Linda Kelley works on a painting that depicts one of the paths on the annual Spring Bulb Tour in Northeast Harbor.

She paints there for hours on evenings and weekends. When she retires from her day job, as director of administration for the Bar Harbor Housing Authority, she plans to spend even more time there.

“I need, almost, isolation,” she says. “I think my dad was like that. He was a carpenter and he had his own little shop in the basement, and I watched him go down there at night. And when I’m coming down the path, sometimes, I think, ‘Oh yeah, my father would relate to this.’”

Kelley’s paintings fill her studio and loft.

Kelley is a lifelong artist whose perceptions are inescapably centered in a world of visual creativity. In her mind, the physical objects of life – from the mundane supplies on her office desk to a splendid seaside scene – are manifestations of ineffable beauty and vibrant energy. She finds herself, often, literally stopped in her tracks to study a building or a flowering bush: She feels compelled to find a slip of paper, if her sketchbook isn’t at hand, to draw her new subject of study and to return repeatedly to gain new understanding of the subject.

A used palette, jars full of brushes, and windows overlooking the outdoor woods frame a painting of trees, one of Kelley’s favorite subjects.

Kelley doesn’t like to say what her paintings are about; she prefers to let viewers interpret them according to their own sensibility. For her, art is all about the process; she has a sense of playfulness and experimentation, and doesn’t worry about results. Often, her images come in series, as she explores the subject matter. A recent theme centers on buildings and houses. The paintings involve the squares and rectangles of structures, windows, alleys, and other elements that are one within the other, sometimes simple one-on-one arrangements, other times multifold. Warm, saturated colors – yellows, oranges, rusts – light the canvas against counterpoints of cool colors such as aquamarine and olive.

On the left easel, center, “The Bridesmaids,” and below, a scene from Monhegan.

Grassy fields, seascapes, and distant horizons figure large in her work, sometimes rendered as smudgy foregrounds that obscure distinct elements – houses, flowers – in the background. There are clusters – of people, trees – that are sometimes distinguished by the lone person or object set apart – a solitary house at the crest of a  hill, a distant figure. She likes to paint flowers, sometimes in detail, other times as mere suggestions of color.

The studio.

Large-point pointillism forms the technique of some paintings. There are outright abstractions that only suggest at representation. Some paintings have imagery that is odd enough – such as wavy lines emanating from powerlines, and tiny people set among apples – that Kelley feels may justify some explanation, perhaps simply in the form of the title. In some pieces, her hot colors, vast fields, separated people, lone houses, and streets without activity evoke a sense of isolation. At the same time, her work often has a story-telling quality – a smeary glimpse of things almost discernable, buildings as geometric objects that dissolve into sky and fields, the sweet cheer of shoreside scenes and houses lined up on neighborly roads, an inviting copse, a sense of social tension, an invitation to run among the flowers or peer through a window.

“This morning, there was some kind of animal down here,” Kelley says, when I visited her recently and there was still ice and snow on the ground. She made us tea and then led the way from the kitchen door of her house and down the path to her studio. “There’s always something. There are deer and they’ll just stand here.  I have to wrap the apple trees because the males were sharpening their antlers on them.”

A recently completed painting.

The studio is a pretty little A-frame with windows on three sides and lots of light. Every surface, from floor to walls to loft to rafters, is full of paintings. Shelves are piled with stacks of stretched canvas and jars and cans of paints, gesso, glaze, and brushes. Also on display are painted crafts – switchplates and hangers, for example – which she enjoys doing for a change of pace.

Kelley rededicated herself to art in recent years, after attempts to keep it going while raising three children and working a full-time job.

“Have you ever seen the film Who Does She Think She Is?” she asks of the 2008 documentary about modern women at the intersection of creativity and caregiving. “The film is about some really incredible women, and I could relate. You’re working and you’re trying to incorporate that and still have their needs met. Not an easy balance. I just made a commitment, probably 10 years ago. I said, ‘This is it. I’m doing it.’”

Smudging evokes the distant-memory aspect of this painting.

Kelley likes to show her work and has many outlets at local galleries, businesses, and shows. She also regularly posts photos of her work on her Facebook page. But she prefers to keep the thought of sales out of her production. She craves the satisfaction of being creative.

“I hope that won’t change,” she says, as she contemplates the idea of painting full-time. “I think if you needed to make money, it really puts a terrible obstacle in the way.”

More than anything, she enjoys art for its own sake.

The geometry-inflected “Earth Machine.”

“I’m just really a child,” she says. “It’s more like playing. I come down to my little house, playing, and I’m by myself and I have my music going.”

Kelley is never not an artist. She sees everyday things in an artistic light. Here are a few of the paintings’ back-stories:

There was the cluster of people she spotted on the dock at Monhegan Island, where Island, where she spends time each summer to draw and paint, and the teenage boy who had separated himself out from the group.

There was the time, a couple of years ago, when she and her husband were on the train from Portland to New York City. Along the way, she did “really quick, kind of art-schoolish drawings” of the powerlines along the route. Her paintings show wavy lines streaming from the top of the poles, like bridal veils. She calls the paintings her “Wedding Series.”

There was the farm she walked by, every day, on her way to school in Keene, New Hampshire.

“I never really looked at it. You know, you look but you don’t see,” she says.

Kelley is never far from a sketchbook.

About two years ago, she went back, took her little chair into the field, and did drawings of the farm so she could paint it, capturing layers of color and shadow, a shack hidden in the wooded gloom.

“I sat, and it just kind of went deeper,” she says. “I thought, ‘This is what I used to look at.’”

She and her daughter were in the car at a stop sign in Yarmouth, one day, when she noticed a group of buildings.

“I had to go back,” she says. “That’s what I generally do. I see something and keep coming back – and become a stalker for the area.”

Another time, she happened to be waiting for someone in a store in Ellsworth. When she looked up, she noticed an old house through the trees behind the old railroad. She did a little drawing on a bank slip. That was the beginning of a new painting.

“I’ll see something, like being at the stop light. That happens often,” she says. “Or I will be attracted to a place and keep going back. I think we’re attracted to things for a reason.”

Ideas come from everywhere, she says, and each idea is imbued with a story about life.

“When I paint, I like to be alone,” she says. “I like silence or music. I don’t very often explain them. This is more than I’ve said in a long time.”

She grew up in a mill town. Her dad was a carpenter, her mother a school secretary.

The energy of powerlines is depicted as rippling bridesmaid veils.

“School and reading and all that were really important to her,” Kelley says. “Not so much for my dad. Watching him work with his hands probably had something to do with why I liked sculpture. I liked building things. But as it turned out, I was more interested in drawing and painting.”

She had three siblings and a “pretty normal” family.

“You know the book Stranger In A Strange Land? I always felt kind of like that. Like, I’m with these people, but not sure I identify with them that much.”

From early on, Kelley knew she was a visual person. “When I was very young, I thought I would be a cartoonist. And then I thought I would be an illustrator. And then it developed.”

Her older sister, who was a fashion illustrator and is now a watercolorist, was noted for her artistic talent from a young age.

“Appletown” inspires students to create stories.

“She took art lessons as a little girl, and she got the message that that was all she could do. She was fantastic,” Kelley says.

Kelley had the opposite experience. Despite her obvious love and pursuit of art, a high school art teacher told her parents their daughter would never be good enough as an artist.

“And actually, that was a big turning point because I thought, ‘What do these people know?’” she recalls.

Fortunately, she was the type of inwardly peaceful person who didn’t need affirmation from others, who was simply happy within herself. She figured she would aim for the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. But in 1969, when she graduated from high school, the country was pretty much in turmoil.

“My parents were not interested in having me in Boston. We were waiting to get into an interview and a guy walked by with a Mohawk, and I said, ‘I’m going here,’ and my father said, ‘No, you’re not.’”

She ended up at the Maine College of Art in Portland, which was fine. She found a milieu where she no longer felt like a stranger. Three years later, she met a young man who appeared to be of like mind; they had dreams of being “hippie artists” and raising animals, so they married and went to live on a farm in central Maine. Kelley also worked at the local Boys and Girls Club and a nursing home, where one of her functions was to do artwork with people with dementia. But the romance with her first husband faded and, by the time they moved to Mount Desert Island, in 1977, she was ready to divorce.

“I always tell people it cost me $28. I represented myself and did the paperwork and nobody contested it,” she says.

In need of a job, and with some experience in social outreach under her belt, she was hired on as the housing authority’s activities coordinator. Terrance Kelley worked at the agency (and is now its executive director). They married in 1979. Linda became the mother of his two young children, and then they had a third child together. Art went on the backburner.

About 10 years ago, with the two older children grown up and their third child preparing for college, Kelley decided to focus more on art. She prepped her husband who, in any case, is perfect as a partner because he needs plenty of quiet time, too, and is always doing different projects.

“I said to him, ‘From now on, I just want you to know, we’ll still be doing things together, but I’m going to be painting – a lot,’” she recalls. “I’ve been aimed in this direction. Mary Elizabeth is our youngest. She graduated from college and she’s 26 now, so she doesn’t needs us. I think that was what really liberated me. It feels like, now, it’s my time. I think you get to a certain age, too, where you’re on a cliff, and you’re looking out into the space, and you’re thinking, ‘Okay, I know that I’ve got this time – it’s an important time – to do the things I want to do.’”

