot cocoa.

Two hours and many ice floes later, we slowed down in Buckle Harbor. How different it looked from summer. The water’s edge that I knew so well, and had last seen flowing with seaweed like my own long hair, was now caked with salty blocks of ice and snow. Soft waves that had lapped at the shore in the ebbing tide were now tinkling and clashing with ice meeting ice.

Marvin tossed the anchor and backed his boat to catch the bottom. Once it held he turned off the engine. His eyes met my mother’s, as if to say, Are you sure you want to do this? But she was already gathering up a basket of food and her duffel. “Come on, children, pick up a bag and let’s get in the dinghy.” Nothing was going to stop her now.

Richard took the oars and rowed us to the high tide beach, closer to the cabin. Holly and I sat in the stern and I held the line to an extra dinghy tied behind us to have in case of an emergency. I tried to imagine what that would look like. We were just staying overnight so what could go wrong? The cold air quickly froze my hands and I envied my brother’s active tug at the oars, keeping his hands warm. I looked forward to getting the fire going in the woodstove.

It took two trips to get us and all our bags unloaded on the beach. Richard and I pulled up the extra dinghy and tied it to a tree. The scallop man said, in his thick Maine accent, “You take cayah now. I’ll be back tomorrah if the weathah holds.”

This last sentence was not very encouraging. I looked at Holly with a half smile and shrugged. Her eyes had grown wide. I was glad to have her company. Richard was already walking up the beach when my mother replied, “Thanks very much, Marvin. We’ll be fine.” She was all smiles as she turned with us to trudge through the snow. I looked back to see our scallop man give one final wave before hopping back in his dinghy.

Buckle Botel was no more than ninety feet from shore, but drifts of snow across our path made it seem twice as far. Cold air followed us indoors. I slid the glass door shut behind us, clinging to the illusion that indoors would be warmer.

When we had finished the cabin the previous summer, the air was warm and the grass was green. Now it was white and cold and unfamiliar. I put the small cooler I had been carrying down on the kitchen table and flung my duffel onto the bunk bed in the corner that would be for Holly and me. My mother had asked Richard to sleep on the floor on a mattress. She would be in the extra room with the double bed on the other side of the wall from the woodstove.

Mum and I rolled up last summer’s newspaper to stuff in the stove. We stacked kindling on top and Richard lit a match. Holly and I unpacked our food. The smell of salami and gingerbread made me hungry. We decided to have lunch right away. Richard sliced the salami as I cut into the block of Cheddar cheese. Holly placed bread on a plate and my mother poured water from a gallon jug she had brought with us. We were far away from potable running water, indoor plumbing, or other comforts of home, but we were feeling very self-reliant, warming ourselves by the fire and sharing in the work of food preparation.

The wind was picking up. It rapped at the windows and blew through the cracks around the trim. Had we listened to the weather forecast before coming, we might have thought twice. But that was not my mother’s way.

When lunch was over we decided to shovel a path to the outhouse, a distance of a hundred feet. We realized it would seem a lot farther if the snow was deep. I felt the first flakes melt on my nose and looked up to see gray clouds. No sooner had we started to shovel than we were engulfed in a blizzard. There was nothing to do but go back in and wait.

Richard got out his guitar and played some Peter, Paul and Mary tunes while Holly and I played cards. Mum found the storm relaxing and took a nap.

Wind screamed through the sliding door each time one of us needed to use the outhouse. This was going to be a long, cold night. Luckily, we had plenty of firewood stacked inside. I was glad we had cut so much last summer. Even with the cold nosing through the cracks, we were warm indoors.

My mother was in an unusually good mood when she awoke. She was happiest when on Buckle Island, and the storm put her over the top. Her mood cast a spell on us. We eased into our chairs, stared out the windows, and felt secure in the envelopment of snow outside and peace within. Conversation centered on whether the boat was going to get here tomorrow. I knew my mother was hoping it would not and I was beginning to feel the same way. It was fun surviving together. I felt needed and I liked that we had to work together to survive. My mother’s values went deeper than possessions and stuff. She wanted to give us experience in testing our mettle.

Mum put another log in the stove and took an iron frying pan out of the cupboard to sauté some onions for the steak. She removed another pot and filled it with water to boil the string beans, and said with just a hint of excitement in her voice, “I think we will probably have to cross over to Swan’s Island tomorrow to get some extra supplies. We will not have enough food if we get stranded.” Tomorrow was Sunday and stores would not be open. I wondered how we were going to buy our food.

Snow continued to pile up around our cabin until after dinner. Then in a breath it stopped, and the temperature plummeted to far below freezing. We did not have a thermometer, but it was cold enough to burn your throat when you inhaled outside. I discovered this when I went to the outhouse before bed. The half-moon was up, spreading its reflection across the still water. Waves were not moving the way they usually did. Could the harbor be freezing over?

