On Whale Island

by Daniel Hays

  IN THE SPRING of 1989, when I was twenty-nine, I packed a blow-up boat, an outboard engine, and the only oar I could find into my jeep. I took a ferry from Portland, Maine, to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and then drove for half a day to a remote town with the enticing name of Weed Harbor. I hadn’t even noticed Kingsland on the map. A spring gale was just getting started, and I’d never seen it snow parallel to the ocean before. Actually, it was worse than parallel: it seemed to snow up from the ocean.

  I asked several guys around the dock if they would take me out to Whale Island. The response was immediate.

  “No, not in this wind, no way.”

  I waited.

  “Try one of them Carters in Kingsland—they’ll go out in anything,” one man finally volunteered.

  I have since found that anyone in Kingsland who must mention Weed Harbor at all will include some colorful and descriptive metaphors in their response. Who knows how far back in time this feud goes? Nova Scotia was visited long before Columbus by Vikings, and Weed Harbor is only a day’s row from the suspected first settlement. Maybe Weed Harbor boys are direct descendants of the Vikings and their barbaric ways. It would explain a lot, according to the Kingsland boys, anyway.

  I drove farther east for another hour and found Kingsland. The town seemed deserted, literally at the end of a road. There were no stores, no phone booths, no traffic. But I did see beautiful workboats in the small harbor. I found a truck whose hood was warm, and in the building that was closest to it I first met Peter. He was building lobster pots, and my first thought was that he’d been doing it all winter, standing in his shed surrounded by rope, wood, wire, and tools. I introduced myself and asked would he take me out to Whale Island? He mumbled something about his boat being “laid up for a while,” and pointed me toward a house, where I eventually found his brother Mike. Again, I introduced myself and asked if he’d take me out.

  “By Jesus, what the hell would you want to go out in this snot for?”

  “Fifty dollars?” I suggested. He looked at me quizzically.

  “And a bottle of rum,” I hastily added.

  Mike took me out through the storm. He didn’t even flinch. He had to test the rum, to make sure I wasn’t pulling something on him, and then I had to be polite. Along the way, I saw the ocean as one finds it only at sea: waves as big as school buses surging over barn-sized rocks. Great masses of ocean, so unquestionably powerful that I always feel humble in their presence. People often talk of man against the sea, which to my mind is as counterintuitive as challenging gravity. A storm is a magnificent glimpse into the heart of nature to be regarded with wonder, not ego.

  And that storm has made all the difference.

  I BOUGHT WHALE Island later that week. My passion and enthusiasm, combined with a complete lack of business sense, were not assets during the purchase negotiations. I was played like a fiddle. I closed the deal paying somehow twice the initial asking price. I justified that allowing myself to be manipulated by a savvy European businessman was evidence that I was incapable of associating with the real world. I actually needed an island, I reasoned, for my own safety.

  That summer my father and I pitched a tent for two weeks on Whale Island. We explored the island, both by land and by sea. We spent hours lost in the thick fog on the small boat Junior lent us. We found ruins of previous buildings. We rebuilt a small fishing shed, the only structure still standing. Various lobstermen would stop by to yarn with us. The shed was in the island’s only harbor, and the lobstermen had some of their traps just twenty feet from our tent. Slowly, and with caution, they spoke with us, and the history of the island was revealed.

  Almost everyone had a story involving a relation who had once owned Whale Island. “My great-granddaddy bought it for two dollars in 1910, and he always said he paid too damn much. He fished here in the summers,” one man told us. “I remember a shipwreck when I was little, a boatload of molasses, thick as oil it was. Her anchor’s still on the shore over there,” he said, pointing. Another spoke of coming here for picnics as he grew up, finding parts of shipwrecks on the beach, and how “a crazy American once lived here, I think he was the last fellow to winter on the island, didn’t get on too good with anybody. Them windows you’re replacing there was shot out, you know.”