Kelley takes a moment to page through her sketchbooks. Complementing her painting process, she’s also been drawing all her life. One of her books is full of sketches from trips to Monhegan, which she, her sisters, and her niece, Alison, an up-and-coming painter, usually visit twice yearly. She loves to draw trees. There are drawings of a nearby dairy farm.

“It’s whatever hits me at the time,” she says. “At the doctor’s office, they said, ‘Do you need any medication? ‘And I said, ‘No, I need my sketchbook. That will help.’”

An impressionistic depiction of human connection, left, and poppies in bloom, hanging in the stairwell of the Kelleys’ home.

A lot of sketches go into each painting – not necessarily into a specific painting, but into an understanding of a subject.

“My drawings are kind of like a diary,” she says.

Her work is probably at its impressionistic height with her pointillism. She likes the technique because of its vibrant energy. In fact, she likes to think of all of her art as an extension of the “life force energy work” that she practices through a healing art called reiki, and as an expression of purpose – although she doesn’t feel a need to understand what the purpose is.

“I don’t mean that to sound heavy, like it has some great purpose,” she says. “But I think all things we do has some purpose.”

Kelley sells a lot of her pieces. Over the past year or so, she’s also been taking her talent into a local school. She tells a story about an imaginary place called Appletown, and asks the kids to make drawings about their own Appletown.

“The premise is about community and how the apples fall and they’ll make homes out of them,” she says. “But they don’t have electronics, so the kids have to think about what they do and what their houses are like. And I have the kids tell about their drawings. They love thinking about what they would do besides TV and all that.”

She came up with the idea, not surprisingly, during an everyday outing. She was picking apples and, naturally, started to draw apples. She’s now working on two more stories. One is about how siblings grow like trees, and sometimes they lean on each other, or they fall apart. The other is about disabilities; she’s making paintings of dogs to illustrate it. She plans to take the storytelling/art concept into more schools.

Among her recent paintings is a series depicting extensive beds of tulips on a Northeast Harbor estate; one of the paintings will be selected for a charity auction this summer. She has donated paintings to benefit other fundraisers in the area, such as the Children’s Museum in Bangor, and the Hancock County SPCA.

Kelley likes to play music while she paints, so today she puts on a CD on of an indie pop-folk group called The Weepies, and takes a seat at her easel. Her palette is thickly daubed with acrylics. Initial layers of paint are on the canvas. She grabs a small brush and layers yellows onto the grass beside the flowerbed, which is drawn vertically up the canvas.

“When I really get serious about doing the painting, I’ll probably do four of these, and then I’ll start putting details in,” she says. “For this kind of thing, I will do some studies. Ideally, I like to have the plant. One winter, I really wanted to do a plant, so I had a lot of geraniums here. I wanted to understand how it grew and how it came out of the pot. This same thing will happen and it will look really simple –  until it gets to that point.”

When not painting canvas, Kelley makes colorful crafts, such as clothespins.

Kelley’s sense of play comes out easily when she’s with her grandchildren. Usually, she’s the one running around the house with them, while the other adults are having sensible conversations.

Art is about play, she says.  Daily life tends to occupy her attention less for the importance of its minutiae – and just how important the minutiae are, she’s not so sure – but for the use of minutiae as elements of creativity.

“There’s the world, and then there’s the creative world,” she says. “And in that creative world, it’s almost like you have license to take things further than what they are. If I’m around people who want to get into all these other details, I can take a lot of that. But internally, I have this whole other standard.”

Most moments of daily life are not about the moments themselves, but about the artistic opportunity they represent. She feels as though she’s always off to one side, just a little bit, observing with an artist’s eye. And visual enticement can come anytime– on the train, skating with friends, sitting at a stoplight. If her sketchbook isn’t at hand, she grabs any slip of paper and draws. She’ll return repeatedly, if she feels like it.

“Where does that wiring come from?” she wonders. “Does it come from family? I don’t know. I just wonder if we’re not wired like that to begin with. Every time I’ve ever traveled, I have the paper, the pencil, I want to be in that other world, instead of whatever ordinary is happening. I don’t want ordinary all the time.”

For Kelley, art is real life. In a sense, the moment she enters the studio, she’s home.

“Yes, I’m waiting to come to the studio,” she says. “My mother said, one time when I was an adult, ‘I saw so-and-so when I was in the grocery store and they asked how you were doing, and were you still doing artwork? And I told them, Yes, it’s her hobby.’ I hollered, ‘Whaaaat?! You said it’s my hobby!? It’s not my hobby. I don’t have a hobby!’ It’s never been a hobby. I’m thinking a lot – the word ‘thinking’ really doesn’t do it – but I’m ‘on’ a lot with the visual stuff. I’ll be at work and I have ideas come up. Nothing that takes away from my job, but it’s always there. The artist is always there. I always have a drawing pad. I would say the artist is 75 percent. The rest is great. I go to birthday parties with my grandchildren and all that, but I’m waiting to come back to myself.”

The time and space she craves for creativity and thought – or non-thought – is like a child playing, she says: “You know how a child is just building and humming and doing things? It’s like that.”

Steve Spurling with the Norwegian-style pram currently under construction.

Newman was one of the first fiberglass boatbuilders on the Maine coast, producing hulls for luxury yachts, commercial fishing boats, and Friendship sloops at the rate of one every two weeks until he sold the business in 1978. He took the mold for his first yacht from a boat designed by his father-in-law, Raymond Bunker, who built wooden boats with his partner, Ralph Ellis, in nearby Manset from 1946 to 1978.

There are many striking images of Newman and Bunker & Ellis yachts on display here. Among them is a picture of a handsome boat that pre-dates both generations.

Two of Spurling’s finely crafted Whitehalls.

Maddy Sue was built by Chester Clement, Sr., who owned the C.E. Clement Boatyard, which is now the Southwest Boat Corporation. Clement, who died in 1937, was called Mount Desert Island’s “carriage trade” boatbuilder in a recent WoodenBoat-digital article by maritime historian Maynard Bray.

Built as a lobsterboat, Maddy Sue was later spruced up to become just as elegant as “one of the very first of the genre now known as lobster yachts, leading in stages to the well-known Bunker & Ellis variety, then to the present-day Hinckley Picnic Boat,” Bray wrote. “Her hull is absolutely beautiful: a nice sheer; a wonderful, quickly yet subtly flaring bow; and aft, of course, a transom with marked tumblehome. Ashore or afloat, she’s simply lovely to look at.”

On my recent visit to Newman’s shop, his daughter, Kathe Walton, is giving me the lowdown on the various images.

Whitehall detail.

“Maddy Sue was sitting out on Cranberry Island at Barbara Stainton’s boatyard for years,” she says of this classic. “It was built for Francis Spurling, Steve Spurling’s father, back in the day. Now a gentleman has bought her and is having her totally rebuilt. He trucked her to a boatyard in Vermont. She’ll have a grand launching next spring. I’d love to have Steve and Arlene Spurling go, too.”

At this moment, from the back office, Newman notices his daughter has a visitor. He strolls in.

“The Maddy Sue is a beautiful boat,” he says. “She’s in super shape now. “

Walton considers the connections between the Spurling and Bunker families.

It goes back to the 18^th century, when the first Spurling, Bunker, Stanley, and Hadlock were settling Great and Little Cranberry islands. The mother of Raymond Bunker – half the Bunker & Ellis duo – was a Spurling. Steve Spurling’s mother was a Stanley. Steve Spurling and Raymond Bunker must be cousins, somehow. And the Newman family is mixed into the relations, too.

Steve Spurling, who is 92 and lives with his wife Arlene two doors down from Newman’s shop, has been a boat captain and boat builder all his life. He still builds small craft, including Whitehalls and dinghies of his own design, in a shop behind his house.

“He keeps the rowboats out there for sale,” Walton says. “He keeps building them. That’s what he does. And Arlene sews. They stay so busy. They’re both remarkable.”

“He needs to do something, just like I do,” says Newman who, once he sold the boatbuilding business in 1978, formed a boat brokerage but is now semi-retired. “I’m not sitting home watching TV. Got to keep going.”

Walton catches sight of someone coming through the back workshop. “Oh, oh, here’s trouble,” she jokes. I turn and see an older man with a friendly face and a roguish gleam in his eye. It’s Spurling, who swings by Newman’s shop regularly to have a chat. He homes in on me, cheerfully demanding to know, in a gruff voice that sounds as if he has to force it open, “Who are you?!” He turns to Newman and Walton for the latest gossip on the neighborhood’s rental houses, which apparently could use some better upkeep.

A dinghy of Spurling’s own design.

Taking advantage of a break, I ask Spurling, whose expression slides easily into a smile and a chuckle, if I can visit his shop.

He’s hard of hearing. “You coming now? Is that what she said?” he asks Walton.

“You’ve got to yell,” Walton tells me.

“Okay, dear,” he says to me. “C’mon. What do you want, take you by the hand?”

We head through the workshop, where a couple of Friendship sloops sit on jackstands. The wooden Friendship sloop Eastward, built in 1956 for New England seaman and maritime author Roger Duncan, is undergoing some noisy grinder work, as the boat’s new owner, tour boat captain Andrew Keblinsky, digs out the deck seams. Miff Lauriat’s cherry-red Salatia awaits its owner’s arrival for the usual spring upkeep.

The steam box out back.

