Girl with a gun

In a post back in March I wrote that the island has no law enforcement. That isn’t exactly true.

The National Park Service, which owns most of the island, employs three seasonal rangers. All three are full-time island residents–which is really a miracle since that doesn’t happen to be a prerequisite for the job. The park is open May through October, and as it’s part of Acadia National Park (which, I’m told is the most visited national park in the country) we get several thousand visitors in a single season.

And for good reason. Though the park is remote access–meaning that the only way you can get there is by boat and the campground is at least 7 walking miles from the nearest outpost of civilization–it’s not so remote that you have to hike in after you arrive on the island: during the summer, the mail boat takes you right to campground entrance. So, normal people who aren’t dyed-in-the-gortex backpackers can enjoy a night or two roughing it. They could even conceivably bring a bottle of wine or two and a gourmet dinner if they wanted, without having to lug it through the New England wilderness. On the other hand, those that are diehard hikers, can get off at the town landing and hike the seven miles to the campground; an invigorating walk that takes them through the west side of town, past the Sea Urchin gift shop where they can purchase a coffee mug to replace the one they forgot, and then stop at the village chocolatier to pick up a few freshly made truffles. I mean, rugged or not, who doesn’t enjoy a fresh truffle with a nip of whiskey from their flask or a sip of cowboy coffee from a nice sturdy mug? In other words, this part of Acadia National Park has something for everyone. But I digress.

The feds feel that this many visitors to a national park speaks to the need for law enforcement. I mean, visitors like to pick up shells and rocks from our beaches, or pick flowers, or gather pine cones. All these are fine-able crimes in a national park, and so the NPS deems it necessary to send out a law enforcement officer to patrol. In the past this has usually been a person from off-island who is 1) not happy to be here, and 2) unimpressed with his housing options which consist of a primitive cabin deep in the park that boasts little more than a hard bunk, an outhouse and a well-established colony of mice.

A couple of years ago, my friend Deena (one of the seasonal rangers), decided to eliminate the need for an off-island, heat-packing discontent, and completed the training that would allow her to be our de facto LE. Of course to look at her, you wouldn’t know it. She dresses just like the other two rangers, Wes and Amy (something we often tease them about when all three come in for a cup of coffee in the morning), and she doesn’t often carry her state-issue gun or handcuffs. But Deena’s training ensures that if there is ever a need for crime-solving or ass-busting on the island, it’s dealt with it in a no-drama, no-nonsense, quiet and sometimes unconventional fashion–which is, in times like these, the island way.

So, when I came bursting into the cafe a couple of weeks ago, covered head to toe with peat and mud, and found a uniformed Deena nibbling discernably on one of my farm market biscuit rolls, I practically fainted with relief

Despite my panic, Deena remained un-ruffled.  She finished her breakfast, topped off her coffee, and not until then did she follow me into the forest.  After all, she said, when I crossed my arms and tapped my foot impatiently while she stirred cream into her cup, whoever it was out there was already dead.

True enough, I suppose, but it’s not every day you find a skeleton in your backyard, and I was a bit out of sorts, to put it mildly.  And, after Deena and I together heaved the rest of the bed frame from its spruce root tethers and unearthed the rest of the bones, it was with some small bit of grim satisfaction that I saw her hands shake and her voice quaver slightly as she spoke into her radio to call in our discovery.

Having been instructed by the Knox County sheriff not to further disturb the site, Deena and I found no reason to hang out in the mud with a creepy skeleton, and retreated to the cafe.  So, when the sheriff and his deputy did finally arrive (by boat, from Rockland), the scene was exactly as we had left it.

The bones–female, according the the sheriff, who had apparently, seen this kind of thing before–were laid out almost casually along the length of the bed frame, whose mattress had long since rotted away.  The skeleton was more or less completely intact, save the left hand, which still lay where I threw it in my panic when I unwittingly tore it from its frame (the thought of which was making me  increasingly queasy).  

They snapped some photos, took measurements, made some rough guesses on the age of the bones, and then calmly, and without much ceremony, and frustratingly little talk, packed the bones and the bed frame into  bags and cases, and walked out of the forest.  

The sheriff, it seemed to me, anyway, seemed to think little of the discovery of the strange remains of a dead woman in a quiet island forest.  The bones were old–possibly one hundred years, or more–and long forgotten, and might have been no more than an unmarked grave of some aged, long-ago islander.  Might have been, if it wasn’t for that pesky gun.  

