Islands of solitude

Maine havens off the tourist path

By Christina Tree, Globe Correspondent

IF YOU GO . . . Information: Rockland-Thomaston Chamber of Commerce, telephone 207-596-0376; Web site: www.midcoast.com/rtacc. The Vinalhaven Chamber of Commerce has no phone; its Web site is www.foxislands.net/vhc Fox Islands Inn (207-863-2122; off-season: 850-425-5095), open through September, is a village hilltop house with pleasant guest rooms, shared baths (two upstairs rooms can be a suite), an inviting living room well-stocked with reading material, and kitchen privileges. $55-$75 includes a continental breakfast and use of bikes. Tidewater Motel (201-863-4618 or tidewater(AT SIGN SYMBOL)foxislands.net) is open year round, with 11 units, one apartment overlooking the harbor; some rooms with waterside decks, others with kitchens, some with both. This is the place to be if you like to sketch or simply watch harbor life, and it's also handy to village shops and restaurants. Rates are $85-$95 double until Labor Day, then $65-$80; $53-$69 off-season. Weekly rentals are possible on both islands, more plentiful on Vinalhaven. Telephone Wesley Reed (207-863-2554) real estate or Frank and Ada Thompson (207-863-4474) of Vinalhaven Rentals. Libby House (207-863-4696) is another pleasant bed-and-breakfast open through August, and the Payne Homestead at Moses Webster House (888-863-9963) is also attractive, open year round for the first time this year ($75-$80 before Sept. 15; 25 percent less after that, $10 surcharge for just one night). The Maine State Ferry Service at Rockland (207-596-2202) charges $8 round trip to both islands for a bike and $26 per car and driver. Inquire about reservations. Fox Islands Thoroughfare water taxi: Phone the J.O. Brown Boatyard at 207-867-4621. Hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., but earlier or later is possible; there's a phone on the Vinalhaven shore next to the boat landing, otherwise phone 207-867-4894. Restaurants: On Vinalhaven, The Haven (reservations necessary before Labor Day) is the fine dining spot and The Island Restaurant also gets good reviews. Candlepin Lodge (open from 5 p.m. for light fare, from 6 p.m. for dinner) is a ``family restaurant'' in the truest sense; it includes pool tables and a candlepin bowling alley, also an attractive dining room featuring reasonably priced lobster, steamers, and seafood. On North Haven, the Coal Wharf Dinner is open daily for dinner; it's next to the Brown Boatyard. Knot-knitting: Check out the Gram J bags at Hidden Treasure in Carver's Harbor and the curtains at Fox Island Inn; the source for both is Stephanie Crossman (207-863-2176). Dramatic event: ``Wind in the Willows'' will be presented through Aug. 25, nightly at 7:30 at the North Haven Community House. Tickets ($10) can be reserved by calling: 207-867-2008.

The Fox Islands Thoroughfare is a rowable stretch of yacht-filled water that separates Vinalhaven and North Haven, two islands that differ deeply.

Vinalhaven is heavily wooded and marked by granite quarries that include two public swimming holes. Life eddies around the village of Carver's Harbor, home to Maine's largest lobster fleet. Summer visitors way outnumber the 1,200 year-round residents, but there's no yacht club or golf course, and, even in August, this is still clearly a working island, not an island resort.

By contrast, North Haven is half as big, with just 325 year-round residents. It's rolling and open, spotted with idyllic farmhouses, summer homes for some of the country's wealthiest and most influential families. Pastimes include wagon rides and golf. Many children sail in the same distinctive North Haven dinghies their grandparents sailed.

It was the British explorer Martin Pring who named the Fox Islands in 1603, ostensibly for the silver foxes he saw on both. A dozen miles out in Penobscot Bay, both islands are still understandably protective of their considerable beauty, especially in view of their unusual -- by Maine island standards -- accessibility. Both are served from Rockland by the Maine State Ferry Service: three round trips per day to North Haven and twice that many to Vinalhaven.

Did I mention that there is no overnight lodging on North Haven and only 30 or so beds available on Vinalhaven in August? Neither is there an excursion boat, an ATM, a kayaking outfitter, or an on-island transport on either, and in high season the hurdles to bringing your car onto the islands are also high.

``There's a certain kind of traveler who loves coming here, exploring every cove and cranny, but there's also a kind of tourist who is looking for a bistro on every corner, and they are miserable,'' said Elaine Crossman, Vinalhaven artist and owner, with her husband Phil, of the Tidewater Motel in Carver's Harbor.