Spurling forges ahead. “C’mon on!” he urges, as we head out to Main Street, walk over half a block, and cross through his yard to the shop and storage buildings he has out back. Inside, the shop is quiet except for the throb of fluorescent bulbs. There’s the usual workshop clutter: A desk, workbenches and heavy machinery covered with sawdust; coffee cans and plastic containers full of fastenings; stray drill bits, clamps, boxes of screws, and rolls of tape; lead weights, sandpaper rounds, measuring tapes, hand tools, shop lamps, lumber, and boat hardware lined up around a snub-nosed pram that sits on sawhorses, tipped partly on its side by means of ropes and pulleys. The boat is his design, but is based on a type of small Norwegian boat that was used for light fishing and everyday tasks for centuries, although the more old-fashioned the heritage model, it seems, the sharper and higher its bow transom. Spurling’s boat, which is in the finish stage, can be rowed or fitted with a small outboard.

Spurling unties the rope that fastens his back door, and we tramp onto the crusty snow, past a steambox that hangs below the eave, to a small shed, trailer, and plastic-covered temporary structure. Spurling opens doors and reveals half a dozen small boats – finely wrought craft, their brightwork gleaming in the sun, built from cedar on oak, with mahogany and oak trim. They sit on or lean up against stacks of lumber, ready to go on display on his front lawn when the warm weather sticks.

Under the plastic structure is Nefertiti, a 1956 Concordia yawl owned by John “Jock” Williams, the boatbuilder in nearby Hall Quarry. Spurling and Williams have been working on the boat’s structural restoration as an on-and-off project for the last couple of decades. Although they haven’t worked on it the past couple of years, Spurling is still ready to climb up on the staging and get to it.

After all, he’s been building boats for “a while,” as he says.

Spurling grew up on Great Cranberry Island. As a young man, pre-World War II, he rode on Raymond Bunker’s boat every morning from the island to Southwest Harbor, and back in the late afternoon, so he could work for the Southwest Boat Corporation, run at the time by Lennox “Bing” Sargent and owned by Sargent and Henry Hinckley. The first boat he worked on was a 90-foot wooden dragger, which was being built outdoors; the crew had to work in all kinds of weather.

The steam box out back.

When World War II stormed in, Spurling went off to join the heavy machine gun section in Company D of the Army’s 351st Infantry Regiment. In 1944, he was awarded a Bronze Star for heroic achievement in action, when his section, which was supporting the assault on Sarti, Italy, came under intense enemy machine gun and mortar fire, killing the platoon leader and six other members of the company. Spurling assumed command and succeeded in reorganizing the platoon.

“Realizing the importance of the heavy weapons support, Sergeant Spurling continued checking the positions of his men and keeping them continually on the alert and supplied with plenty of ammunition,” the citation reads. “Sergeant Spurling gave no thought to his own personal safety at any time. He continued his hazardous task for the rest of the day and night until orders came to withdraw to defensive positions. This heroic action by Sergeant Spurling lessened the enemy resistance greatly and inspired his men so that, despite the inclement weather, they exerted their utmost efforts in support of the attack. Sergeant Spurling’s brave and fearless actions under fire reflect great credit upon himself and exemplify the high traditions of the United States Army.”

Nefertiti, undergoing a long-term restoration at Spurling’s shop.

When Spurling returned home, he worked for a while longer at Southwest Boat. But mainly, for the next 50 years, he captained the picnic yacht Gambol for textile magnate Roger Milliken Sr. and his family. Millilken and his siblings, Gerrish Milliken and Joan Stroud, had summer homes in Northeast Harbor, and their sister Anne Franchetti, who was married to a Sardinian baron, had a house in Tremont.

Over the years, Spurling captained the family’s first and second Gambols. The first was a wooden luxury yacht built by Bunker & Ellis in 1952. When the second Gambol was built at the John M. Williams Co., Spurling was on the construction crew. The wealthy Millikens owned a variety of sail, power, rowboats, and tenders. When they left for their winter stomping grounds, Spurling was responsible for pulling all the boats, decommissioning them, and performing maintenance and repairs. He got everything back on the water in time for the family’s spring arrivals.

The Maddy Sue.

During the winter, he worked for area boatbuilders. In the 1960s, he was at the Bar Harbor Boating Co., John Cochran’s yard in Hulls Cove. Arlene recalls it was the ‘60s because the country was in the middle of the Bay of Pigs missile crisis, and there was some question whether Spurling would be able to cross into Newfoundland with his buddies to go moose hunting.

In later winters, he worked for his cousin, the wooden boatbuilder Ralph Stanley who, as it happened, would build a sloop for Milliken sister Anne Franchetti in 1995. And Spurling has a long relationship with Jock Williams’ yard, where he was responsible for the fine woodwork that finished the fiberglass boats produced there.

Arlene Spurling at one of her sewing machines.

Spurling’s wife Arlene, hospitable and fun to chat with, comes from the deeply rooted Dolliver family and was raised in the nearby coastal village of Manset. Bunker & Ellis’ boat shop, where Ellis’ son, Don Ellis, now carries on the boatbuilding heritage as the Ellis Boat Co., was on land previously in the Dolliver family. Arlene recalls, as a child, seeing, and hearing the explosions of, the flares shot off by the Navy blimps that were hunting German submarines near the local shoreline.

The courtship of Steve and Arlene was simple. Steve was a friend of Arlene’s brother. They met, he came back the next day, and they’ve been married since 1946.

What is 66 years of wedded bliss like? His partial deafness plays a major role.

Arlene uses cheerful fabrics for her crafts.

“I say he can’t hear right. He says I don’t talk right,” Arlene jokes.

Arlene, who is 85 and stays in excellent shape through exercise, is a gifted crafts maker. She’s a member of two crafts co-ops – Pemaquid, in New Harbor, and Lupine Cottage in Belfast. She stitches just about everything – quilted bags, placemats, potholders, credit card/change purses. Her sunny sewing room is full of worktables, at least three sewing machines, racks of thread, and bolts of colorful fabrics mainly Maine themed, such as blueberries and puffins. Crates full of finished products are stored upstairs until she ships them off to the co-ops.

“I learned to sew when I was a little girl and my grandmother taught me,” she says. Three children took up most of her homemaking time, but when they grew up, she returned to the needle.

Old photos from the Cranberry Isles.

Thanks to Steve’s job with the Milliken family, the couple was given the gift of some cruising opportunities early on. Starting around the mid-1960s and for the next seven years, they were tasked with piloting Gerrish Milliken’s boat Spindle (a name suited to the textile business) to Jacksonville, Florida, for annual maintenance at Huckins Yacht, where it was built.

In the 1980s, they were hired to deliver a boat named Fishwife to Florida, which they did every November for six years. They stayed in Florida through April, in an apartment at the home of their employer, then delivered the boat back to Northeast Harbor.

“The first day of November we were out of here, come hell or high water,” Arlene says.

The reason Fishwife was built was because the owner had admired Gambol.

“He liked what we had built, so I took him up to Jock Williams and he had that one built,” Spurling says. “But it’s two feet longer than what we had, because he was tall.”

Sergeant Spurling’s citation and bronze medal.

At the Florida house, by chance, Arlene got a job that she didn’t really want.

“The cook and butler decided they’d had enough of Florida,” she says. A new cook came along soon enough. “But he couldn’t find a butler. I wasn’t doing anything, so I said, ‘If there’s anything I can do to help you out until you find a replacement, I’ll be glad to do it.’ Well, five year later, I was still a butler. So then, a few jokers said, ‘Well, what do we call her? A butlerette? A buttress?’”

The Spurlings did additional boat deliveries over the years. Eventually, Steve retired, except for his own boatbuilding at home. But Arlene’s feet are still itchy, so she’s taken a lot of group tours since then. Her latest one was to New Zealand. She gives the country rave reviews.

“If you ever get a chance, go there,” she urges.

A 1940s photo of the missionary ship Sunbeam off the Cranberry Isles.

Not long ago, the couple took a trip related to Spurling’s war service. Their grandson, who works in Washington, D.C., arranged for his grandparents to fly down at cherry blossom time so they could visit the National World War II Memorial, which opened in 2004.

“What year did you go?” I ask, a routine question.

She consults with Steve: “Do you remember what year you cut your thumb off?”

Wait. What?

“It was in the spring of 2005, because he was going like this” – she sticks her thumb up – “every time I took a picture, because he had a pin in it. I got his doctor to write out a thing on a prescription because we had to go through security when we flew.”

Well, at least it was a positive gesture, we agree. Thumbs up!

But that all begs a certain question.

“It got caught in a table saw,” he explains. “You know what? A table saw will cut your thumb just as easy as it will wood.”

The event resulted in another distinction for Spurling. At the time, then in his 80s, he was thought to be the oldest person ever to have a digit reattached.

Steve Spurling and his ready smile.

“He made medical history,” Arlene says.

The couple have brought out old photos. By coincidence, says Arlene, she just spent the whole afternoon at the Southwest Harbor Public Library, working with photo database wizard Charlotte Morrill, who asked Arlene to help identify old photographs.

“But they were back before my time,” she says. “The trouble is, so many of the older people are gone. And a lot of the pictures had no date.”

Their family photos are another matter. Among a series of four framed photos of boats in a Cranberry Isles harbor, from the 1930s or earlier, Spurling points out a “little bitty” boat that used to carry the mail and a few passengers to the island. It’s a lot smaller than the sturdy mailboat/ferry run today by Beal and Bunker.

