#Eva-murray

Eva Murray
Matinicus life: 2020 with a view, or a month of Sundays?
Thu, 12/31/2020 - 9:45pm

Well, it has happened: after two decades of writing about this place, and seeing people still react as though life on an unbridged, offshore island is indeed peculiar, and that full-time island residents are some sort of oddball societal enigma, some psychological aberration or cute anachronism—insert heavy use by other journalists of the inaccurate term “unique lifestyle” here—and after endless lame comments from mainland friends about how “they couldn’t live without” this or that convenience...
Eva Murray: Baking bread and watching chickadees
Mon, 04/20/2020 - 7:15pm

Anybody, these days, might understandably feel conflicted. A resourceful and resilient citizen cheerfully looking for silver linings to the crisis one minute, singing with others on the computer and taking up new hobbies (I keep getting online ads to sign up for study of quantum physics or Norwegian) is the next moment ready to strangle the idiot who posts yet another chipper little meme about purple finches or sourdough starter. People are out of work, out of money, and sometimes out of...
Industrial Arts
Eva Murray: ‘Does this count as school?’
Tue, 04/07/2020 - 1:30pm

“Does this count as school?” That question, now a wise-aleck remark uttered with rolled eyes or a wink, is a Murray family one-liner. Among us four—me, my husband, and our two children, now in their late 20 —“does this count as school” might be asked during any experience which makes us scramble, toil, or sweat. Anything difficult but which leaves us feeling we’re learning something, whether we want to or not, like making some complicated repair when the nuts and bolts fall down into the...
Emmet Meara, Dave Barry, right whales and hand grenades
Eva Murray: Cleaning House
Wed, 02/26/2020 - 2:00pm

This is the time of year when many of us tackle our big scary household jobs. In these winter months, while the summer people think we have nothing to do, the DIY-ers among us (meaning most everybody in Maine) spend their tax refunds on new flooring, or finally find time to repair that hole where Big Jake punched the sheetrock, or get out pencil and paper to engineer an improved chicken coop. In my house this year’s job involves mucking out heaps of paperwork. Old Standard Electric invoices and...
industrial arts
Eva Murray: Snowshoe holiday
Wed, 12/18/2019 - 8:30pm

Back around Thanksgiving, if you recall, the news was filled with reports of the “busiest travel days of the year.” By airliner and by car--occasionally tossing in “by train” for good measure--reporters assured us that most of America was on the road despite the snowstorms. The charming assertion, ever hopeful, is that a happy family and a good dinner is worth traveling for. The other assumption is that snow doesn’t help. None of the news reports I saw happened to mention travel to a...
It’s serious; but it’s fun, too
Eva Murray: A trip with Honor Flight Maine
Thu, 11/21/2019 - 5:15pm

The veterans of World War II are in their 90s now. There is a monument in Washington, D.C., recognizing their efforts to basically save the world from tyranny, and a great many of these veterans have never seen it. Of course, the National World War II Memorial didn’t open until 2004; by then, the women and men who fought for the freedom of so many around the world were in their late seventies or older. Many still alive were in poor health, or losing their vision, or without the resources to...
Industrial Arts
Eva Murray: Tenants Harbor and Matinicus Island combine effort for shoreline cleanup
Thu, 06/27/2019 - 3:00pm

On Sunday, June 23, at about 9:30 a.m., about 40-some residents of (and a few regular visitors to) Matinicus Island assembled at the harbor, waiting for the arrival of a small group of lobster boats from the mainland. This was the day of “the big cleanup,” where we’d work with “the Tenants Harbor guys” to wrestle some of the heavier trash and destroyed fishing gear out of the island’s coves. We passed around the homemade doughnuts, figured out where we wanted to go to work, and piled into boats...
Eva Murray: Part 2: Truck calls, the opiate crisis, August as the cruelest month, and the importance of eating together
Without an Agenda: talking with the crew of the ‘Sunbeam’
Tue, 04/02/2019 - 1:45pm

