(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange and his wife recently took a trip down Memory Lane, twelve miles out to sea.
(LANGE) Hurricane Island, off the coast of Maine, has been abandoned three times. Overgrown middens of mussel shells speak of a long-ago presence recorded no other way. As the coast was settled in the 18th century, Hurricane became property. In 1870 it was sold for $1000 to a retired Civil War general, Davis Tillson.
From a distance the island’s profile resembles a great whale. Its beauty is breathtaking – to us who used to live here, heartbreaking. But Tillson wasn’t interested in its beauty. He saw a business opportunity in Hurricane’s creamy gray granite. He opened quarries, installed steam power, and built finishing sheds near the wharf. He imported stone cutters, and soon a town of 1100 people had sprung up on the island.
Tillson paid poorly, in credit redeemable at only his company store. He cut the pay of workers who read pro-labor newspapers, and demanded they vote Republican That couldn’t last too long; most of his imported Italian workers were socialists and union organizers. At one point they even sent a delegation to Washington to visit President Hayes.
After 1900 the quarry business slowly petered out. In November 1914 a loaded company scow foundered in Rockland harbor. Two weeks later the superintendent died of typhoid fever. Next day the owners informed the workers that all operations were suspended. They could stay; but the ferries would be suspended shortly, too.
Tools were left lying where they’d been dropped; tables set for the next meal awaited families that never returned. The buildings were picked apart for use elsewhere. The island was silent again.
Then 50 years later an Outward Bound program leased the island and began building: dining hall, offices, boathouse, tents and cabins for students and staff. Mother and I arrived in 1965 at low tide, and she amused everybody by refusing to climb the wharf ladder with her skirt on till we wrapped her in a blanket. So began one of the best jobs I’ve ever had – seamanship and navigation, rock climbing, initiative tests, and the famous morning run and dip. Mother built a house inside our tent. When the tent came down in the fall, her built-in furniture remained.
Now Outward Bound has abandoned the island. The boats and equipment are gone, but the huge buildings remain, already looking derelict. Mother and I came out yesterday, probably for the last time, to visit the quiet ghosts of the island.
Neither Mother nor I moves as briskly as we did forty years ago. We strolled slowly through our memories – the dining hall decked with mementoes, the quarry whose chilly water we dreaded on foggy days, the meadow and ice pond, the empty foundations, our old cabin. Spruce and grass already are reclaiming the island.
A boat is coming to pick us up. We’ve piled our stuff on the wharf. It’s low tide again. We’ll leave the last time the way we first arrived, on a vertical 15-foot ladder.
This is Willem Lange off the coast of Maine, and I gotta get back to work.