…and how one subject always leads to another on Matinicus…

Sat, 10/14/2017 - 10:15pm

Eva Murray

Beach trash turtle

This summer I enjoyed the genuinely happy experience of meeting one of my students from 30 years ago again, when a young woman came by the bakery who looked familiar. She had been my third grader, the entirety of the third grade back when I taught school on Matinicus, although academically she worked with the junior high kids. (I suppose that is a dated expression now!) I’d always wondered what came next for her after she left the island.

Meeting one of my students again, and the start of a new school year, got me thinking about my year as teacher here. Like teachers before and after me, I rented the parsonage, an old and fairly utilitarian home in the middle of the island owned by the Congregational Church and used to berth the assortment of volunteer clergy who came to Matinicus in the summertime to offer Sunday services in a variety of styles.

Nobody from High Command instructed Matinicus to start a recycling program or truck our trash to the mainland. We initiated the system ourselves, we organize it ourselves, we pay for it ourselves and we work rather hard at it. Had we been ordered to do it, we’d most likely still be resisting. Of course I can speak only for myself.

This brings up the subject of church on the island, which topic I am quizzed on from time to time by earnest, well-meaning sorts on line at the grocery store. Our church is very little about sermons, and never about denominational exclusivity. It is usually about community merriment, and typically about good food prepared by many hands. On rare occasions it is a dignified and quiet hall when we must gather for a more somber reason.

Anyway, for many years from September through June the parsonage has been the default rental option for a series of one-and-only teachers (or occasionally, teaching couples). These days, the parsonage also rents a few rooms to the United States Post Office. Although we teachers were not obligated to rent the parsonage, there is sometimes nothing else available. This brings up the subject of workforce housing and our shortage thereof. This is a complex problem, hardly unique to Matinicus. Suffice it to say that there are even fewer rental options these days than there used to be. Nobody who goes away for a few cold months wants to rent their primary home to a winter tenant. Heat and water are troublesome in many seasonal residences, the town owns no land upon which to build a rental unit, and even the bed-and-breakfast owner is actively trying to retire. Often there is truly nowhere to rent.

At any rate, back when I moved into the parsonage, it was a good thing I had a pack basket.

In the fall of 1987, the parsonage did not have a washing machine. Most weekends I carried my laundry up the road to a neighbor’s place and washed it there, hauling the wet clothes home afterward—a decidedly heavier load—and drying them on a decrepit clothesline-ish sort of contraption that somebody had installed in the dooryard. I had no vehicle on the island at the time--thus the usefulness of the pack basket. Eventually the powers that be—and I do not remember whether this was the school board who were my bosses, or the church trustees who were my landlords, or the people who became neighbors and friends—found a washer on the island they could acquire and place in my rented abode.

It was a wringer washer. That was fine with me.

Using the wringer washer, despite the frequent puddle in the middle of the floor, was a whole lot less inconvenient than using the wreck of an umbrella-style clothes-drying thingy pounded at some wobbly angle into the middle of the lawn, with its thin, plastic-coated wire “clothesline” and inherent structural instability. When the local electrician began hanging around with some frequency repairing appliances and drinking hot chocolate with me, he installed a proper two-pulley rope clothesline for me between the corner of the porch and a tree. This worked much better, but he received a stern lecture from somebody for daring to change things, and we had to take it down at the end of the school year.

Why an improved clothesline was viewed as messing with the status quo, and troublesome, I can only chalk up to somebody in authority being in a bad mood that day.

Also on the lawn, not far enough from the clothesline, was the parsonage burn barrel. Burn barrelswere not a choice in those days; they were simply an expediency, a routine, and entirely the norm. The school board showed me an identical barrel outside the school, with a couple of holes punched on the sides and a screen of hardware cloth on top, and simply instructed me to burn my trash. I suppose I had sense enough to do it when no small children were around, but the kids wouldn’t have thought it anything worrisome. Every one of their homes had the same.

These days, many of us are extremely concerned about the firetrap that this whole island has become, due to an aging and dying spruce forest. I know, I know: please do not explain to me how “we” need to cut the wood and barge it off the island to a buyer. Nobody wants twisted old half-dead island spruce, and the transportation costs would make it the most gold-plated pulp you could buy, except that you wouldn’t. Nobody would.

That brings up many subjects—what we use for heating fuel (everything you can think of short of peat and buffalo dung,) the cost of trucking anything over the water (less if it’ll fit in my U-Haul, more if you have to hire the Island Transporter,) forestry and fire safety planning, and how those are handled at the individual landowner—not the municipal—level, because we are not a commune or a condominium association. We are a Free People.

I’ve bored my readers enough over the years, I’m sure, detailing our struggles and small victories around trash. Garbage, scrap, junk, and junk mail are a fairly heavy burden on an island where you cannot just hire some guy with a garbage truck to come around every Tuesday. Awareness of the problems associated with marine pollution and plastic in the ocean is beginning to take hold as well, although a few of the guys still think of tossing boat trash overboard as a tradition. “My grandfather did it, and so will I!” Your grandfather had manila rope, wooden buoys, and wooly mittens. Plastic is different.

This brings up the subject of autonomy and independence. (What, you did not notice the smooth segue?) Here’s the thing: nobody from High Command instructed Matinicus to start a recycling program or truck our trash to the mainland. We initiated the system ourselves, we organize it ourselves, we pay for it ourselves and we work rather hard at it. Had we been ordered to do it, we’d most likely still be resisting. Of course I can speak only for myself.

It should be noted that a large, dead turtle was sighted on one of the sand beaches this past summer. Somebody (who just happened to be an oceanographer, and who grew up here) told me that he poked around and discovered the creature’s gut was filled with trash. That bellyful of plastic would not have likely come from here; not much of it, anyway. A big sea turtle covers a lot of territory in its life, and turtles are not born on these beaches. The whole world—including us--must reckon with the problem of plastic trash in the marine ecosystem.

During a beach cleanup effort a year ago I found a small green plastic turtle toy, worn down, faded by the sun, but otherwise fine. I’ve kept it as the mascot of the trash project. Anarchic crankiness aside, perhaps that turtle (the real, dead one, I mean,) along with math and reading and drawing pictures of boats might be part of every island school kids’ curriculum in the future. Just a suggestion.

That brings us back around to the subject of school, which is where we started this ramble. Our new teacher this year doesn’t need a burn barrel, and he doesn’t need a pack basket as far as I know. He works with a few amenities I didn’t have, like the Internet—and a washing machine--but his is not an easy job. The position of island teacher is never an easy job.

As much as changes out here, much remain the same.

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Eva