The Matinicus Experiment
It’s hard to get to Maine’s most remote island, and harder still to make sense of it.
By Max Alexander
If you ever hope to understand Matinicus Island you need to know a story about No Man’s Land. With an area of just 750 acres, No Man’s Land is an insignificant, uninhabited dot some twenty miles off the coast from Rockland, out where Penobscot Bay becomes the wide sea. It’s part of the island archipelago dominated by Matinicus, the most remote Maine island with year-round inhabitants (about fifty) and a place where few Mainers or tourists (there is really no difference to Matinicus natives) have ever been. No Man’s Land? Nobody goes there.
[For the rest of this story, see the August 2008 issue of Down East.]
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Reader Comments:
I found this article to be extremely interesting well written and inciteful.
I was wondering if there is anyway to reach the author by email?
Thank you
Max Alexander's experiences on Matinicus made for delightful reading in your August issue. Ironically, it's now late September and the extracted pages have just been received from my Florida friend. And we are pleased to have become party to Alexander's "where few Mainers or tourists have ever been. Nobody goes there"
Native to Knox County - Cushing - I know a bit about the coast and its islands. And Matinicus was beckoning. On September 02 Valerie and I were expertly transported by pilot Robb in a Cessna C-207 from Kevin Waters' Penobscot Island Air Service out of the Rockland Airport.
We only spent the day there but we'll go back for another visit; and my Cushing cousin has said she wants to go with us. The landing on the up-slope Matinicus International Air Strip was smooth. As a pilot I'd never seen mud flaps on landing gear but there they were, obviously to keep the air strip rocks off the belly of the plane.
The Mermaid Taxi lady was terrific. She's no island native, having relocated there from Portland. After the taxi ride we walked - and we walked - along the beach art-decorated shores and up the various trails while admiring the lush botanical species throughout the trees. And suddenly staring at me from within the tree branches was the bright yellow tail of a gorgeous
Piper J-3 Cub airplane. It doesn't take a pilot long to recognize a jewel, and through the brush I went to see it from the front which was only about a dozen feet removed from the edge of the air strip.
As I raised my camera to capture the pristine 1947 aircraft two men walked around the plane's front, one probably sensitive to this stranger photographing his baby. Meet Captain Ronald Ames(owner) and his friend, Peter Wentz, also a pilot. Ironically, Valerie and I had met Mr. Wentz a year earlier at Portland Jetport.
A picnic lunch on the inner end of the sea wall was followed by my choosing my steps out to the end of the wall; yeah, the wall that ate my cell phone when it fell from my pocket and into a wide space between the huge blocks of stone. Fish gotta swim and "Can you hear me now?"
Oh; and the store. Now there is one, it having opened a couple months before our visit. And the resident actress-extraordinaire with whom I'd been in a couple theatrical productions on the mainland; the one who long ago told me, "Before you land your plane you'd better get permission - it's a private airport."
SR was off the island; but I have a hunch that Cap'n Ron and P. A. Wentz will grant said permission.
And there's always Penobscot Island Air; but we'll be gong back.
Lawreston Crute
Georgetown, Maine