  The stories kept pouring in. “Three men was buried on the north shore. I remember a cross used to mark the spot. I came here with my daddy when I was little. He’d leave me ashore while he pulled traps in the narrows there. Of course that stretch of island was washed away in ’56.” Another told us of a herd of deer who swam out and lived on the island for a while. In 1928 there was a fire. These stories left me wondering how my own time on the island would be described to future generations.

  My father is a terrific designer. He actually learned the trade by designing stage sets on Broadway in 1955. The eight-by-eleven-foot shed we rebuilt became as snug as the two sailboats we’d built years before. We planked the inside with pine, made bunks and a kitchen, and installed lots of hooks so wet clothing could dry. We put in a tiny woodstove. We put in windows and a new roof. A few years later it fed eight friends for the five summer weeks it took us to build the main house.

  There is no easy way to summarize the building of our home: 100 pounds of nails; 150 pounds of nuts, bolts, and washers; between 12 and 15 tons of lumber; 1 ton of cement; and 100 gallons of water for the cement. In all, the house cost me under $20,000 to build. The friends who came to help stayed about a week each. We worked—my father, the friends, and I—from sunup till sundown. We made about eighty trips to the shore to pick up our supplies, a total of over eleven hundred miles, or nearly the distance between New York and Miami.

  We unloaded much of the lumber onto a rocky peninsula closer to the house than our main harbor. We could do this only at high tide, and the sea had to be calm. Probably a third of everything fell into the water at least once. One bag of cement is still visible at low tide. There are 652 steps up a steep and winding path leading to the house. Friends named this “the Trail of Tears” after a week of carrying almost half of the future house on their backs. This was a long, hot summer.

  Now, bringing my new family to this place for the first time, I remember how the main house is still not quite finished. The fishing shed will act as a guest house, and maybe a retreat for later on, when cabin fever strikes.

  No road—or even footpath—can follow the coast between the harbors of Kingsland and Weed Harbor. The mainland is rife with bogs and inlets, some cutting way inland. These natural walls keep the roads far away. Whale Island is on the outer curvy part of a bulge of wilderness land along the eastern shore. From the island we see no sign of civilization except, at twelve-second intervals, the flash of the Kingsland lighthouse. By boat it is seven miles to the closest road, in Kingsland. There is no way to walk along the coast toward the island from either town without having to ford the inlets, and you would probably die from mosquito bites.

  Most of Whale Island is forever hidden. The trees are so dense that penetrating the thicker parts is possible only by walking backward. You just lean and push like hell, and the trees snap back into place behind you. If not for the constant sound of the ocean you would become lost after about ten feet, at which time where you came from would no longer be visible, gone in solid walls of dark green. Once, determined to get to the center of the island, I bravely launched myself into the void. After only about two minutes I walked right off a cliff. It took me a full twenty seconds to “fall” the ten or fifteen feet through the clutching spruce trees. I landed, if it can be called that, safe and happy on thick moss. I climbed up the way I had come and headed for the shore’s constant music. I have not tried again.

  From space Whale Island looks like an aggravated baby pterodactyl. When I look at a map of it, I always wait for a twitch, or I listen for a screech reminiscent of the cartoon Jonny Quest. The island is quite alive for me.

  I am still fascinated by how each stretch of the coast is different. It�
�s as if shores from around the world have been collected and reassembled here to highlight the verities of nature. Some areas are huge sheets of bare granite with thick veins of quartz running through. A few hundred feet farther along there is nothing but baseball-sized rocks, smoothed over time. My favorite is a stretch of basketball-sized rocks, which are smoothed and rearranged only during the biggest storms. (As they constantly shift, you have to hop with agility on these rocks, pretending each half fall is just the beginning of the next hop.) There is also a small sandy beach, a flat rock beach composed only of skipping stones, a marsh, a beach of pebbles, some areas where dirt falls directly into the sea, and some jagged steep-sided inlets where I can barely hang on. And there is one beach where all the ocean seems to deposit its flotsam, a terrific place to find buoys and pieces of wood for building stuff. There are unbroken rock peninsulas of solid bedrock, earth bones. There are pools where rainwater collects, tidal pools full of squirming life, and flat stretches of rock where the seagulls come to drop and crack open sea urchins or crabs so they can get to the soft meat inside.

