On Isle au Haut, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The first thing you see is the church steeple.
You rub your eyes, look again, squinting through the salty spray of the Gulf of Maine.
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On the water, lobster boats chug, skiff oars pull at the inky water.
But they treaded lightly.
They primarily took up farming and fishing as their livelihoods.
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It wasn’t long before wealthy urbanites discovered The Island.
There, he established a summer colony called thePoint Lookout Club.
It became a separate municipality officially dubbed Lookout,Maine, with its own post office and ZIP code.
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The Top 15 Islands in the Continental U.S.
The Point Lookout Club closed during World War II and never fully recovered.
By then, only 75 people called the island home.
Today, the island’s population hovers around half that, though it more than quadruples in summer months.
Part of my abiding love for this place is its deliberate and ongoing resistance to both overfishing and overdevelopment.
This was both a mark of progress and the end of a way of life.
There are no restaurants or cafes.
Forget scrolling away idle hours on your phone; Cell service is essentially nil.
Your days are shaped by the elements.
And everyone waves, a particular, island kind of wave, just a flat hand raised in acknowledgment.
It’s something of a social mandate on the rock.
People come to the island to be quiet, but islanders understand the essential presence of each other.
The wave reaffirms the interconnectedness of island life: I see you.
I’ll leave you be.
But I’ll be here if you need me.
Today, it is even possible to live on the island and work remotely.
But Isle au Haut remains a world apart.
Its fragility and remoteness are what lend The Island its enduring allure.
But that feels like a false demotion.
So let me hit it one more time: On The Island, the natural world is all.
COVID-19 had, for months, prompted the community to temporarily close itself off to non-residents.
The potential absence of such a sacred ritual was devastating.
But The Island doesn’t belong to us summerers.
It has never, really, belonged to anyone.
We are merely visitors.
We must tread lightly.