“It had a make-or-break engine in it,” he says. “Of course, it didn’t go very fast. And the price at one time, I think, was 10 cents. And then finally it went up to a quarter. But it could only carry three or four.”

He points to Raymond Bunker’s boat, and his father’s, open, narrow boats that were small and vulnerable compared with today’s powerhouse lobsterboats.

There’s a winter photo from around the 1940s of the second Sunbeam, the name given to each of the Maine Sea Coast Mission ships that has provided services for remote islands from Mount Desert Island since 1905.  The harbor is full of ice.

“It used to get froze up pretty hard,” Spurling says. “We used to have to wait for an icebreaker from Portland. One time it got froze so hard that, when somebody needed a doctor, they put a flat-bottom rowboat on top of a  handsled, in case the ice broke, went across the Western Way and come got him and brought him to Cranberry, and took him back the same way. That’s how hard it was.”

Arlene finds an old photo of the Maddy Sue, the boat that was built for Steve’s father. It was originally named Trail Away.

After his father died, Steve bought Trail Away from his stepmother. He used  it for a few years, but then took the boat captain job for the Millikens and didn’t need it. In the 1950s, Steve sold the boat to a summer man on Cranberry, who renamed it Maddy Sue for his wife and daughter, owned it for decades, and then sold it to its current owner.  A boatbuilder/writer/researcher named Douglas Brooks has been documenting the boat’s restoration at Darling’s Boatworks in Vermont. Arlene is in regular contact with Brooks to see how things are going.

There are a bunch of other boat recollections – a long-ago boatbuilder you wouldn’t want to work for, a customer you wouldn’t want to have, the launching of the replica Spray in the 1990s, Sim Davis’ shop down on the Bass Harbor shore, where he built mostly draggers in the 1940s or thereabouts.

“He built one for somebody from Gloucester or somewhere, and he wanted to try it out and it wasn’t all paid for,” recalls Steve. “And he tried it out all right, and he kept right on going!”

Fifteen-year-old Chummy Rich is seen launching, from his own shop, the first boat he was commissioned to build, for fisherman Sheldon Smith. He built it evenings and weekends during the winter of 1955-56. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

When Rich was a young kid, he liked nothing better than to hang out with his grandfather, locally renowned boatbuilder Clifton Rich. He borrowed scraps of lumber from his dad, Robert “Bobby” Rich, also a well-known builder. Sometimes, young Rich got into the good stuff. By the time he was 10 or so, had put together a pretty good-sized craft. In a vintage photo, he and his buddies, Ralph Tate and Morris Thurston from up the road, can be seen clambering into it as they ease it into the water.

“You had to bail quite consistently, but it did float,” he says. “The only means of propulsion was – you’re on the boat, you throw the anchor out as far as you could throw it, you haul yourself along, and then throw it out again.”

Coming from a long line of boatbuilders, ship builders, seafarers, and carpenters, and enjoying tutelage from a network of family members and their skilled employees, Rich had no trouble from then on making his boats float and establishing his own reputation as a builder of fine craft.

On the “back side” of Mount Desert Island, in the adjacent coastal towns of Tremont and Southwest Harbor, the Rich clan “goes all the way back to Noah,” Rich jokes, adding, “We have built just about everything.”

Today, Chummy Rich is the last of the clan in the trade.

The young couple Mildred and Robert Rich, with Robert’s father Clifton. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

Between Clifton, Bobby, and Chummy, the yard has produced at least 367 boats in astonishing variety. In the early 20^th century, Clifton’s punts and dories, and his small fishing boats and sailboats, were a mainstay for the local fleet. When Bobby started his shop in 1939, he soon became the go-to builder for all manner of work boats, recreational boats, and specialty craft, his name to become known nationwide and his boats sold from Maine to South America.

Chummy began working in his father’s shop in 1958 and took over operations upon his father’s death, in 1981. He inherited a venerable mantle and made it his own. Backed by 10 generations in the local dynasty, his name is something of an institution around the harbor.

“That’s ‘mental’ institution,” he quips.

A few years ago, Rich thought he’d retire from the craft and concentrate on his boat transportation business.

The cedar-planked, oak-framed cabin-cruiser Andromeda, built by Bass Harbor Boat.

Instead, a younger wooden boat enthusiast, Richard Helmke, landed on his doorstep. Helmke owned a Bobby Rich boat built in 1959. One day, about ten years ago, he called Chummy Rich for advice on its restoration. The two men hit it off.

Helmke recalls a discussion they had one night at dinner.

“He indicated how he’d love to retire and sell the place, but he’d miss it. And that’s when we came up with an idea together: What if I bought the place, you still keep coming in and do your thing every day and enjoy it as long as you want, and it works out great for both of us?”

The idea took. Early in 2013, Helmke was in the process of finalizing his purchase of the business. He intends to keep the name and focus on wooden boat repair, storage, and restoration. Rich will be involved as much as he wants to be.

Boatbuilder Robert “Chummy” Rich shakes hands with customer Bill Jenkins, aboard Andromeda.

Rich laughs. “I enjoy going down there and watching him work.”

When you get to talking about the Rich clan, you have to shift to first names because there are so many of them. Even then, you pretty much have to go with nicknames, because there’s a fair bucketload of Johns, Jonathans, and Samuels through the ages. My favorite nickname – which I learned from Meredith Rich Hutchins, Chummy’s genealogy-researching cousin who lives in nearby Southwest Harbor – is “Talkin’ John,” who lived from 1853 to 1919.

“Why was he called Talkin’ John?” I, apparently brain-dead that moment, ask Hutchins one day, while viewing quite a lot of her research documents.

“I suppose he talked a lot,” she charitably answers. “They had nicknames for the Riches a lot. There was Lyin’ Sam, Sam Peculiar, One-Wing Sam – we presume that came from the Civil War. And my grandfather was very talkative. And my father was very talkative. In fact, I think we all talk, given the opportunity.”

This vintage photo shows Clifton Rich building a punt in the original section of the current Bass Harbor Boat shop in Bernard. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

According to Hutchins, who provided most of the family information and lore herein, many of the Rich men were seafarers, as shown in some of the earliest records, even before coming to America.

The first Rich was named John, and he arrived on Mount Desert Island around the time of the American Revolution. The clan branched into several boatbuilding families who lived within miles of each other but who gradually stopped counting how many cousins distant they were from each other. The boatbuilders include Chummy’s contemporaries, brothers James and Merton Rich, who died in recent years; and the brothers Frank, Ulysses “Eulie,” Roy, and Chauncy Rich. There’s also the Rich branch that owns a fish wharf, a straight shot across Bass Harbor.

“Somewhere back along the line, we’re all related,” Rich says. “But you’d have to go back and find it. My mother married a Rich, her sister married a Rich – but two different branches of Riches. So it just kind of got confusing.”

Rich Helmke at the helm of Andromeda, in 2010.

The early Riches were fishermen, not boatbuilders, Hutchins explains. She quotes William Otis Sawtelle – a Rich descendant – who wrote, in Volume IV of the Bangor Historical Magazine, that MDI’s first John Rich “was a Grand Banks fisherman and continued in the business for many years. He used to boast that he had eaten sixteen Christmas dinners on the Banks.”

John, who died in 1811, fathered a large family. Among his children was Captain Elias “Heavenly Crown” Rich, who had 12 children. Captain Elias died in 1867 and, according to the 1938 tome Traditions and Records of Southwest Harbor and Somesville, Mount Desert Island, Maine by Mrs. Seth S. Thornton, a  frequently appearing “discoloration of the stone” at his resting place in the Bernard cemetery, “has assumed the outline of a crowned head.”

Chummy and Meredith’s great-grandfather, John Melbourne “Talkin’ John” Rich, went to sea for many years, as did his son, Clifton Melbourne Rich (1881-1970) as a young man. “Talkin’ John,” explains Hutchins, was master of a number of vessels. In 1896, when Clifton was 14, he helped his father build their house by the Creek in Bernard, after their house in Richtown had burned.

Hutchins continues, “Our grandfather, Cliff Rich, once told my brother that ‘as a young man while on a trip in the schooner Idaho, the vessel was tied up to a wharf in Boston where he was caulking the deck. A man came by and watched him work and then said to Cliff, “A man’s a fool to go to sea when he can caulk like that.”

“’And you know, he was right,’ Cliff said, so he came home and began to carpenter and build boats. He didn’t want to go to sea anyway, he said: ‘It was dangerous, the food was bad and it was a hard life.’”

Chummy says it was about 1910 when his grandfather Cliff got his first order to build a boat. Cliff worked in a small shop that is now a portion of Rich’s larger building.

Young Chummy Rich, right, with his pals Ralph and Morris, put in their sturdy little vessel. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

“I don’t think he ever got into anything very big,” Rich says. “Twenty-eight feet, maybe 30 feet was the biggest thing he ever built.”

One reporter called Cliff “the Wizard of Bernard Corner,” a tribute to his “Bass Harbor” lobsterboat designs, considered faster than those of other builders. He was also known for his pleasure boats. One year, another article notes, Cliff, “veteran boatbuilder at Bernard,” had three projects lined up at once – a 14-foot punt, 21-foot motorboat, and a 26-foot fishing boat for a Swan’s Island man.

Cliff, who died in 1970, had three sons – the twins Roger and Ronald, born in 1913, and Robert, born in 1915. They all became boatbuilders. Chummy is Robert’s son.

A clipping from the late 1920s commends young Robert, Ronald, and Roger as “Expert Boat Builders.”

