Further thoughts on Isle au Haut: Entrepreneurs by necessity
After spending a day on Isle au Haut last month reporting my Oct. 14 story, “An island community confronts its economic challenges,” I returned to the mainland with uneasy feelings about the future of the year-round island community.
Like Monhegan and other year-round islands, Isle au Haut faces daunting problems: Aging and declining populations; limited employment opportunities; high costs for housing, energy, food and other necessities, to mention just a few.
The counterpoint to that unease is the ample evidence that when a need arises, islanders work together to address it. Not surprisingly, most of them wear many hats.
Take the Island Cooperative Store, a cornerstone of Isle au Haut's economy. Located 200 yards from the town wharf, the store is owned and operated by islanders. It sells fresh produce, meat and fish and other essential groceries.
Rachel Harris, a seasonal resident who moved to the island after retiring in 2010, serves as secretary of the municipal board overseeing the store. She typically arrives in April and lives in the camp she purchased in 1988 until just after Thanksgiving. “I appreciate the importance of that store for the year-rounders,” she told me. “We are stewards of the island store for the community.”
The store is only open three hours a day during the winter months. To reinforce its place as the center of the community, Harris said the store launched, with the Isle au Haut Congregational Church, a weekly potluck supper called “Tuesday's Table.” It runs through the winter and provides a free homemade meal to all residents. The thought comes to me: Islanders take care of each other.
Another cornerstone of the island's economy is the Keeper's House Inn, now owned by Marshall Chapman, a college professor and longtime summer resident who purchased the property in late 2012. He was away on the day I was on the island, but I did have the chance to meet Judith Burke, who with her artist husband, Jeffrey, owned and operated the inn for 23 years until they sold it.
“At the time, lighthouses were being totally demolished,” Judith recalls, telling the story of how she and her husband came to Isle au Haut in the mid-1980s after learning the island's Robinson Point Light was for sale. They fell in love with the island, purchased the property and transformed the turn-of-the-century light-keeper's house into an inn that does more than just preserve some of the island's history.
“Just about everyone on the island worked at the place at some point during the time we owned it,” she said, something that continues under the new ownership.
Diversification of the island's economy, given that almost half of the island's year-round residents fish for lobster, is a big concern to Robert Gerber, a geologist and civil engineer with extensive experience in the energy and environmental fields who has lived on the island for 11 years. As chairman of the town's planning board and comprehensive plan committee, he's actively involved in long-range planning discussions focused on how to strengthen the island's economy.
“I'm concerned about the potential reduction in the lobster catch,” he told me when we spoke by phone. “If lobster fishing declines significantly, that's going to be a significant problem that will affect the entire island.”
It's no wonder, then, that Gerber's committee has spent “a lot of time discussing that concern” — with seaweed-harvesting and sea-farmed mussels, oysters and scallops among the opportunities for diversification they've explored.
The islanders I spoke with didn't talk much about economic development, although that's clearly a concern. They spoke more about finding ways to sustain each other and the community on Isle au Haut that they so clearly love.
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