Island Chrysalis

 Yes, there were all those trails – Cliff, Goat, Western Head – branching out from Duck Harbor landing. And from them, Squeaker and Deep Coves beckoning. There was also the road tempting us back up island to Town Landing, with its path to Seal Trap and where the Lobster Lady’s food truck offers a lobster roll re-fueling pitstop.  All familiar to me from previous trips to Isle Au Haut, the six-by-two mile island seven nautical miles south of this one, half of which is part of Acadia National Park.

But after the mailboat ride there with friends last week, our direction taken, thanks to the able guidance of naturalist and writer Kathy Fiveash, was a new one – from Town Landing east to the other, less-visited side of the island. And there, yes, were the impressively cobbled Boom Beach and the exquisite, swimmer-friendly Long Pond, evidence of an Ice Age glacial scrape. Also, a good share of sightings – bald eagle, sharp-shinned hawk, a young snowshoe hare that, unlike the island’s wild turkeys, had so far survived the hunting prowess of a new coyote population, proof on an unbridged out-to-sea island that coyotes indeed know how to swim.

And, surprising to me, there were bogs, several of them, with colonies of acid-loving carnivorous plants – red carpets of glistening sundew bejeweled with sticky “fly paper” droplets of nectar, maroon deep-throated insect-trapping pitcher plants, and, here and there, rootless yellow bladderworts whose diminutive statures belie the genius of tiny, highly specialized suction traps with trigger hairs and hinged, miniscule doors. Along the roadside, there were spikey cotton plants and steeple bush and purple going-to-seed thistle aquiver with coppery-hued painted ladies and red admiral butterflies. In the forests, there were spruce trees knobbed with bulging, warty burls, and cushiony beds of sphagnum moss, the kind Indians once used for diapers.  

But most memorable still is something of a different stripe altogether – the island school. Yes, the bog’s sundew may glisten like gems but the school is the real jewel.

In summer, Isle Au Haut’s population “swells” to about 400. Come winter, according to the 2010 census, it hovers around a sobering 70, although islanders peg it closer to 40. Here indeed is a place where a single resident wears many hats. And here, too, is the home of one of the roughly 400 one-room schoolhouses still found in the U.S.

With sunlight generously pouring through tall windows on a morning in early August, the school stood quiet and empty of its pupils though it wasn’t hard to imagine how such an inviting place would be transformed in just a few weeks. In that hushed, seemingly breathless waiting, I could’ve easily slipped off my backpack and settled into the white rocking chair of as tempting a book nook as I’ve seen. I was tempted to spin the globe or slide open the drawers clearly notated with the materials – pencils, markers, scissors – long requisite to a K-8 school. I would’ve liked to notch my height into the door frame with those of former students or pause to memorize the posted fire drill diagram clearly and painstakingly drawn by a young student’s hand. I could imagine myself sitting down at the table and unwrapping my lunch-time sandwich, or, prior to walking home on a winter afternoon, unclip my dried mittens and woolen cap from the clothesline near the front door.

Make no mistake. This was no relic as is the one-room schoolhouse on Eagle Island forced to close its doors in World War II, and now, museum-like, everything still in its original place, only opens to island visitors of the Quinn family. Nor is the Isle Au Haut school merely a throwback, though it does, in size, location and demographics, have its challenges, not the least of which is the worrisome issue of a school population that’s shrunk to just four. A number soon to be bolstered hopefully by way of a grant enabling the island’s Community Development Corp to build a couple of affordable houses attractive to young families who possess a requisite love of adventure and few qualms about donning a small island’s multiple hats. Still, if I needed any reminding that here was a “real” working school, I got it by way of a large flat-screen monitor.

Since, I’ve learned that that flat screen along with the presently absent laptops help transform the Isle Au Haut one-room schoolhouse into a version of the 21st century school, thanks to Outer Islands Teaching and Learning Collaboration, or, appropriately, TLC. According to Island Journal, TLC has grown from networking teacher support to enabling, through teleconferencing, the daily collaboration of curriculum, place-based educational opportunities, field trips, book groups, unit lessons and student interaction. Via Skype, the combined virtual classrooms of multi-island schools compliment the much smaller individual physical ones (like Monhegan’s of just three students).

TLC also provides for critical peer group expansion and social connection, including the recent formation of a student council in which the election of a president and officers paralleled a unit lesson on government and civics. Candidates posted to the Internet their interactive, multi-media posters and campaign videos with testimonials from classmates, family and community members. Election ballots were distributed via Google docs and the election results  videoconferenced to students, including a boy in a hospital bed. Since, student agenda-driven meetings have been held and inter-island fund-raising events like a read-a-thon launched. The Isle Au Haut school is being transformed.

Back here all week, I’ve been watching a different kind of transformation. One in which technology has no role. And yet, I can’t help but think of its connections to what is happening in some tiny island schools.

 For days, I’ve noticed how the leaves of my garden’s asclepias, a type of milkweed, have been disappearing. What I’d hoped was the cause is: a few striped caterpillars fattening up for the next stage of monarch magic. Or, more scientifically, complete metamorphosis. Soon, I’m hoping that at least one will seek a stable, sheltered spot – maybe the nearby window sill? – to attach to, suspend itself head down and pupate into a tiny jade-green lantern-like chrysalis that hardens into a protective shell, inside of which, in less than two weeks, dramatic changes will take place. Quite miraculously, for example, a caterpillar’s chewing mouth will transform into a butterfly’s straw-like tongue for sipping nectar from flowers. And there will be wings. Tiny, wet and crumpled at first, they will, in less than an hour, be ready for flight.

In such amazing transformation, each stage is important, dependent on the other. But to my way of thinking – my preference? – it is the chrysalis that is most crucial. That protective incubating space in which change take place. Within, transformation. Emerging, the transformed.

 And isn’t that like a schoolroom? A chrysalis crucial to development?  The place where dramatic changes can – need to – happen. Where wings are grown.

Sure, it’s probably an easy metaphor to make, though there’s nothing facile about what, amazingly, can occur in that incubating space, and whether of a sprawling suburban campus or a one-room school house on a tiny island. The classroom as chrysalis is crucial to the child and to her community, an assurance to its pumping lifeblood that a next generation will follow. Oh yes, there will be the flight away – at the very least to a mainland high school. And maybe beyond – to places where scientific knowledge and flights of imagination are needed to understand what enables a migrating butterfly weighing half a gram to fly 25,000 miles to a grove of fir trees on a mountainside in central Mexico, and thus complete its cycle. Or for a young child who, if differently winged, lifts off from a tiny island, from a one-room schoolhouse, and, transformed, departs, but knows her way back to family, trails and bogs, to future, multi-hatted generations. And who by feel alone can recognize the grooved notch in a doorframe where it all began.