A  FEW weeks ago, I sat with a handful of other passengers in the stern of a small mail boat surrounded by packages, mail and other cargo all of us bound from Stonington, Me., to Isle au Haut, a pristine 6,900-acre island some seven miles off the coast of Deer Isle. As we pulled out of Stonington's picturesque harbor, one small island after another drifted by, each covered in the dark spruce forests and granite ledges so distinctive of Down East Maine. While the late afternoon sun hovered in the sky, the haze turned the distant islands of Merchant's Row into dark, shimmering mirages.
Solitude, and No Need to Pack a Hair Dryer
Some 45 minutes later the mail boat rounded the northeastern tip of Kimball Island and we slowly headed toward the tiny town dock of Isle au Haut. A stunned silence hung over the boat as we took in our first glimpse of this beautiful and utterly tranquil island. The island's fir-tipped landscape is dotted with a combination of grand old shingled cottages, battered lobster shacks and prim, neatly painted Cape Cod houses set into verdant green meadows rolling down to the ocean.
With about half the island some 3,000 acres owned and operated by Acadia National Park, Isle au Haut is part national park, part wealthy summer community and part working-class fishing village (with approximately 40 year-round residents). In these ways it is not unlike its larger and more populous sibling island to the north, Mount Desert Island, but that is where the similarities end; Isle au Hauters are fiercely protective of their privacy and make no bones about the fact that they do perfectly well without hordes of tourists. Even the name they call their island is assertively independent: islanders pronounce it "eye-la-HOE," to differentiate themselves from visitors who often use the "EEL-a-hoe." As the author Linda Greenlaw, the fishing-boat captain portrayed in Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm" and perhaps the island's most famous resident, says in "The Lobster Chronicles," her recent book about Isle au Haut, "If by any chance, in the course of reading this book, you should fall in love with, or become consumed with curiosity about Maine island life, I promise you that visiting Mount Desert Island, Bailey Island, or Monhegan will surely satisfy both lust and curiosity. People there welcome tourism. They have hotels and restaurants. We have nothing."
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