Sharon Daley, RN is the first and to date the only nurse associated with the telemedicine program on the Maine Seacoast Mission vessel Sunbeam, which makes regular visits to many of Maine’s offshore islands offering telemedicine services, home health nursing visits, and other types of support. Sharon lives on Islesboro with her husband, but she grew up on a farm in Missouri. “Being a farmer is not that different from being a lobsterman in some ways. You’re self-employed, it’s hard work,...
Eva Murray: Industrial Arts
Without an agenda: talking with the crew of the ‘Sunbeam’
Fri, 03/22/2019 - 4:15pm

Part 1: A discussion with the captain and the engineer about breaking ice, the needs of a steel boat, and the substitute mission vessel Moonbeam For over a century the Maine Seacoast Mission Vessel Sunbeam —meaning the latest in a series of boats named Sunbeam —has visited Maine’s offshore island communities to provide a range of services. The Seacoast Mission, a well-loved Maine nonprofit which does not proselytize, and keeps the religious aspect of its work to a “when...
Industrial Arts: A reply to ‘How’s your winter been?’
Eva Murray: Island winter — weather, food, and the owls
Mon, 02/18/2019 - 12:15pm

A few out-of-state friends have asked how things are going. I enjoy this time of year, but they don’t believe me. I don’t like the cold rain we are getting as I write (and yes, that was actually thunder, for sure, in January; the aviation weather confirmed convective activity, plus the neighbors heard it, too). But hopefully it’ll be sunny and below freezing again soon, and if the wind doesn’t blow, I’ll call that a very fine stretch of weather. I don’t care if it’s 40 below zero; if the wind...
Industrial Arts
Eva Murray: An accidental twitcher — birding on Matinicus Island
Sun, 01/13/2019 - 8:45pm

Birding “well out to sea” isn’t just about the puffins. My mother-in-law always swore that she had once seen a mountain bluebird on Matinicus Island, back when she lived here in the 1970s and early 1980s. At the time, one of the Maine bird experts who sort of held court about such things scoffed at her claim, and by her telling, dismissed the sighting with some insufferable variant of “Oh, no, dear; that’s impossible, and you wouldn’t know anyway.” A mountain bluebird is a western species, not...
Industrial arts
Eva Murray: Circles of green on Matinicus
Wed, 12/19/2018 - 9:30am

Our kitchen floor is scattered with bits of the woods out back — twigs, fir needles, and the occasional snarl of pale green lichen, usnea I think, “Old Man’s Beard” — or that’s what I’ve always heard it was called. It is time to make wreaths. I have several sturdy rings made of copper tubing, formed with a pipe bender for me by the propane guy, and to these copper rings I wire the greenery. These hold up for re-use year after year. One of the wreaths goes on the Murray headstone over in...
Industrial arts
Eva Murray: Shipping forecast
Wed, 12/05/2018 - 2:30pm

These notes begin aboard the ferry bound for Matinicus. I sit in the cab of my 36-foot U-Haul; in front of me, a fisherman’s ton truck laden with a couple of frighteningly unsecured bait boxes, large, gurry-spattered plastic cubes rockin’ and rollin’ like Chuck Berry on a hot Saturday night, and nobody in the cab. As we leave the inshore waters and pass abeam Two Bush Light in the distance, where my great-grandfather once worked, my MP3 player set on “random” offers me “Boats of Stone” and “...
A seasonal ceremony of leaving
Eva Murray: Edamame, rotgut, and rats
Tue, 10/16/2018 - 11:30am

It’s time for many among us to begin thinking about closing up for the winter. Well—you, maybe; not me. As I write, rocking and rolling on the state ferry vessel Everett Libby Rockland-bound from Matinicus, several of the other vehicles on deck are my part-time neighbors, inbound to stay on the Continent until spring. Obviously people all over New England dance this seasonal jig. Friend, if this is you, I am not calling you a “summer person.” Don’t let’s get insulted. Heaven forfend, as...