An ancient newspaper clipping, frayed at the edges, from the late 1920s, commends young Robert, Ronald, and Roger as “Expert Boat Builders.” A photo shows two of the boys, at age 13 and 14, with some of their model sailboats, including a two-masted schooner, a powerboat with the trysail on the stern, and a Marconi-rigged sloop.

“No doubt the children of ancient Egypt passed days in making miniature pyramids. And there is evidence that lads of the Middle Ages played at being armed nights [sic], just as today boys play at being traffic officers and airplane makers,” the story says. “Three brothers who live in Bass Harbor, Me., built toy boats, perhaps because their father, and his father, and his father’s father were ship and boat builders in the same place.”

The author admires the “marvelously correct design and good workmanship” of the kids’ model boats, “because they are very careful reproductions in every detail of the craft they see in their harbor every day.

“The open boats without rigging are copies of the fishing boats in which Maine fishermen go trawling or lobstering or scalloping, sometimes as far as 20 miles in the open sea off their shores. Some of the others are sail yachts, and some are little schooners, models of the coasting freighters that still ply the New England Coast, although in diminishing numbers.

Bajupa, the oldest Bobby Rich boat still operating. The photo was likely snapped in Rockland. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

“Sometimes the boys frame and plank one of their larger models, but most of their boats are made from a solid piece of wood, modeled and hollowed out, and decked over afterward. They sometimes power their motorboats with works from an old eight-day clock, gear wheels being removed so that the machinery can expand its eight days’ energy in a few minutes.”

Shortly after Robert – called Bob or Bobby by friends – started building boats, in 1939, World War II came along. It was a time when government contracts for patrol boats, mine sweepers and the like became a major economic engine for the area. The three brothers went to work at the Southwest Boat Corporation, jointly owned at the time by Henry Hinckley and Lennox “Bing” Sargent. Bobby became foreman of construction on Navy vessels, but left a couple of years later to build his own shop on the Bass Harbor shore in Bernard, where he and his wife Mildred also had their home. Roger and Ronald, both of whom lived in Southwest Harbor, went to work with their younger brother.

In 1946, Roger started his own operation as Rich & Grindle Boatbuilders, with his friend Ralph Grindle. Roger was similar to Bobby in temperament. He liked to have a good time and was adept at everything he put his hand to – plumbing, mechanical, electrical. He was a great one at making jigs for design work.

“Jack-of-all-trades. He could do anything as far as boats were concerned,” Rich recalls.

Bobby and Ronald Rich, second and third from left, and Roger Rich, right, stand in front of Kada II at Bobby’s shorefront shop. Built in 1942 for an insurance man from Portland, Kada II immediately went into war duty. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

Several years later, Grindle fell ill with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a disease of the nervous system, and moved on to other endeavors. Roger continued to build boats on his own, including his own boat – the Meredith, named after his daughter – to go lobstering summers.

“But he was one of these gentleman lobster fisherman,” Rich says. “His boat was really a pleasure boat. It was all fixed up down below. He was meticulous as hell. Everything had to be done just right. If you got a scratch on the side of the boat, he came and fixed it.”

Ronald also started his own shop in Southwest Harbor, where he built boats the rest of his life, working by himself. He retired in 1980, after 51 years in the trade.

“He tried to retire a year ago, but the orders kept coming in,” a clipping says.

“He built everything,” Rich says. “He built a lot of lobsterboats and quite a few pleasure boats. He did a good job. He had to have help with the mechanical and the wiring, so I went over there and did a lot of that stuff for him. Especially with the pleasure boats, it was a little more complicated.”

Ronald, who died in 1997, was a loner.

Lumber is ready to go at Bob Rich’s shop on the Bernard shore, in a photo take in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

“He didn’t do well in crowds,” Rich says. “He was a good worker. Actually, he worked harder than any two fellas, when he worked with Father. But he couldn’t work shoulder-to-shoulder with anybody. You had to kind of put him on a job by himself. He’d go like hell.”

Rich got along well with his solitary uncle.

“I went over there and I did a lot of the mechanical and some of the electrical stuff on his boats. When you went over there to work for him, he waited on you hand and foot, to the point where he was underfoot. If he’d just gone about and done his thing, left me to myself, I knew where all the tools were, I didn’t really need him. But he thought he had to wait on ya every minute to make sure you didn’t need anything.”

From left, Clifton, Bob, and Chummy Rich on the Clifton M. Rich. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

A photo of Chummy’s father, Bobby Rich, shows a pleasant-looking man with a gap-toothed smile and buzz-cut hair.  In Bernard, it’s a lovely ramble down to the Bass Harbor shore, where Bobby started with a small building and soon expanded to two main buildings and three marine railways. Bobby’s Bass Harbor Boat Co. soon became a thriving concern. His first two or three projects were small lobsterboats, but he kept getting bigger and better, and soon enough Bobby was building good-sized pleasure boats for an expanding clientele. At the time of his death, in 1981, he had built at least 165 commercial and recreational boats.

With his family home close by the shore, within sight of his father’s shop and the fishermen and yachters who valued his father’s skills, and his grandparents living half-a-mile up the road, Chummy Rich had a natural predilection for hanging out in one shop or the other, throughout his childhood.

He fondly remembers as a kid spending time with his grandfather Cliff, who liked to build dinghies and garden in his later years.

“I spent quite a lot of time down here, in the shop,” Rich says. “Just kind of underfoot, making a nuisance of myself. I spent more time down here than I did at home, because I could get away with more. I spent almost every night and even weekends here.”

Bob Rich built Lula May and other boats for Massachusetts law enforcement. His shop is behind. Launched in 1955, the 40-foot boat was named after the wife of that state’s police commissioner. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

Rich remembers when his grandfather used to have a garden out back, where there’s a parking lot now.

“The whole garden wasn’t half as big as this living room here,” he says. “He raised a lot of potatoes. He was quite proud of his potatoes. My father built me a little plywood cart, kind of like a jeep. You had to push it. I’d go down and load that thing up when he was digging potatoes. But then, in that soft dirt, I couldn’t move it, so we had to unload the potatoes.”

Rich had his first professional commission at age 15, when he built a 16-foot inboard powerboat for a local fisherman, Sheldon Smith, during the winter of 1955 to 1956.

“It was built nights and weekends, with considerable amount of help from Father and some of his crew,” he says. “For the time, it was a big, bulky 16 feet. It was difficult to build because it was so full forward. Had to steam every plank or it wouldn’t bend around. But it was a real stable, bulky boat and worked out just great for fishing and towing dories. It was in the fishing business quite a few years.”

When Rich graduated from high school in 1958, he did a summer stint at the nearby yard of the Henry R. Hinckley company, which was making a name for itself in high-end yachts. But his temperament was not quite right for the yard’s “rules and regulations.” The yard was building a 60-foot wooden pleasure boat, and the owner wanted someone to go deckhand, keep the boat clean, and do minor maintenance after it was launched. Rich was promised the job.

“Come close to the time, they’re launching the thing. We had a little meeting, and the captain of the boat said, ‘I’m going to explain your duties to you. You’ll have to wait on tables and do laundry and dishes and serve cocktails aboard the boat.’ Well, that’s not what I signed up for and I’m no good at that kind of thing. That basically ended it.”

He went straight back to his father’s shop, where he worked “elbow to elbow” with Eugene Walls, his father’s valued compatriot and Rich’s main mentor (and who, now in his 80s, still swings by the shop for weekly visits).

“He was the one who showed me all the little tricks,” Rich says. “He was probably as big an influence on me as anybody. I worked right beside him all the time. Father was there and he’d make all the decisions, but Eugene taught me what size drill to use.”

An original saw and planed owned by Chummy Rich’s grandfather, Clifton Rich, and still used by the crew. Clifton made the plane and likely made the handle of the saw. His name is incised in the wood and can still be made out.

Helmke has taken on the massive job of archiving the Rich heritage, preserving old photos, clippings, and brochures that go back 80 years, trying to discover the fate of each boat produced through three generations. The internet comes in handy for a lot of the research.

The three Rich men kept pretty good lists of the boats they designed and built, but not so good that Helmke doesn’t have to put in a fair amount of work to match boats to dates to owners.

He’s loaded the original materials, and Cliff and Bobby’s handwritten notes, into a cardboard box, and is in the process of backing and laminating each document. This is awesome, because up to now, Rich has been a tad laidback about what others view as part of his family’s treasure trove. I first came across his ancient, overstuffed album – overflowing with black-and-white photos, faded brochures, newspaper clippings crumbled at the edges – when Up Harbor Marine owner Carlton Johnson bought Rich’s shorefront property in 1996. I wanted to get a sense of the family history, and Rich kindly insisted I should take the album home to look over at my leisure. I did, terrified that I might accidentally damage it. The experience taught me that the anxiety wasn’t ever again worth taking someone else’s original documents from their home, no matter how obliviously they insist (although I have).

The two men have determined from sketchy notes, in Bobby and Mildred’s handwriting, that Bobby started to number his boats after World War II, although he was building before and during.

“Unfortunately, neither my father nor I were very…” Rich begins.

“Organized?” I suggest.

A personable man with a trim appearance, Rich is a tidy dresser, wearing a collared shirt, perhaps a sweater, square-rimmed glasses, his white hair in a brush-cut, a pencil behind his ear. He comes across both as principled and easily amused. Always one to tinker, he likes to spend evenings in his basement workshop, where tools that once belonged to his grandfather hang on the wall, making half-models, decorative wood propellers, or a colorful contraption with many interlocking gears for a schoolteacher friend.

