Roll 'er up

According to computer models, Maine has 4,617 islands, more than all the other East coast states combined. Such exactness is admirable, but it begs the question: how do you count? Count at high tide and what looks like an island may in fact be connected to the mainland at low tide, and at low tide, what looks like an island vanishes beneath high water.

Even measuring our island – computed by someone at twelve miles long and six miles wide – is tricky. What gets measured? Every jut, crevice, outcropping, point? How much of the pink granite ledges off Sand Beach Road make the cut? What of the clam-pocked bar at low tide? And if measuring at low or slack tides, in those small pockets of time when Barred or Sheephead islands are reachable on foot, do they get tallied, or do they remain discrete, individual, with their own set of statistics? Measure in the morning, in no wind, a fisherman’s “flat ass calm” sea, or in the afternoon’s freshening breeze, a “sailor’s delight,” waves smooching the bony headlands, and the numbers vary dramatically.    

There’s even disagreement as to what comprises an island. The U.S. Geological Survey with its satellite imagery of elaborate lines and vivid pixels, demands an island be at least one acre in size, or roughly the size of a Super-WalMart parking lot. In fact, some people don’t even consider Deer Isle an island. As if it were a “faux island,” something akin to acrylic being passed off as genuine shearling. Even Philip Conkling of the Island Institute, when writing of the 1895 America's Cup winner the Defender, crewed entirely by our island boys, referred to Deer Isle as "back when it was a true island."

Though discrete and surrounded by water, as a true island is, Deer Isle connects to the mainland via a long, spanning steel-cabled bridge – hence the belief held by some that Deer Isle is a mere extension of the mainland. “Real islands,” they claim, are further out to sea and must rely on the schedules of ferries and mailboats.

But ask the residents here and, fiercely proud of it, they’ll tell you Deer Isle is an island. As though the bridge did not exist. As though it were not so easy to cross. Or that it were capable of being rolled up, a feat that, actually, come tourist-peak August, a few islanders might wish were possible.