Talk about “Two Maines” — the only reason that the island of Matinicus is part of the Pine Tree State is that there is nowhere, short of independence, for it to go. Located 22 miles out to sea, with only three dozen year-round inhabitants, its principal lifeline to the mainland are small airplanes. Known largely to other Mainers and people from away for its occasionally violent “lobster wars,” it is not like Monhegan, a tourist haven. Matinicus remains, in hard times and fair, a working island dependant on the lobster fishery.

If the reader wished to learn about daily life in southern coastal Maine, in the suburbs of Portland, he or she would do well to turn to “Backyard Maine: Local Essays,” by Edgar Allen Beem (2009). These thought-provoking pieces, culled from the author’s newspaper column, give one both the personal and universal insight into daily life. They are amusing, ring true and will be useful a hundred years from now. Beem’s bailiwick covers a large population area that many readers are, to some degree, familiar with.

Eva Murray, who came to Matinicus as a schoolteacher in 1987, married “the island electrician,” raised a family and became a columnist for area journals. She covers a much smaller range but proves equally true and her writings will be just as useful to family, researchers and scholars a hundred years hence. The pieces are funny, too, yet, in spite of the author’s protests, take no quarter.

In Murray’s “Introduction — And a Note to My Neighbors,” she says: “I did not set out to write a book about Matinicus. The unwritten rule has always been ‘Don’t write about Matinicus.’ I have written newspaper columns containing my own observations of life on the island since 2003; maybe I like to live dangerously. This collection of essays is not a field guide on how to vacation here, nor is it ‘a year in the life’ and it is most assuredly not an objective academic study. There’s nothing in this book you haven’t seen before if you read the local papers. Actually, there is less; I don’t tackle ‘lobster wars.’ “

Well, Murray may avoid lobster wars directly, but you will rarely get a better understanding of the how and why than from this volume (the scholars can back things up with James M. Acheson’s “The Lobster Gangs of Maine” if they so wish).

The author is, in spite of her protestation, not avoiding anything. This is not your romantic Caski Stinnett island life of birdsong and productive contemplation. It is more like Beem’s life on the mainland but with a greater, more accepted degree of difficulty. Murray talks of “constantly moving stuff,” where “The Hassle Footprint is bigger than the Carbon Footprint,” where “lobstering is not a job, it’s a life” and where the happiest teachers have lived on a boat, worked in the Peace Corps or lived in Alaska. The 50th state seems to be the closest comparison to this Maine isle.

On the other hand, Murray is not out to paint the place as an island “Deadwood” from the 1870s; “The Island is not a time machine. Our students work on laptops and the teachers communicate with their colleagues from other islands on video-conferencing equipment.” In an emergency, the airplane is key and for most trips a necessity — “we get only four ferries a month during the summer and fewer the rest of the year.” On “Ferry Day” the security screener “measures my truck. I’ve got a ticket for 24 feet; his tape measure says 26. Fortunately the other rental box truck in line has exactly the opposite configuration. This happens when you rent. We trade tickets.”

Hurrah for common sense. Then there is the politics, Matinicus is a Plantation, and writes Murphy; “it is tempting to let the community lapse into an unorganized territory” but “we’ve got our municipal power to protect.” Here the essay “Disorganized Territory” is a classic civics lesson. Indeed, for the flatlander, brought up in the big woods, the potato fields or the towns, reading Eva Murray’s wonderful essays is like being transported to a place at once exotic and somewhat familiar. Her writing is substantive, hard-edged and an absolute delight to come across. “Well Out to Sea” is insightful and should be in every Maine school library.

William David Barry is a local historian who has authored or co-authored five books. He lives in Portland.

 

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