In Rich’s living room, a fire crackles cozily. Several model boats built by his father sit on an overhead beam. Two are hollowed-out pieces of wood; the third is a genuine miniature, with sliding hatches, real planks, everything operational. Bobby built models for all the kids in the family.

There’s a framed photo of Rich’s 42-foot cabin cruiser Omega, a handsome, black-hulled craft that was based on his father’s design and was the last wooden hull to come out of his shop for 25 years.

The 42 started out as a spec boat.

“But somewhere along the line, I got a job that had a paying customer on the end of it. So I had to give up on that, five or six years. When I got going on it again, I decided it would make me a real good pleasure boat. Omega was a pretty nice boat. It was well laid out.”

When Rich sold the boat – “one of those ex-wife things” – he threw together the “waterbago” that became an object of affectionate amusement around the harbor.

An official photo of the patrol boat Lula May under way in Massachusetts. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

“It’s a combination of all the garbage I could find, poured into one boat. It’s got a camper-trailer on the back,” he says. He ruefully adds, “Definitely not a good demonstration of my workmanship.”

At the kitchen counter, Helmke scrolls through old photos he has scanned onto his laptop, filed by decade. He has a pretty good start on the 367 boats that Bobby and Chummy produced since the shop opened in 1939.

“This list is constantly evolving,” says Helmke. “Here’s number 80 to 367. And I’m close to having from 1 to 80 figured. But that’s tough because it keeps changing as I go.”

An old clipping tells of a 30-foot boat under construction by Cliff.

The motor yacht Bluejacket, built for a Seal Harbor customer in 1956, is seen here on launch day. The boat is still in Seal Harbor and is as beautiful as the day it was launched. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

“This boat follows the same design as that recently completed in the Rich shop for Earl Awalt, Frenchboro lobster fisherman,” the clipping says. “Awalt’s boat has a Chrysler Crown straight drive, and is said here to make the run from Long Island to Bass Harbor in less time than any other Frenchboro boat.”

The first officially numbered boat was a 48-footer built for Billy Howell in 1944. But there were others before that. Rich and Helmke ponder: Carl Lawson’s boat, built in 1940, may have been Bobby’s first.

“A lot of boats never got numbered,” says Rich. “Back in 1950s, I remember exactly when, Father built a lot of boats for the Hinckley Company. They were little 18-, 19-foot runabout outboard boats. A whole bunch of them, kind of a production line thing. And some of the tugboats that Father built never got numbered. And a couple or three of the boats I built never got numbered. They were spec boats that just kind of evolved.”

Originally named Santa Maria, the elegant yacht Framboise can still be seen in Northeast Harbor. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

A yacht comes up on the screen. Probably the biggest and best of the boats to come out of his father’s shop, says Rich, it’s the 57-foot motor sailer, Lazy Lady, a John Alden design launched probably in the early 1960s for an Arlington, Massachusetts, family. Its dinghy was named Tired Miss.

The Rich shop used to have quite the launching parties. Some 200 people attended Lazy Lady’s launching. Rich’s mother christened the boat, and his wife served refreshments and coffee. That evening, 25 of the guests attended a dinner party.

“People got dressed up, lot of booze, and a lot of the local fishermen ended up at the launching parties – free booze,” Rich recalls. “We had one fellow we built for. I said, ‘We’re not launching the boat without something to drink.’ So he went over to Gott’s Store and got a little bottle of that ginger ale, set it out and said, ‘There you are, fellas. Help yourself.’”

It seems like there was always something new to learn. On Lazy Lady, teak Formica was the test. The owners wanted it in the cockpit and down below.

“We dolled it all up and put it out in the sun and it just fell off,” Rich recalls. “Because in the hot sun, it got so hot that the glue let go with the sun shining on it. We put Formica down in the cabin and not a problem. But this real dark Formica, outdoors, with the sun beating right on it, we had to use a different kind of glue. We didn’t know that. We had to tear it all off and do it over again.”

Early clippings about boats being built by Clifton Rich and his son Roger’s shop, Rich and Grindle.

Chummy’s mother, Mildred Rich, was a foxy lady, if old photos are any indication. She is mentioned in clippings as hostess of many launch-day festivities. She also had the foresight to cut out the clippings and save them, along with all of the old photos and notes from her father-in-law’s day and from the shops of Bobby’s brothers, Roger and Ronald, in nearby Southwest Harbor.

One of the early launch photos shows Kada II in 1942, on the ways and ready to hit the water. Robert still had his brothers Ronald and Roger on-hand; burgees are strung up on the foredeck. Built for an insurance salesman whose father founded one of the oldest insurance agencies in Maine, the 53-foot yacht was promptly impressed into war service with the Coast Guard Auxiliary. This was probably the last boat the three brothers built before heading to work at the nearby Southwest Boat.

A couple of years later, when Bobby relaunched his business, it thrived. The variety of boats that came out of the shop is phenomenal. There were numerous seiners, gleaming luxury cruisers and motor sailers, lobsterboats, sportfishermen, tenders, towboats, research vessels, utility boats, police boats, and a pulling boat for the Hurricane Island Outward Bound program. Bobby Rich gained national renown for his “baby tugboat” design, which he called Little Toot. He contracted with the Plimoth Plantation living history museum in Massachusetts to build a 17^th century replica “shallop” of the style that traveled with the Mayflower.

Bob Rich built this beautifully crafted 26-foot yacht for a Boston doctor. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

Bobby Rich’s obituary recognized his prominence: “Across the island, many mourned the loss of boatbuilder and community leader Robert Rich…. He was described by one friend as an exceptionally kind and devoted man, as well as a first-rate craftsman. He will also be missed by a flock of faithful mallard ducks who came to his boat wharf every day to visit him and be fed.”

The oldest Bobby Rich boat still around is probably the 50-foot dragger Bajupa, built in the late 1940s for the Rackliff and Witham Lobster Co. in Rockland. A 2005 article in National Fisherman quotes the modern-day owner as saying the craft is “just perfect for what she does” – hauling lobsters and carrying supplies and construction materials to the offshore islands.

By 1950, launch days were drawing scores of attendees, including other notable boatbuilders. Cyrus Hamlin, a noted naval architect who had a home in Southwest Harbor, wrote that there was  “an admiring crowd of between 100 and 200 people,” including Sim Davis, Henry Hinckley, Lennox Sargent, Roger Rich and, of course, Bobby’s father, Clifton Rich, for the launching of the pogy and mackerel seiner Isabelle J. II. The yellowed clipping, dry almost to disintegration, reads, “Billy Tower Jr. of Ogunquit, young owner-skipper of the Isabelle J. II, was quick to give credit for the fine job of building to Bobby Rich….” Taped next to the clipping is a Christmas greeting card to Bobby and Mildred, from Billy and his wife Bunny, with a photo of the Isabelle J. II underway.

Lazy Lady. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

From 1950, Bobby had a key friend in George Davis, who had family roots in Maine and who was general manager, and later owner, of Plymouth Marine Railways (now Long Point Marine) on the waterfront in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Davis had his own boat built by the Rich yard, hooked Bobby up to build boats for the Massachusetts Law Enforcement Division, and turned commercial and sport fishermen onto the Rich brand. One newspaper reckoned that the sleek 47-foot offshore lobsterboat built for the Cape Lobster Company of Hyannis, Massachusetts, would “give some competition” to the Soviet fishing fleet that was plying the North Atlantic’s state waters at the time.  In Green Harbor, Massachusetts, sales took off.

“One time I was down there, I think it was 13 out of 21 full-time fishermen had boats that we built,” Chummy Rich recalls. “For a little place up here, that’s a pretty good record. Every time we built a new boat for somebody down there, all the other fellows would show up at the launching. Most of them were fishermen. Well, some of them got drunk before they even got there. They knew how to live and enjoy themselves.”

Massachusetts police officers apparently got a kick out of traveling to Maine to visit the yard.

Malcolm MacDuffie of Bernard and Waterville was proud of his new 30-foot cabin cruiser Morning Star, a William Garden design built by Bobby Rich, and wrote up an article about it for Maine Coast Fisherman. MacDuffie called it his “personality boat.”

“They were up here all the time, getting something done for them,” says Rich. “Those boats were a good excuse for them to come up and get drunk. And cops do drink. There was one fellow that wouldn’t touch a drop of alcohol if he was dying. But the fellow who came with him half the time was so drunk when he got here he couldn’t stand up.”

Plymouth Marine’s Davis fed Bobby’s predilection for unusual projects. In the 1950s, Davis won a contract to build a 33-foot replica of a workboat, called a shallop, that was brought in pieces by the Pilgrims in 1620. The shallop would sit by the side of the full-scale reproduction of the 1620 schooner Mayflower, which was under construction in England. The two boats would be a feature display at the Massachusetts living history museum called Plimouth Plantation, near historic Plymouth Rock.

Davis subcontracted the shallop job to Bobby. In turn, Bobby sent his brother Roger and Roger’s good friend, Francis “Mickey” Fahey, the general manager for Henry R. Hinckley and company, to do the work. A report from the day says the Maine company was selected because no Massachusetts craftsmen were skilled enough in the handling of wood tools to build it.