Disconcerted and jumpy, and not wanting to hang around the house, I accompanied Deena while she escorted the sheriff back to the town dock.  The men assured us that they would look into the matter, but as they pulled away, it was clear to me that “looking into” it, would be no more than flipping through a few old census reports and matching a name up with a likely candidate.  A hundred years ago, these offshore islands may have well have been another country for as much as the mainland authorities knew about them and their residents.  Death certificates were practically nonexistent, and knowledge of the comings and goings of people virtually impossible to track–except in the long memories of those that lived there.  And when that failed, well, that was it.  

Except for that journal–the one that was tucked quietly away in the cedar chest of my guest bedroom.

What the rain washed up

Well, September is here, the island school is back in session and our high school students have left to return to campuses off-island. Many of our seasonal residents have returned to their year-round homes all over the country. We’ve cut the cafe back to off-season hours–open Friday, Saturday, Sunday–and I spent many of my freed-up hours this past week catching up on paperwork, making chocolate and squeezing in a little writing. After the emotional upheaval the island underwent last week, I think we were all very glad that Lynn and Seth had the brilliant foresight to throw a huge post-Labor Day party a couple days ago. It’s an annual thing they do: pig roast/potluck, an island-wide In the Can tournament, and a live band.

This year, the pig was a 200-pounder from an off-island farm (brought over on Seth’s boat, Scalawag, as Lynn feels that having a pig on her fishing boat is bad luck). As soon as the pig hits the shore, master off-island roasters Barney and Boo take over: an all night open-air cooking marathon in Kennedy’s field. By 4:00pm the next day, the boathouse is bursting with delectable side-dishes and desserts from the homes of some of the best island cooks, the band (this year it was Flash in the Pan, a 40-person steel drum ensemble from Blue Hill) is warming up, the In the Can courts are ready to go, and the pig is being sliced and carried over to the boat house on steaming platters that are emptied as soon as they’re set down.

Though it seems everyone, along with their potluck dishes, brought a bag stuffed with foul weather gear, the threat of Hannah coming up the coast held off until all the food was gone, the band had packed up and a the In the Can trophy was passed to this year’s champions.

And then it rained. All night it rained; a deluge that washed out park roads and driveways all over the island. The next morning, the road in the village was littered with rocks the size of softballs, the bog by Moores Harbor overflowed, cutting a white-water stream that gushed into the guzzle, and water flowed in torrents down the rocks up to Black Dinah.

While Steve worked the counter in the cafe, I hung up my apron, escaped through the back door and pushed my way through the huckleberry and baby spruce that hides the little trail up the mountain. Earlier this spring, just before the hecticness of summer set in, I found a sheaf of captain’s journals in the woods here. The journals we’re hidden in the leg of a bed frame buried under a century of forest detritus in a patch of woods between the Black Dinah trail and Wes Bingham’s property. I had wanted the bed frame for a pea trellis, but the forest wasn’t ready to give it up–which is just as well, as the early onslaught of summer business foiled my garden plans. It also prevented me from digging into those journals, which have been sitting, unread, in the cedar chest in our guest bedroom. But the night’s rain–the likes of which, according to lobsterman Bert Bingham (who was in for a doughnut earlier in the morning), hasn’t been seen on the island in all of his 70 years–got me thinking that perhaps all that water had coaxed the bed frame out of the earth. Not that I’m in the market for a pea trellis at this point, but after finding those journals, I was curious about the bed frame itself–and the story it had to tell.

I veered off the trail just past the boardwalks over the flooded bog, and made my way up the heavily wooded rise to the old stone wall that separates Wes Bingham’s land from the rest of the forest. Down the back side of this knoll, is a little brook that winds through the base of the miniature valley where I had found the frame. It was as I’d hoped; the brook–now a torrent of foamy white water–had cut through the soft, peat-lined banks of the valley, carving out the packed earth that held my bed frame prisoner. It was too early for the water to have receded, so I pulled off my shoes, rolled up my jeans and waded in. The peat was soft under my bare feet, but quickly gave way to sludgy silt, and I sunk down to my ankles as I made my way toward the frame. Most of it was under water, cloudy with silt and peat, but I could still tell that the brook had done a fine job of excavating where the winter frost heaves had failed. Beneath the swirls of foamy water I could barely make out the blurry lines of the light painted iron frame. Hoping to succeed where I had failed in the spring, I shored myself up against a tree trunk, and prepared to pull the frame up out of the muck. I bent over, reached under the water, grabbed hold and gave a good tug. But just as in the spring, the spruce roots held fast, and instead, the frame gave way with a muted snap, and I fell back hard against the tree trunk grasping a short section of the frame in my hand.