I told everyone and we went down to the high tide beach to have a look. Sure enough, the surface spreading from shore was solid. Where blocks of ice had floated in the harbor the day before, they now joined together, forming heaves and ridges. Our breath was steamy as we listened to the uncommon silence. Time stopped. We felt the great body of ocean groaning under the weight of ice, forcing upward fingers of frozen water, as if trying to push back a much too heavy blanket.

The next morning the entire harbor was frozen solid. My mother was uncommonly cheerful. She asked Holly and me to go with her to Swan’s Island while Richard stayed at the cabin “to keep the home fires burning.” I understood the full meaning of the expression. Without him it would be cold by the time we returned. We ate our share of bacon, eggs, and toast, put on our warmest clothes, and lumbered down to the beach.

The extra rowboat was now stranded above the tide. We undid the stiffened painter from around the tree and slid the boat down to the edge of the frozen water, making a trail in icy sand and seaweed. Everything was slippery with ice. Between Swan’s Island and us was a cluster of pink boulders with a tiny copse of trees on top. The tide was so far out that the mussel flats were a field of ice. Holly and I took one side of the boat, my mother the other, and we very carefully slid our way over the flats and onto the ice.

Years later, Holly and I compared memories of how we crossed Buckle Harbor. She swears we rowed in open water. I swear we pushed the boat all the way across the harbor on top of the frozen waves.

One thing we do agree on was that the walk into town was very, very long. We took turns with my mother, breaking trail through the knee-deep snow. Our conversation was muffled by the dense white of winter hanging on every branch. Rambling reminiscences, random observations about birdsongs, and the exertion of walking through deep snow helped keep our morale high. We giggled at the sight of us, marching single file through woods in search of civilization.

By the time we arrived at the town, the streets were plowed but the sidewalks were empty. Our weary legs welcomed the easy walking. Mum knew only one person on Swan’s Island. Carl Lawson lived on the other side of town. She was banking on their friendship as collateral for convincing someone to open the general store on a Sunday. We were by this time very hungry, and returning to the island empty-handed was not an option.

The street was lined with houses and trees, all spaced well apart around the harbor of the little fishing village. We walked past several doors, hoping to find someone looking out a window, but not a soul was in sight. Halfway down the street was a faded yellow house with white trim, similar to others on either side, but with a glass front. We peered through the darkened window and spied shelves of canned food.

“Now, if only we can find someone to open it up,” my mother said. She sounded as if she had just found the first clue on a treasure hunt. We looked up and down the street wondering whose door to knock on. A light was glowing three houses away and my mother decided to take the chance. We followed behind her as she knocked on the door. A man opened it, and when he saw us fringed with snow, his mouth dropped open, revealing several missing teeth. “You lost?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” Mum answered, smiling, and reached out her hand. “I’m Peggy Rockefeller. We are staying on Buckle Island and have run out of food.” She made it sound like that would answer everything. His quizzical expression was grounds for embellishment.

“I wonder if you know the person who owns the store. My friend, Mr. Carl Lawson, told me there was a grocery here, and while we realize it is Sunday, we’d be awfully grateful if we could buy some food.”

The man looked from my mother to Holly and me, as if a strange new species had just shown up in town. I couldn’t tell if he recognized our last name or whether it made any difference, for his mouth fell slack for what seemed like an eternity.

Perhaps he took pity on us. Or maybe the feeling of being needed had just spread beyond Buckle Botel.

“You come right with me, Mrs. Rockefeller,” he said, pulling on a jacket from a hook just inside the door. “We’ll go ask Carl’s brother and I bet he’ll open her up. Where did you say you came from?”

If we weren’t a new species we were aliens, but any kind of stranger is welcome news on a cold winter day on an island in Maine.

“From Buckle Island,” my mother repeated, her voice slightly higher, as if it would shrink the distance we had walked. “We came out to spend the night and were supposed to return today, but the man whose boat we were going on never arrived. I guess there was too much ice.”

“Ayup. It is some cold. But you walked a long ways. And you’re fixing to walk all the way back, too?”

“Yes, indeed,” my mother answered. “I’ve got two strong helpers here.” Holly and I looked at each other and grinned.

We had arrived at a house five down from his. He knocked on the front door. It opened to a larger man dressed in overalls. Before we could say hello, our knight in shining armor launched into a story.

“Harry, this is Mrs. Rockefeller, a friend of Carl’s. She and her girls have just walked from the Buckle and they need some food. Can you open up your stowa? They’ve run clear outta food.” His last sentence explained how stories on Maine islands get bigger over time.

Harry looked from us to his neighbor, gently shaking his head as if to say, “Don’t know what they was doin’ in the first place,” but he took us on as a welcome project in his otherwise quiet day.

“Well, I think I can arrange that. Just let me get my key and I’ll open her right up.”

I looked at my mother as if she had just found the combination for the treasure chest. The first turn of the dial had brought us to Buckle Island. The second had produced the storm. The third got us safely into town. We opened the door to food and survival. The three of us smiled like Cheshire cats.