You want to live in Matinicus Foreside?

This early February morning offered limitless sunshine, a bluebird sky, and 10 degrees above zero—the perfect chance for a long walk through woods trails, across untouched snow, and around the wind-blasted northern and southern tips of our little continent. This afternoon, as I write it has begun to flurry again, quiet and glittering. The wind has subsided. To my mind any weather with no wind is good weather.

We live with beauty here. We have loons in the coves and bunnies in the woods and a snowy owl on the chimney. We have dark skies for shooting stars. We have a million apple blossoms like a sudden snowfall in the spring, great fields of lupines in the summertime, and fire-engine-red cardinals in the winter that’ll visit anybody who might put out a few seeds.

Yet I saw on Face-thingy a couple of months ago the chitter-chatter of a few busybodies who had a lot to say about this community as they entered Matinicus harbor for the first time aboard the State Ferry. Something along the lines of: “The people of that island obviously don’t take any pride in the place, by the looks of the homes.” Our poor benighted knuckleheads didn’t even realize that the “homes” they were judging were a set of somewhat derelict harborside trap-shops on wharves, some in use and others merely the historical record of Grampa’s place, kept in order to reserve one’s right to use the spot considering the strictness of modern shoreline zoning rules. The area known as Harbor Point, which a ferry rider would see first, is Common Undivided Property, an awkward and mathematically untenable arrangement set up over a century ago to provide working waterfront access to lobstermen, and never intended to make an impression in Architectural Digest. These old and beaten-up fishermen’s shops suffer the ravages of Not Being Gentrified.

Authenticity comes with a price.

Non-gentrification, meaning that all the good spots aren’t already bought up by people who don’t get dirty for a living, seems to encourage just as much snark as does its over-priced obverse. Here, working people can leave the particulars of their industry lying around, regardless of others who might have an opinion about the same. Most homeowners don’t see any need to hide the propane tank behind a rose bush, either. Like much about life on the very edge of civilization not all will agree about where, exactly, that edge is.

I have a hobby that results in the burning, from time to time, of bituminous coal in a tin-shack workshop behind my house. There is no way such a thing would ever be permitted by a Neighborhood Association (a prickly expression used around my house to refer to any Nosy-Parker who opines where they oughtn’t about somebody else’s pile). Most of my neighbors reside close by their stacks of lobster traps, several have yards crowded with vehicles including the excavators and tractors we rely on in any sort of pinch, and island artists— multiple island artists have done this over the years—carry home driftwood and fill their gardens and porches with scavenged treasures. None of that would be permitted in the Rulebook Condominiums ringing Portland or the “quaint” postcard towns where even the color of your paint job is subject to the opinions of the Committee.

They won’t let you have a clothesline in some places. Imagine that. Don’t even start with me about individuals who want to move long-settled utilities infrastructure, at monstrous expense, to improve the view. Of course, because we don’t have a Committee, some neighbors show little evidence of spending their Saturdays doing yard work.

Don’t get me wrong; we aren’t slobs. In the summer, we mow. Many here mow obsessively, trying to exert control over at least something in a place where we control little because the weather tells us whether or not we can get groceries, or watch the evening news, or go to work or even go to the hospital. We mow our patches of grass like men possessed.

Yet if I roll my eyes about another who chooses to fill his lawn with Twisted Tea cans instead of red dahlias, I must not preach him a sermon. I would sound too much like those who’d hector a neighbor about their laying hens, or work trucks, or lobster traps. I can nurture my own opinions about tidy little lawns, right or wrong, but a nice person would keep still.

There are always a few who have something to say about another fellow’s dooryard. Maybe they’d like to be on the Committee. If I was on the Committee I might consider slapping the litterbug into irons, sure--but I’d give free rein to telephone poles, chickens, lobster traps, clotheslines, excavators, and artists who pile up driftwood on their porches.

Published in the Islesboro Island News, February 2022