A clipping quotes Mildred Rich’s description of the project: “When they built it, everything had to be authentic. Everything had to be done with old-fashioned tools, nothing electric. His father and grandfather were boatbuilders and they had those tools and they and Bobby and all knew how to use them.”

A photo from Plymouth’s hometown newspaper shows the keel-laying ceremony for the shallop. A handsome Roger Rich wears a fedora at a jaunty angle and has a movie-star insouciance in his expression. “’The keel is plumb,’ signifies Francis Fahey,” says the copy.

Morning Star. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

Morning Star “has rather a ‘podauger’ look about her,” Bernard resident Malcolm MacDuffie writes about the 30-foot cabin cruiser that Bobby Rich built in the 1950s. Judging by the few internet references to be found, which lead to the better known “pod auger,” the term conjures “old-fashioned.” And that’s just what MacDuffie wanted. The “Monterey” style yacht, designed by William Garden of Seattle, was his “personality boat,” MacDuffie boasts in an article he wrote for Maine Coast Fishermen. It combined “a couple of good features of the old-time boats” – the lifting qualities of the Friendship sloop, the easy-driving ways of the old peapod stern, and the “four punt-loads of beach rock” that Bob Rich loaded her with for ballast.

The old photo of Morning Star is one stop on Helmke’s scroll through the decades. There are so many boats and so much variety that each one seems like a gem in the treasure trove.

Here’s the John Alden-designed luxury yacht Whitecap, built for Gordon and Robert White of Boston, owners of the vaunted nautical instrument firm of Wilfred O. White and Sons. Unsurprisingly, “the new boat is well equipped with navigation instruments,” a clipping says.

“Not as yachty as Lazy Lady, but still fancy enough to get into Yachting Magazine,” Helmke notes.

He goes on, “It’s quite a nice mix of boats, from working boats that were the pickup trucks of boats that went out and worked all day, to summer residents’ yachts.”

“South America is the furthest away we’ve sent our boats,” says Rich. “The furthest east we’ve sent them is Cranberry Island. You can’t send a boat further east than that.”

Most of the sales were word-of-mouth, summer residents telling friends, that kind of thing, Rich adds.

A 1985 clipping commemorates the launch of the excursion vessel Aunt Elsie for Acadia Boat Tours and Charters, down the ways at the original Bass Harbor Boat shop on the Bernard shore. Built by Chummy Rich, the boat is now called the Elizabeth T. and is still in use for excursions by Quietside Cruises.

One such incident was written up in a book published in 1984, Nine Boats and Nine Kids, by Jeanne St. Andre Merkel. Among the powerboats that Merkel and her husband owned over the years was one built by Bobby Rich. On their boating visits to Maine, they had noticed “how smart and responsive” the lobsterboats were, and they began to visit boatbuilders, whose shops, nevertheless, were hard to find.

“They are unwilling to advertise their locations, and their signs are often small, faded,  hand-lettered, and overgrown with weeds, or nailed to a tree or fence at a lonely intersection or driveway which always looks too private for a commercial establishment,” Merkel wrote.

The Merkels were looking for a shop in Brooklin, one day, and got lost. A man stopped to help, and advised, “Go see Bobby Rich down on Mount Desert Island…he’s the best boatbuilder and man you could hope to find!” The couple turned tail, headed for Bernard, and discovered “dear Bobby Rich,” who built them the downeast cruiser Lady Jeanne and ended up a close friend.

From 1952, there’s the Santa Maria, now named Framboise and living in Northeast Harbor.

“Everybody says it’s a Bunker and Ellis. It’s a Bobby Rich,” says Helmke. “Built the same time as Adequate” – an early Bunker and Ellis yacht – “very similar – the sheer, cabin proportions, the simplicity, two little portholes. It’s such a beautiful old boat.”

Mrs. Wilfred Bunker cracks open a bottle of champagne to christen her husband’s new vessel, the Double B, built by Chummy Rich in 1983 for Beal and Bunker’s mailboat and for charter service.

An August 1956 photo shows Bobby Rich building a 32-foot cabin cruiser for Dr. Edward Robinson of the University of Kansas, to be used in Connecticut waters. There’s the 30-foot Sirius, built in 1962 and a beautiful example of Down East lines and workmanship.  In 1964, Bobby built a yacht tender for E. Farnham Butler, owner of the Mount Desert Yacht Yard, who named it the C.M. Rich, after Bobby’s father, Clifton.

“Butler received some of his early boatbuilding training under Cliff Rich and the first towboat his yard ever had was built by Cliff, who still builds skiffs in a shop near his house in Bernard,” a clipping says.

There’s a postcard  of a handsome yacht, built along lobsterboat lines, zipping through the water with the Bass Harbor Lighthouse in the background. Named Tim Tam after the owner’s Triple Crown racehorse, the design inspired construction of Danielle, a boat that still fishes out of Bass Harbor.

“This is a beautiful running hull,” Helmke says of Danielle. “Two or three years ago, we took the platform out of it, and it looked brand-new inside. One nice thing about a fish boat is that most of them stay in the water most of their lives. They never dry up and shrink, so the hull is in excellent shape.”

Bluejacket, which is still in local waters, is “still as beautiful today as when it was launched,” Helmke says.

There are several shots, in the late 1960s, of the lobsterboat Belinda L. under construction for local fisherman George Lawson, and then being launched, his family in tow.

“We have a shed full of boats right now, doing the same thing for 50 years,” says Helmke. “It’s neat. And you see pictures with a bunch of people on the boat. George Lawson’s boat, his whole family is there. What a joyous occasion. It’s named for his daughter, and that must have been a fun day.”

TV star Garry Moore garnered much attention with his miniature tugboat, built by Bobby Rich.

Little Toot attracted a lot of attention locally and, eventually, nationwide, yielding a slew of media attention that tracked its progress.

Bobby designed the miniature tugboat in 1959, as a spare-time project. Eighteen feet long, with a seven-foot beam and drawing 34 inches, the tug was constructed of native oak with cedar plank decks and a marine plywood deckhouse, and powered by a 32-horsepower Gray Marine motor. Scooter tires served as bumpers. The boat could maneuver like a real tug.

“Complete, even to a black smokestack, Little Toot resembles a Disneyland creation with bright red super structure, green hull and white trim,” a clipping says.

A local youngster, David Lawson, “was a pretty constant ‘workman’ on the boat when hours away from his studies at Tremont Consolidated School permitted.” Young Lawson had the honor of christening the boat and taking it for a shakedown cruise.

Little Toot outside Bass Harbor Boat. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

Rich was using the boat for fun and for small-boat work, when the distinctive craft attracted the attention of a nearby resident. Garry Moore was a prominent television personality – host of I’ve Got a Secret and To Tell The Truth – who had a summer home in Seal Cove. A well-known yachtsman, Moore “had to have” Little Toot “for the amusement of family and friends.” Before he returned to New York, he made an offer that Rich “couldn’t turn down.”

At the wheel of Little Toot, Moore looks like a giant in a toy. He moved the tug to up-state New York in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the boat sailed to Ohio on the Allegheny and Ohio rivers. One year, Little Toot “helped” the big tugboats moor the Queen Mary II in New York Harbor. Moore had been invited to participate by the tugboat company working the harbor. The company tried unsuccessfully to buy Little Toot.

In the 1980s, Moore retired to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, and took Little Toot with him. The boat became a well-known sight there, until 1993, when Moore died and the boat was moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for an overhaul by a new owner.

In 2003, the Island Packet, a news site reporting on the doings of Hilton Head, had a report on “Little Toot’s journey.”

The little tug “brought big smiles to a lot of people on the island,” wrote reporter David Lauderdale.

For the article, islander Neele Barner remembered Moore’s “funny little boat.”

“He’d go out, and we’d hear the toot toot and pretty soon we’d see him,” said Barner. “It was a dear little boat.”
The article quotes Moore’s widow, Betsy Moore: “He just had fun with it. He would go in and out of little places. It was only big enough for two people, but it was adorable.”‘

Bobby Rich ended up building four or five of the distinctive boats. The producers of the television game show The Price Is Right bought one to give away as a prize. A $4,000 bid won the boat.

Rich built the 26-foot tug Benj. F. Jones for an Oyster Bay, New York, man, a wealthy heir in the steel industry who spent part of his fortune on a major collection of steam mechanisms, including a full-size, functioning railroad steam engine. The little tugboat was painted with the authentic colors and detailing from the gay nineties.

A 1968 clipping from The Post-Times in Florida says the owners of Bobby Rich’s 18-foot tug, Fran’s Folly, made sure that “real, although unnecessary, smoke puffs from the black and red stack.”

An eccentric couple commissioned a tug they called Fran’s Folly.

A 1968 clipping from The Post-Times in Florida says, “Once each year, for a period of three months, Mr. and Mrs. E.L Cummings, Capt. Randall Haskell, two cats, a vacuum cleaner-powered set of bagpipes, a chord organ, a motor cruiser and, of course, an 18-foot tugboat leave the wintry north for the warmth and waterways of the Palm Beaches.”

The Cummings used Fran’s Folly to ply the waters of Long Island Sound in the summer, then cruised south along the Intracoastal Waterway for the winter.

“For six winters, this unlikely combination of person, animals, and items have lived aboard the yacht Sea Song IV at the West Palm Beach Marina,” the article says. “In an adjacent slip, a miniature gray, black and white seagoing tug, trimmed in red, pulls gently at her spring lines.”