``I spend a lot of time on the phone trying to explain what it's like here,'' she says. ``I'd rather have an empty bed than an unhappy tourist.''

``In Vinalhaven, people actually look at and talk to you. Within a day or so they may ask you home to dinner. But the mention of `tourism' makes them shudder,'' I wrote in these pages 26 years ago. It's still true.

The lowest level of tourist is, of course, the ``daytripper.'' At $9 per round trip per adult, $4 per child, the ferry ride itself -- out through Rockland Harbor and past two lighthouses, on out into Penobscot Bay with a view back to the Camden Hills -- is one of the best bargains on the entire coast.

North Haven initially seems the more welcoming of the two islands. Cooper's Landing, the island's only restaurant open for lunch (11 a.m.-4 p.m.), is just across the street from the ferry landing, and shops and galleries are all within steps.

Eric Hopkins's is a destination gallery, the reason many people come to North Haven. One of Maine's best-known artists, Hopkins is both the son of a North Haven fisherman and a graduate of prestigious art schools.

``I can't work without music, and I think of my work as visual jazz,'' Hopkins told us in the gallery at Hopkins Wharf. The gallery is hung with bold, bright paintings (large canvases and small watercolors) of clouds, deep blue water, and spiky green islands, seemingly all in motion.

June Hopkins, Eric's mother, operates the neighboring North Haven Gift Shop, the oldest, largest, and handsomest of several stores obviously geared to the island's summer residents. Check out Calderwood Hall Gallery down the street, housed in a weathered building that has served as movie theater and dance hall, featuring paintings and sculpture by owner Herbert Parsons.

Theoretically, North Haven offers 30 miles of road, including a shore loop that we followed as far as Pulpit Harbor, but the day was hot and visions of Vinalhaven's Lawson Quarry hovered like a mirage over each hill.

Back at J.O. Brown's Boatyard in the middle of North Haven village, I found Dick Shields, the former ferry captain who now provides shuttle service ($4 per head) across the Fox Islands Thoroughfare. Shields ferried me across.

The strip of shore facing North Haven is, incidentally, not at all the way I've so far described Vinalhaven. Mansion-sized, century-old summer cottages, owned by families most Bay Staters would recognize, are spaced discreetly along the shore.

Carver's Harbor and the parts of Vinalhaven visible to most visitors and residents alike are, however, a full 8 miles back down a wooded road with narrow shoulders, not the safest or most enjoyable bike ride. Happily, a friend had lent me a car in which I stowed my bike and so was soon soaking in the velvety cool water of Lawson's Quarry.

Vinalhaven offers visitors far more than most Maine islands: accessible natural beauty as well as overnight lodging and dining choices. Nothing, however, is obvious at first. The walk from the Vinalhaven ferry landing into town, for starters, is the island's ugliest quarter mile.

If you do daytrip to Vinalhaven, catch one of the earliest boats (7 a.m. or 8:45 a.m.; the last ferry back is 4:30 p.m.) and stop halfway into town at Surfside, a breakfast place that's the island's first meeting spot of the day.

``The first rush comes right at 4 a.m. when we open,'' proprietor Donna Webster says, adding that there's a lull around 6 a.m. after all the lobstermen have passed through. Technically, Surfside closes at 10:30 a.m., but the grill was still hot when I arrived, snagging a tasty zucchini and cream cheese omelet, with home fries. Service was slow, but the harbor view was filled with action.

``We're short on help,'' Webster explained. ``You can't get young people to wait on tables when high school kids can make between $30,000 and $40,000 lobestering in a summer.''

Downtown Carver's Harbor is a single street straddling a causeway and the narrow landstrip between the harbor and Carver's Pond. A boom town dating from the 1880s, when Vinalhaven was synonymous with granite, the village is built almost entirely of wood, the reason why many of its best old buildings are missing. The strikingly Victorian Star of Hope Lodge, owned by nationally known artist Robert Indiana, is the sole survivor of three such amazing buildings that once marked the center of town.

Work by Robert Indiana is presently displayed at the Vinalhaven Press Gallery up on School Street, and pictures of the town from the 1880s through 1910, Vinalhaven's peak production period for both granite and fishing, can be viewed in the neighboring Vinalhaven Historical Society.