  NOW AT JUNIOR’S DOCK, the end of the road, our two dogs explode from the truck in a flurry of pee urgency. They run directly for Junior. Abby is an overbred neurotic Airedale. Bear is a studly Idaho sheepherding mutt. They are in love with each other. Both engulf Junior, completely disregarding his cool Irish demeanor. Abby leaps toward his face like a dart, her tongue desperate for a proper introduction.

  The air is clean and I fill my lungs deeply, starting at that exact moment a new life. We are at the end of the road, with everywhere to go before us.

  “Yup. Here we are. You better like us ‘cause you’re stuck with us for a year,” I say. Junior almost smiles. “Well, by Jeezus, I’m willing to put up with you is all.” (High praise, I think.)

  Junior’s boathouse is the hub of Kingsland. I love to stand in it with my eyes closed, smelling a hundred years of sea life. Shelves overflow with the sort of gear you see being used in the old Captain Courageous movie with Spencer Tracy: anchors, buckets of tar, buoys, nets, pulleys, crab traps, sails, spars, pails of hardware. The place does more than smell; it tastes, rich sea broth from a long time ago.

  With Junior’s help we uncover our aluminum motor-boat from the dark depths of his shed. I always leave it there between my visits, and since it’s a well-used boathouse, many things are placed, temporarily at least, on the boat. “Uncovering” the boat is more like “finding” the boat under fishnets, boxes, and great coils of rope. There is a ramp leading directly from the shed’s back barn doors into the sea. The boat is light enough for the four of us to nudge her along. Once she is on the ramp she slides eagerly into the shallows.

  The outboard engine is a 25-horsepower with no fancy attachments. A three-foot section of PVC pipe is duct-taped to extend the steering arm so I can stand up to see over the bough while steering. The boat is a seventeen-foot workboat that I bought from Junior, old and scratched up just right. I haven’t felt her in the water for a full year, and I remember that when I float on any ocean I am floating on the whole world’s surface. I become calm, content just to be. This is only Stephan’s second time seeing the Atlantic, and he’s off playing with a starfish. Wendy seems a little afraid, and I hug her tightly.

  We overload the boat with too much of our stuff and are off. Three humans, two dogs, and the first load of four hundred pounds of “the bare necessities” of life. The boat is weighed down, our outboard not powerful enough to allow us to plane over the water. We surge ahead like a brick, but a happy brick. A small wave slaps the boat and splashes us. Finally.

  Our driveway travels along unspoiled coast. If our boat were light, it would take us about twenty minutes. Today it is closer to an hour, and we all watch as the shore’s shifting mysteries slowly unfold. Since last summer there has obviously been some stormy weather. New trees are washed up well beyond the high-tide mark. House-sized boulders have been moved.

  From a mile away, as we round Strawberry Point, Whale Island appears. Often shrouded in fog, it is low and surrounded by a ring of gray-and-white granite shoreline. There are several outlying ledges to avoid. Sometimes during big storms one of these, usually a good ten feet below the surface, will be exposed between massive surges of ocean. The thundering waves breaking on this ledge turn an area the size of a football field into a chaos that one cannot help but think of as unleashed fury. Today there is no sign of this, and we motor right over the submerged Goliath. The cold water is especially clear this early in the summer: rocks and fish quite sharply defined to about ten feet, shapes for another fifteen feet. In many places the winter’s ice has scratched all marine growth from the bottom, and the rocks are mostly white, clean granite.

  We round the rocks protecting the harbor. In the shallows we see the fish, crabs, and rocks that will become familiar with our family as the year goes on. Our harbor is an underwater world teeming with life and activity. I cut the engine and we glide onto the beach. There is nothing like the feeling of a small boat as it skids onto a gravel shore; you have arrived with certainty.

