Monday, August 6, 2007

Life on Islesford

When we went up to Maine in April to do some wedding planning, we had a fantastic dinner at Dan & Cynthia's house with their friends Bruce and Barb Fernald. The meal was excellent, and the company was even better. It was the first time we had seen Barb since the day after we got engaged--she was having dinner with Dan and Cynthia when we arrived at the restaurant, and so she was among the first in the world to know about our engagement (not only that, as the local society columnist, she was the first to publicly record it, in the July 27, 2006 edition of the Mount Desert Islander!)

Little did we know that Bruce and Barb were famous! I recently picked up this charming little book called "The Secret Life of Lobsters" by Trevor Corson, and it turns out Bruce and Barb are major characters in it. Here's how the book starts:
The morning sky was glowing pink in the southeast but a chill hung in the salt air. The grumble of a truck engine echoed across the harbor. Bruce Fernald's rust-encrusted Ford pickup skidded to a halt in the gravel near the fisherman's co-op on Little Cranberry Island. ...

A century earlier, three hundred Maine islands had been home to year-round communities of fishermen and seafarers. Little Cranberry Island was one of just fourteen such year-round communities that remained. A mile and a half long and shaped like a pork chop, it lay among four other small islands that together formed the Cranberry Isles. Nestled just south of the larger island of Mount Desert, the Cranberries were visible to hikers in Acadia National Park as a cluster of green slabs on the ocean.

Little Cranberry Island had been Bruce's home for most of his fifty years, and he'd spent most of his adult life trapping lobsters around the island's shores. ... Down the main street was the Protestant Church. In the other direction was the Catholic chapel, where a fisherman's net hung behind Jesus, the fisher of men. Bruce Fernald attended neither, but if the lobstering didn't improve, it was possible he'd begin attending both.