You will be passing these two buildings anyway, if you have stopped at the Paper Store (everyone does) and asked Carlene Michael (as everyone does) the way to the nearest swimming hole.

Lawson's Quarry is less than a mile from the center of town, but School Street, the first stretch, is seemingly straight up. It levels off at The Vinalhaven Historical Society, a large spanking white building that was built in 1838 as a church -- 15 watery miles away, in Rockland.

Esther Bissell and Roy Heisler, the volunteer staffers who make this one of Maine's most welcoming as well as most extensive community museums (presently open daily, 11 a.m.-3 p.m.), will tell you that since 1878 the building has been a town hall and a theater, a skating rink, and community center. How it got here, however, no one seems to know.

Exhibits on Vinalhaven's granite industry include 40 stunning photographs by island photographer William H. Merrithew, dating from 1890. One depicts stonecutters atop the giant eagles that they carved for the Buffalo, N.Y., post office. In another, they are handcutting the colossal columns around which Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine was built.

The first order for Vinalhaven granite, you learn, was shipped to Boston in 1826 to build a a jail, but production really skyrocketed after the Civil War when granite was the preferred building material for the country's building boom. On an island map, 40 red pins mark the sites of major quarries, but there were also countless ``motions,'' or backyard pits, you learn. Population peaked at almost 3,000, including a thousand quarry workers.

Museum displays depict island life and other industries like fishing (the Lane-Libby Fisheries Co. once was one of Maine's largest fish processing companies) and lobstering (in the 1880s, The Basin, a large saltwater lake, was used as a giant holding tank, penning as many as 150,000 lobsters until prices peaked). Knitting horse nets (to keep off flies) in intricate designs was yet another island industry (``knotted netting'' remains Vinalhaven's most distinctive craft). It's the granite industry, however, that's still the island's hallmark.

``There's evidence everywhere,'' John Morton, a retired fisherman turned-restauranteur-turned tour guide, observed. During a 1 1/2-hour tour ($25 for two people), Morton pointed out Granite Island, granite fountains, the granite library (actually incorporating pink granite from Jonesboro), a ``galamander'' (the huge wagon equipped with a derrick, block and tackle used to haul granite) as well as the two public quarries, the granite chips that cap the town dump, the private East Boston quarry from which paving blocks were extracted until the 1930s, and the old granite works that are now Armbrust Hill, a public park now hidden behind the medical center.

No fewer than 16 public ``places to go and see'' are marked on Vinalhaven's give-away map, and all but Brown's Head Light (at the entrance to the Fox Islands Thoroughfare) are conservation areas. They vary in size from vest-pocket-sized Grimes Park, a picnic spot near the ferry landing, to the large Perry Creek Preserve at the island's northern end.

The 45-acre Lane's Island Preserve, a pleasant walk from town along the harbor, is within daytrippers' reach. Stroll out along the beach and up into meadows facing open ocean, filled with wild roses and beach pea. Bring along a container of chowder and a crab roll from the Harbor Gawker (middle of town) and watch the sun set.

Vinalhaven's two most appealing lodging places address the logistics of exploring the island in two different ways.

At the Fox Island Inn, marathon runner Gail Reinertsen furnishes guests with her own descriptions and directions to the island's best walks and offers basic bikes free of charge. From June through September, Reinertsen does not keep an on-island car, preferring to get around on her own, hitching an occasional ride to the Thoroughfare.

At the Tidewater Motel (open year round) the Crossmans rent out basic bikes ($10 a day) but frequently offer guests rides to the ferry and elsewhere.

This trip, I brought my own 21-speed bike, which worked well but was frowned on by island friends. All bicyclists, I learned, are worse than daytrippers who use their own feet. Bicyclists, it seems, frequently wheel down the middle of the road, oblivious to local traffic and to the lobster trucks that are as king of these island roads as lumber trucks are of those in mainland Maine.

Still, you can forgive visitors for missing this message. Whether on foot, bike, or in a car, the unspoken rule of the roads on both North Haven and Vinalhaven is: Wave.

``Most people come back,'' said Amy Durant, who operates The Island Gift Shop (Vinalhaven's oldest gift shop) in her house, midway between the ferry landing and downtown Carver's Harbor.

Come back and you are, of course, no longer a ``tourist.''

Published 08/23/98 in the Boston Suday Globe's Travel Section