Or at least that’s what I thought it was. But as I regained my balance and actually looked at what I had pulled up out of the water, I realized it was something very, very different. Instead, what I held tight in my hand, broken off from it’s anchor below, was the soft-white, slender forearm of a human skeleton, it’s bony fingers still clutching the butt-end of a rusty revolver.

Treat-ease

Labor Day, the last day of summer, brought weather so fine I could practically taste it on my tongue when I walked out in the morning to turn around the cafe sign.    The wind  was up, but it was a warm one, coaxing a smile–the kind that assaults the face when no one is watching, the corners of my mouth drawing my arms up in a delicious stretch, embracing the warm, dry air, the late summer sun.

I’ve been a news junkie lately–what with the DNC and the RNC, Gustav, and Tbilisi.  I get up in the morning, make the coffee, bring a cup up to Steve and then start making cinnamon rolls.  By the time I come-to, Market Place is on, the cinnamon rolls and the biscuit rolls are done and the scones are in the oven.  I’m halfway through mixing muffin batter and am planning the Italian meringue buttercream I’ll make from the week’s leftover egg whites.  Mid morning brings Gustav crashing  into the Gulf Coast and I think  a chocolate cake is in order, layered thickly with the buttercream spiked with a good dose of Venezuelan chocolate–it’s good for what ails us.  All this sorrow and hope and tragedy.  And recently–and closer to home–island in-fighting that always seems to plague the end of summer, as if we were all peevish at its departure, dreading the dark months to come. But, as we well know from history, we can not feed each other cake and expect our problems to disappear.

So, I spent the latter part of the afternoon catching a few tears with a dish towel, in an effort to keep them from seizing the chocolate I was tempering for lavender truffles.  I hate watching my neighbors fight, stand by while misunderstandings turn to maelstroms, whirring and wailing into personal hurricanes crashing into the September-quiet shores of our own little coasts.  I can’t help but think of Tita crying into her sister’s wedding cake batter in Like Water for Chocolate.  What havoc that created–what with Gertrudis riding off naked with revolutionaries, and Rosaura losing her son and later becoming sterile.  All because of a few tears in the wrong place.

I hope those lavender truffles don’t make people sad.  Instead, I hope that they somehow communicate the complicated fabric of community life.  Maybe not so literally,  but somehow infusing our palates with compassion, a willingness to understand, forgive.  Make the words off our tongues sweeter, lessen the bile, ease our  frustrations, douse our anger with simple pleasure, fleeting joy; and a desire to seek joy, rather than unrest and conflict.

I don’t know.  Maybe the onset of autumn makes me moody, more sensitive.  The cream infusions for the ganache taste stronger these days.  Too much coffee that I must amend with a bit more cream, which is sweet this time of year.  The lavender seems cloying, so I add a bit more earthy vanilla bean, and a chocolate from Peru that is slightly more vegetal than floral.  It all comes out right in the end.  But it’s the getting there that seems the struggle these days.  More time in the means, compensating for the imbalance in my immediate surroundings.  

Is summer too sweet?  Fleeting, yes.  And perhaps that’s how Mother Nature makes up for the fast-fading paradise that Maine is in July and August.  A goodness that, alas, is too good.  And so we must complicate it.  Bring it around to what we’re used to.  What it’s always been.   Bitter than sweet.  Foiled with unrest.  

And this is when recipes fail us, I suppose.  The kind that we use in the kitchen, and the kind with which we govern our lives.  I often boast that my ganache recipes are full-proof.  Infuse the cream, chop the chocolate, strain, boil, emulsify, spread into the frame–in which, I have calculated, it will fit perfectly.   But the only constant in the recipe, is that, unfailingly, each batch is different from the last.  This, I have come to realize, isn’t my failing as a cook, but rather, the nature of the ingredients I choose to use.  Natural things that are subject to changes in weather, stages of development at harvest time, the whim of the farmer, the roaster.   

Sometimes people choose their communities as I would choose those ingredients, believing that the finest human beings (our kind of people) make fine communities. That like minds and lifestyles, accompanied by a prescribed set of rules (in the communal household I live in years ago, they called them “habits”)–a recipe, really–will guarantee utopia.  But more often, and even in the planned situations, I think, communities are sprouted from the place they settle.  A love of place.  A fierce connection and commitment to place.  And because we are people, and subject to our own storms and halcyon days; our own belligerent demons and quiet angels; this commitment manifests in vastly different ways, and so conflict and unrest are inevitable. 

Not that i like it.  And I find myself impatient with neighbors that I feel are being inflammatory or slanderous; unfair or bull-headed.  But I am not fluent in the ways of people.  And so I try to take my lesson from the lavender or the coffee.  Improvise with the ingredients available.  When it is too bitter, add sweetness; too floral, add earth.