Cruising to McNutt's Island

Sherri and Ken Taylor (pictured here) are readying their 44 foot Marine Trader trawler Brown Eyed Girl for a summer of cruises between the Town of Shelburne and McNutt's Island. The cruises will go out twice each day. Passengers will have a choice of cruising all the way around the island, or being dropped off on the island during the morning trip and then picked up again on the afternoon trip. Either way, it's a great opportunity to see a place that is not that easy to get to.  Ken and Sherri will also give their passengers a tour of historic Shelburne from the particularly lovely perspective of the inner harbour.

For details about their tour, go to www.shelburneharbourboattours.com

We will be happy to see visitors on the island this summer. We are not very far off the main road and hope people will stop by on their way to or from the lighthouse.  Or if you're taking the circle cruise around the island, wave at us. 

Washing the windows

I've finished washing the windows in the kitchen and living room. Last fall, in an effort to reduce the inherent windiness of an old clapboard house, Greg caulked the wooden storm windows in place. So taking off the storms this spring has been a slower process. Each storm window has been made specifically for a particular window. And each one has its own quirks, which I am beginning to know. 

After the storm windows were off and safely stored in the shed, I washed the windows. Even with our woodstove going all winter long, there was no dust or grime to speak of on the windows. But after I have removed the storm windows and washed all the panes with vinegar and water, the windows sparkle.   

Most of the windows still have the old original panes with bubbles and wavy glass. If you sit across the room and look out through the windows the world outside dissolves into small discrete impressionist views, each small rectangle slightly off kilter from its neighbours. A few panes of new glass have been installed over the years to replace old ones that have broken. When you look through a pane of new glass you see a world that is literal, factual: sky, sea, tree. Within the same window, the views through the older panes slide this way and that, like water rippling in the cove on a quiet day. When you look through the original glass you see a world that's open to interpretation.    

The kitchen windows are quite small, and low. Visitors comment on how small they are. Really, if you want to look outside while you are in the kitchen you will need to bend down, or sit down at the kitchen table, which is Greg's special quiet late afternoon place for drinking a beer or a mug of tea and planning his menus or making his lists for trips to town, and looking outside. If I go into the kitchen while he's sitting there, he growls. In earlier times people did not care for views as we do. If you had to get your living the hard way, by going out to sea in a little boat, you didn't want to sit looking at the sea when you were safe at home.   

So the windows in the living room are a good size considering when they were built, in about 1858, and considering that this was not an elegant house like those in the Town of Shelburne, but a simple fisherman's cottage on a remote island.  When you sit in the living room, because we made three smaller rooms into one room, you can look out in three directions. The weather here can be very dramatic. Last night -- an undramatic night -- the sunset was pink and gold and copper and grey over the the water on the western side while night darkened into deep indigo on the eastern side. 

I guess if you were going to build a house from scratch in a beautiful and wild place like this you might be tempted to put in a room with all glass, so you could see everything that was going on. When we first moved here we thought we might eventually add such a glassed-in room.  As it is, a heron flies past and you catch a glimpse in one window, then a millisecond later another glimpse, then a third.  You don't see the heron in flight, really: only brief bits and pieces of it.The world outside comes to us in fragments, never whole. 

I have read* that small windows, or windows with many small panes, are actually more pleasing for people to look through than large expanses of glass.  It's the contrast, if I remember right, between the sturdy walls and upright framework that keep us sheltered safe inside and those brief, defined glimpses of something intense and vast and wild, something that beckons us but also humbles us, outside, beyond.  

*Somewhere in Christopher Allen et al, A Pattern Language, Oxford University Press, 1977.

Wells

We had been concerned about the possibility of lambs and sheep falling into some of the old wells.  So in the past few days Greg has built new frames and covers for three of them.  He is slowly using up all the old lumber that was still around the property. When we completed the restoration of the house we had a big pile of old lumber for various future projects. There's hardly any of it left now. He used old hardware and, obviously, left-over paint, too. The wells match the house! 

As far as we know there are five wells. Four of them were probably dug in the latter half of the nineteenth century by the Perry family. They are traditionally-built spring wells lined with rocks. Elizabeth Hyde, the former owner, knew the location of every well and tried to restore them and keep them usable. Like everyone who had lived here before her, Elizabeth did not have running water. For her daily use she drew water from the well in front of the house. The other wells were near the garden, along the path to the fish house, and in the bog near the lower orchard.  Elizabeth -- and probably the Perrys, the Gouldens and the DeMings before her --used the well near the garden for watering. It has an old but still-sturdy frame around it, even though the cover has rotted away.  This one is on the to-do list.

We used the front yard well as soon as we arrived two years ago. Greg replaced the frame and built a new cover right away, and it was our water source for washing dishes and clothes and ourselves that first summer, until our new well was dug. 

We drew the water up with a pail. I learned how to clear the water's surface by tapping it with the bottom of the pail before dipping the pail beneath the water.  I had never drawn water from a well before that summer. We heated the water on the Coleman camp stove which was all we had at the time. I washed clothes and dishes at a table in the front yard beneath the apple tree. We hung Elizabeth's shower bucket from a branch of the oak tree for our indescribably wonderful showers.   

We rediscovered the well in the bog, in a place that had been impenetrable before Greg began clearing. We just caught the reflection of water off the bog path one day, and then found the well, hidden by dead trees and bayberry scrub, surrounded by ferns and squishy sphagnum moss.  

It was the same with the well along the path to the fish house. It was hidden in scrub. It had some sort of wooden cover, but it had rotted through. Elizabeth had written that one side of this well was a huge boulder. You can see it here.

Greg used the floor grate from Elizabeth's old shower to make this cover. 

Elizabeth writes about another well, in the lower orchard. We haven't found this one yet. But Greg thinks he knows where to look. A well down there would have been near the house that Jonathan Perry built in the 1830s, and of course they would have needed a well. 

This last well is the one that was dug for us.  It is located near the garden well and the Old Fellers' Bog. It consists of a stack of concrete rings set on top of pebble and cobble filtration. The water is pumped through pipe laid underground to the cellar, and then into the house. The pump is electric, and runs on the energy we get from sun and wind. So we have running water in the kitchen and bathroom sinks, the shower and the washing machine, and we have a toilet that flushes.  These were all firsts for the house, though Elizabeth had a wondrous in-door shower that you can read about here. 

We don't have a practical use for the old wells. But they are valuable for gazing into and admiring the stone work and thinking that beneath any surface there could be mysterious hidden depths.