Island Views
a Ferry Ride — or 15— Away
John Gibson
John Gibson
...The real merits of islands lie, as I've suggested, in their separateness. Little can be said to fully explain this attraction except to observe that as mainland life grows more intolerable across the globe, islands become more obviously places of refuge where one tangibly senses difference. There are islands where I have spent foggy weekends off the coast of Maine that effectively erased all sense of baneful television news, a crumbling stock market, and backed-up traffic on expressways. The notable absence of a brightly lit McDonald's just left of the bait shed is reassuring.... One dares the larger world to make its trivialities felt here....
Maine islands boast a certain exceptionality as to appearance. Though in tropical southern Maine, islands may sport the deciduous growth common on the mainland, as you work northward the vegetation and its visible underlayment begin to change. Rock and ledge show themselves more and more along island peripheries. Dark groves of conifers dominate. Ledge, seen from a boat, reveals itself to be just under the surface of everything, forcing you to revise your sense of what is stood upon. There is a coldness, too, about such a landscape, a hard, unyielding beauty. Few other island places on the North American continent appear quite as do these Maine islands-their mysterious metallic greenness, their ageless rocky footings, their shaded glades of mossy stone. If you take a boat or paddle a kayak through the chain of islands from Stonington to Isle au Haut you will see what I mean. Separateness, I think, in all the keen forms in which you can experience it, were it to have a particular color, texture, and shape, would look like these islands.
Without explanation, human artifacts crop up here and there, sometimes as if growing from the very ground. They appear to be of human origin, at least. The late Maine author and humorist John Gould once puzzled over the strange stone circle found on Damariscove Island. It is a stone wall in a circle, and John asked why in the world and who in the world would build such a thing, given the extensive manual labor and mechanical ingenuity involved. After all, what needed to be fenced out or in, he inquired. From whom did islanders, there since the 1500s, need to be shielded? ...
How to explain these things? Or the writings on rock at Monhegan? Perhaps the work of those who came before anyone arrived from the Atlantic or Mediterranean world? I had wanted to lend John an essay on Dun Aengus and its situation on the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, but he, perhaps, was already aware of it. There is an ancient stone circle there, too, backing up to the sea. And then there are the eerie ghost ships that navigate among these islands. Unexplainable shapes floating on oily surf-silent, uncrewed, adrift....
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