Life on Maine’s Eagle Island During the Lonely Winters

It was early morning and 5 degrees above zero. Mailman Robert Quinn, 43, piloted his 38-foot lobster boat, The Last Straw, through the choppy surf across East Penobscot Bay.

Windows in the wheelhouse were thick with frost. Icicles draped the weather-beaten craft. A stick held the window open in front of Quinn so he could see his way across the angry, frothing sea.

Freezing spray repeatedly struck his face. His cold, numb cheeks were beet red. Fierce gusts made the wind-chill factor 10 degrees below.

It was a three-mile, half-hour run for Quinn from Sunset, a tiny town on Deer Isle, to Eagle Island, a 1-mile-long, half-mile-wide island settled in 1825 by his great-great-grandparents, Samuel and Lucy Quinn.

Island Hopping

From mid-September to mid-June, Eagle Island is the only stop for Quinn, who makes the mail run on Tuesdays and Fridays. In summer, he carries the mail across East Penobscot Bay six days a week to several families vacationing in cottages on Eagle, Bear, Barred and Great Spruce Head islands. It’s a contract route that earns him $256 a month.

No one lives on Bear, Barred or Great Spruce Head nine months of the year. If they did, Quinn would deliver their mail.

Quinn has had the mail run for 12 years; his father had it for 30 years before him. A mail boat has served the islands since 1904.

When Quinn left Sunset, he climbed down an icy ladder from the dock to his skiff and shoveled a foot of snow out of it. He rowed over to The Last Straw (so named because his last boat sunk “and if I lose this one, that’s it”) and shoveled the snow out of it before setting out for Eagle Island.

When he rounded Northeast Head and entered the more calm waters of the island’s lee side, he spotted Adam Broome, 27, snowshoeing to the dock through powder two to three feet deep.

It was low tide; the sea was 15 feet below the dock. Quinn gingerly made his way up the icy ladder carrying a sack of groceries in his mailbag.

Adam, his wife, Alison, 26, and their children, Tom, 3, and Maisie, 11 months, are the only four people on Eagle Island nine months of the year.

On Quinn’s twice-weekly run in winter, he also brings groceries and supplies to the Broomes.

Adam immigrated to Maine from England in 1979 when he was 19 “because there wasn’t much work in the U.K.” In Maine, he played a guitar and sang in a five-man band, Attitude Problem.

After he married Alison, they ran a classified ad in Folk, a weekly newspaper, seeking to be caretakers of an island. Maine has nearly 2,000 islands off its rocky coast. Eagle Island needed a caretaker.

“We came out four years ago and have been here ever since,” Alison said. “We are not paid to be caretakers. However, we do get to live in this marvelous old house (built in 1845) rent-free.”

The island has no electricity, no phones, no indoor plumbing. The Broomes cook and heat the house with a century-old wood stove. It’s a turn-back-the-clock existence.

Every time she does her laundry in an old ringer washer, Alison has to hand-carry 20 gallons of water for one load, empty it and replace it with 20 more gallons of water to rinse.

“We like the solitude,” Adam said. “We’re kept busy--Alison with the children, cooking and chores. I have a lot to do around the house, fetching water from the well in buckets, filling the lanterns with kerosene, chopping and splitting wood, keeping the fire going.

“We do an awful lot of reading. We read every day to Tom and Maisie.”

TV Is Usually Dark

They seldom watch their five-inch black-and-white, battery-powered television. “Few people write letters today,” Alison said. “We write a lot of letters.

“I’m from a big family. I miss my family. I miss interacting with people. The island is so remote. But I’m like Adam. I enjoy the solitude and quiet.

“Being out here alone makes you realize how much you can do without in the world. I appreciate things so much more not being able to run to a store.”

Adam does carpentry work during the winter in the nine vacant summer cottages. Last year, he earned $4,500. He and his wife have a garden in summer and she “puts up” string beans and tomatoes. She makes jams, jellies and pies from wild strawberries, raspberries and rhubarb; she bakes bread and pies.

They keep their home-grown potatoes, carrots, onions, beets and green peppers in their cellar over the winter as well as apples harvested from trees on the island.

They had a dozen chickens and a duck. A wild mink ate them.

During their nine months alone each year, the couple have never left the island except when their children were born: Tom in February, 1984, and Maisie last March. In the summers, they have gone to the mainland and stayed as long as a month visiting family and friends.

Alison went to the mainland on the mail boat a week before the birth of each of her children “to make sure I wouldn’t be stuck on Eagle Island due to high seas when my time came.”

They don’t have a boat. If an emergency occurred, they would call for help over their citizens band radio.

The island is heavily forested with spruce except for the Big Field, a large meadow next to their home.

For 100 years, the island was the private domain of the Quinn family. Lucy and Sam Quinn had 13 children, many of whom married off-island spouses and lived out their lives on Eagle Island. Now there is only one home on the island owned by the Quinns, the 142-year-old two-story house the caretakers live in.

A cemetery in the center of the island has 50 graves, most of them Quinns’. The mottled headstone inscription for a Quinn woman who died in 1867 reads:

A seat by the fireside is vacant

A dear form so loved is now gone

Yet one from our number is taken

Whose place can be filled by none.

The Quinns were lobster fishermen, boat builders and farmers on the 263-acre island. There was a one-room school on the island from 1870 to 1942 with five to 13 pupils each year, nearly all Quinns.

In the beginning, a teacher was paid $3 a week. The salary increased to $5.12 a week in 1900, $12 a week in 1924 and $21.72 a week in 1930. The Eagle Island Lighthouse was manned by keepers from 1838 to 1959.

For three months in summer, the families who own the nine homes on the island vacation here with as many as 40 men, women and children, neighbors to the Broomes.

Come Labor Day or a few days after, the houses are locked up and the Broomes have the island all to themselves.

“We know every inch of Eagle Island. We hike a great deal in summer and cross-country ski in winter. We really love it here but know we cannot stay forever,” Alison said. “When Tom is of school age we will have to leave.”

“They’re special,” said mailman Quinn as he rode back to Sunset on The Last Straw. “Not many people could live alone cut off from the world, without electricity and modern conveniences, all by themselves in long, miserable Maine winters as they have.”