The Eagle Island Light is a landmark on the East Penobscot Bay. Author Ben Howe's family maintains it, the sort of act of love for a place that makes Maine Maine. Here he tells the story of the Quinns who have lived on the high mile square island a mile west of Little Deer Isle, one of a group of islands that make the Bay a mystical archipelago. I'll let him Ben tell the story. Be sure to click through to the whole piece in the Times. - GWC
The last year? For 100 years the Quinn Family has delivered the mail to Penobscot Bay islands
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HANCOCK COUNTY, MAINE — In blinding fog, an aging boat called the TM 2 zigzagged through the Cricket Hole, a shallow reef in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. The ocean’s calm surface concealed a maze of unseen ledges, around which the TM 2’s captain, Karl Osterby, cut a tight course. The boat soon approached an aluminum dock on Great Spruce Head Island, where a man in shorts and rubber boots awaited.
“Another busy day?” the man said, his sarcasm as evident — this being Maine — as the invisible bottom of the Cricket Hole. Mr. Osterby said nothing and held out an all but empty canvas bag of U.S. mail with one hand, as the TM 2 glided past the dock without stopping. There was a single passenger aboard (me). In the state that calls itself Vacationland, high season had just begun.
Normally, by July, the mail boat that serves six of the small and rugged islands of northern Penobscot Bay — Barred, Butter, Eagle, Bear, Scrag and Great Spruce Head — would be weighed down with letters and packages, plus a dozen or so passengers at $25 per ride. Some riders would have been sightseers scanning the reef-laden harbors for porpoises and harbor seals, and some would have been seasonal residents of the islands. Many in the latter group would be stranded without the mail boat — a lifeline delivering essentials like prescriptions, groceries and, this year, ballots.
Operating the route has been the responsibility of one family since 1905 — and this year is likely to be the last because of the hardships imposed by Covid-19.
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