  Stephan has not grown up on boats as I have, so he must learn all of the basic rules of seamanship from me. I ask him to jump to the shore and hold the bow. But he is not in the front of the boat when I ask him, so he jumps off the stern. He lands in the water up to his waist. I cringe, and Wendy says, “Stephan, you’re all wet now, you’ll catch cold!” He couldn’t care less. He’s ecstatic. Wendy is fixated on how she’ll have to wash his salty clothes and how he might get sick. I am wondering where I failed. How could any kid that I live with jump into the water like that? I am preparing a lecture on how to stay dry when Stephan screeches, “Yahoo-eee!” and runs up the beach to chase a seagull, forgetting about the boat and everything else in the world.

  “He’s just a little guy,” Wendy says, noticing my reaction to the nautical blasphemy that has just occurred. It is not appropriate to leap out of a boat that needs assistance to chase seagulls. It is just not done.

  “Hey, bonehead!” I yell. “Get your little ass back here and hold the boat!”

  Grinning, and with water sloshing out of his boots, Stephan runs back just as a small wave turns the boat sideways and carries her up to the beach.

  We unload a huge pile of stuff as the dogs tear up the smooth beach with as much enthusiasm as can be contained in their two bodies. The new smells must be wonderful to them, especially after having been stuck so long in my truck. Their wet noses flash in the sunlight.

  The first order of business for me is making the boat safe. Under a tree, right where I left it after last summer’s visit, is a coil of rope. I tie one end to an eyebolt that I secured to a van-sized boulder in ’93 (I had to rent a generator and a big hammer drill to do that). I launch the boat (mumbling childishly under my breath at Stephan) and let her drift across the small harbor to another eye-bolt similarly embedded on the other shore, and tie up to that one too. Between the two eyebolts is 300 feet of rope led through a pulley at each end. By securing the boat to any place along that continuous line, about 150 feet between shores, I can haul the boat out to the middle of the harbor and then knot the rope to the eyebolt. This way she’s in the middle of the small bay, where the water is deepest. I can leave her there safely during all but the worst weather.

  We carry food, clothes, tools, books, and even Legos over a quarter mile of treacherous roots. I cut this trail years ago from the harbor on the east of the island to the south-facing shore, and it’s a bit curvy, meandering almost. (Junior’s comment was “What were you, drunk?”) We all pull some muscles.

  The hinges to the door are rusted almost solid, but we eagerly open the house and breathe in last year’s air. We stand together, just inside the door. The atmosphere is thick and wonderful.

  Wendy and I put our bags down and look at each other. “Wendy, we are home!” I pronounce. Her smile, with the ocean, the dancing sunlight—it’s a perfect moment. She hugs me tightly. Then Stephan (with the intuition of an
only child who might not for a moment be the absolute center of attention) tries to join us. He gets about halfway up the stairs before slipping with his box of Legos into a colorful heap at the bottom. Wendy and I peer down the stairs. After a pause, Stephan holds up a green animally looking Lego and cries out, “I found my Lego alligator, I found him!”

  Small organized anthills litter the floor. At first we step around them, as if honoring all their hard work. Upstairs, I examine a pile and see that it is light blue, obviously insulation that has rained down from the roof. I guess the ants have been tunneling up there all year. I wonder just how much insulation is left? Guess we’ll find out come winter.

  Before nuzzling down into our blankets on the hard floor, I encourage Wendy and Stephan to keep a journal of this year. “For you, it’s required,” I tell Stephan. “Being able to recognize your feelings, thoughts, the best or worst part of the day, whatever you want. Just mean it. It’s important to express yourself. One day you will be glad you did this, and if not, you can burn it all then.”

  I turn to Wendy. “And please don’t just write when you are pissed off at me. I know that’s when you usually write, but when you are old and rereading it—I mean, I do good stuff too, right?”

  She looks at me with raised eyebrows. “If you want a positive leading role in my journal, you can start right now and be quiet.”

  Later, I sigh all the way down to my toes, melting into the moment that I’ve been dreaming of for two years. I follow the huggable moon’s reflection to its origin, seemingly just out of reach. (Thank God for that, or I’m sure we’d find a way to ruin even the moon . . .)