Frances Cumming always wanted a tugboat, the article says. Her husband, “with the judicious mixture of diesel and lube oils,” made sure that “real, although unnecessary, smoke puffs from the black and red stack.”

A mock scanner, in reality the windshield wiper mechanism from a car, was mounted atop the pilothouse, as are three canned-air horns.

“One of these blats out a low throaty Tooot!”

Nan and Art Kellam’s boat, the BLB, was built in 1949 at Bass Harbor Boat. Decades later, its condition was stabilized for display.

The oldest boat built by Clifton Rich, Chummy’s grandfather, that is still in existence is probably a 20-foot dory that served Nan and Art Kellam for nearly four decades, as the couple rowed supplies out to their isolated year-round  home on Placentia Island from mainland Bernard, two miles distant.

Every so often, Cliff and his wife visited the Kellams, who bought their 552-acre island in 1949 to live a life of seclusion and self-sufficiency.

According to the 2010 book “We Were an Island: The Maine Life of Art and Nan Kellam,” by Peter P. Blanchard III, the couple met in 1934, a year after graduating from college.

When they married, they moved to California, where Art was a World War II-era aeronautical engineer for the Lockheed Corporation.

But the Kellams had long contemplated a change in lifestyle. They embarked on “an extensive search before they could select, purchase, and finally set foot upon an island home,” Blanchard wrote. They liked Placentia, he wrote, because it was isolated, habitable and affordable; its terrain was varied, there was plenty of woods, a year-round stream traversed the island, and the beaches were accessible by small boat. They built a homestead, which they called Homewood, and lived without running water and electricity.

The Kellams regularly rowed their high-sided, flat-bottomed dory on round trips between Placentia Island and Bass Harbor in order to obtain supplies and the mail.

The name of the flat-bottomed boat, BLB, stands for “Bear loves Beum,” their nicknames for each other.

Wrote Blanchard, “At various times during its thirty-six years of service… the BLB carried out – in addition to its crew – furniture; a cook stove; a shower stall; and an array of material for Homewood’s construction, including windows, lumber, pinewood paneling for the interior, and shingles for the roof.”

Art died in 1985, and Nan in 2002. The couple’s buildings were left behind to rot.

“Down by the shore, the dory lay upended like a small whale, beached on an islet of wildflowers and grass,” Blanchard wrote.

In 1981, four years before Art’s death, the Kellams donated Placentia to the Maine Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, a national conservation organization; they retained a life estate. In recent years, the Tremont Historical Society acquired ownership of the dory from a member of the Kellam family. The society asked Chummy Rich if he would stabilize the boat for display at the society’s Country Store Museum in Bass Harbor.

After a decade upside down in the weeds, the top planks, and the top of the frames, transom and stem, had rotted out. The iron fastenings had disintegrated.

“When we got it here, it was just flopped open,” Helmke said at the time.

The Kellams’ name is seen on the stem.

Cliff built quite a few dories and punts in his day, and handmade the bronze and copper fittings.

“I think this might have been one of the bigger ones,” Rich said. “A dory at that time would typically have been used for seining herring. But a rowing dory would have been five or six feet shorter than this one.”

“This is from 1946. I’m amazed,” said Helmke. “I cut this back and look at the wood – in great shape. It’s like brand-new cedar, and the same on the oak frames, where the oak wasn’t on the ground. It’s pretty incredible.”

After sawing five inches off the top and judiciously replacing the frames, top planks, and part of the transom and stern, the vintage craft was ready for display.

An old photo in Rich’s album shows the boat from the back. One of the Kellams has written, “This is our happy memory of our very lovely and quiet boat ride – and it couldn’t have been any better. Thanks for so much!”

Helmke loved a boat named Spoiler.

He came to know the boat when he was a 13-year-old kid working at a boatyard in Nyack, New York.  Years later, with two young kids of his own, he bought it. At the time, he didn’t know who the builder was. But he loved old wooden boats, and this one certainly had the right feel, a traditional style, shapely and narrow, rugged.

Bobby Rich’s handwritten notes show that he built at least six boats in 1953 and eight in 1954. He started numbering his boats after World War II.

Always one to track a boat’s history, he found the original owner, Dwight Smith, who lived in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Smith worked for Plymouth Marine Railway at one time. The owner of Plymouth Marine, George Davis, was a good friend of Bobby Rich. Davis facilitated the sale of a lot of Rich boats in Massachusetts. Rich built Spoiler for Smith in 1959.

Helmke relates, “The original owner fondly remembers coming up here to check on the boat being built, and Bobby and his family taking him out to an island, and partying out there. He said it was a really good time. I think all the boat owners, the customers, enjoyed that friendship with Bobby and his family, and with Chummy.”

In the late 1960s, when Plymouth Marine went on the market, Smith sold Spoiler to raise capital to buy the yard.

“He said it broke his heart. He loved that boat,” Helmke recalls.

By the early 1970s, Spoiler had made its way to an owner in Nyack, where the Helmkes lived.

Chummy Rich’s brother Walter and nephew Wayne help get Andromeda in the water.

For income, at the time, Helmke did a little bit of everything – landscaping, utility work, car sales. But he always worked on boats. He was part of a group of friends who owned wooden boats. They tinkered and cruised around.

“Every year, we would go up to the Rondout Creek” – a tributary of the Hudson –  “in Kingston,” Helmke says. “Half a day run in the boat up the river, there was a classic boat meet up there. So that was something to strive for.”

By the time Helmke bought Spoiler, the hull was in pretty good shape, but it needed new decks and other repairs. Helmke had done restorations before, but this was getting in deep. He researched the boat’s provenance.

“I met the original owner and he told me the builder’s son was still around and had a shop,” he recalls. “I called Chummy and asked him a couple of questions. He remembered the boat. He was very helpful and open and willing to help with just a call. “

Tim Tam. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

Before meeting Rich, Helmke did quite a bit of research to hunt down many of Bobby’s boats, visiting the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, where Bobby had  donated his records. Rich was apparently pretty impressed by Helmke’s interest. The two men got along. In 2006, Helmke moved the family – and the boat, now named after his wife, Deb – to Bernard. Rich had a new employee. Today, the Helmke boat is a striking addition to the Bass Harbor fleet. Shapely and narrow, it’s painted an unusual green-gray that stands out among the predominant flag-blue and white hulls.

“I had a great time with him,” Helmke says. “And then he brought out this box of old photos, getting all crinkled up and deteriorated. And I said ‘Wow!’ I’ve always loved old stuff, whether it’s cars, boats, motorcycles.”

Wooden boats, and wooden boat owners, says Helmke, become family.

“Take my boat, for example. My family goes out and has fun. You imagine, 30 or 40 years ago, the same thing was happening in that same boat.  And the boat’s just chugging along doing what it’s supposed to do, smiles on everybody’s faces.”

A dory of Clifford Rich’s design was built to accompany Andromeda.

Andromeda was the most recent wooden boat to come out of Bass Harbor Boat. It was also the first wooden boat to be built there in 25 years. Completed in 2010, it was based on the design that produced Helmke’s boat and several others that are still in the area.

After his father died, Chummy Rich mainly focused on producing wood finishes for fiberglass boats, on storage and maintenance, and on his boat transportation business.

But he was pulled into building one more wooden boat now that he had Helmke to take the lead on the heavy lifting, a customer who was smitten by the traditional style of Helmke’s boat, and his long-time right-hand man, Bobby Kelley.

The customer, Bill Jenkins, lives not far from the yard, and has known Rich for many years. Jenkins is an inveterate boat owner, but had sold his Flye Point 32 a year previously. It was time to get back into boating. The 28-foot carvel-planked wooden cabin-cruiser, modestly equipped, was rugged and would provide a comfortable ride for an older couple.

Jacquelyn. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

“Chummy explained to me the benefits and enjoyment of a wooden hull,” Jenkins said one day at the shop, when the boat was under construction. Jenkins pitched in sometimes, but mostly spent time in the next bay over, building the wooden dory-tender, based on a Clifton Rich design, that would accompany Andromeda.

Local documentary-maker Jeff Dobbs and his crew filmed portions of Andromeda’s construction and conducted pertinent interviews for a legacy film that was sold locally and aired on the public broadcasting network. One of the sequences shows Rich, Helmke, and Kelley on their knees on the floor, lofting the hull. Bobby Rich’s drawings were incomplete, but Chummy’s expertise filled in the gaps.

“This boat is kind of one of my favorites,” Rich says on film. “It goes real easy through the water. It’s an easy-riding boat. It doesn’t thrash and bang. It doesn’t pound. It handles good. It’s good around the dock. For the size of it, it’s an all-around good, comfortable boat.”

The 1950s vintage yielded a graceful tumblehome and a long, narrow hull that was easily propelled with a small engine. The carvel-planked cedar-over-oak, bronze-fastened hull is shapely and rugged.

Belinda L. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

“Chummy did a lot of the guidance and Chummy was there all the time,” Helmke says. “Bobby Kelley had built a lot of boats with Chummy. With Chum, he’s built so many boats in his life, and seen so many, it’s just…” Helmke snaps his fingers to indicate automatic-pilot – “like that. Where we sort of have to stand back and think about it a little bit, he knows exactly where to go with it. That will be lost with guys like Chum.”

“Boatbuilding is not different from cooking or anything else,” says Rich. “Whether you’re a boatbuilder, house carpenter, or whatever, there’s always a whole bunch of little tricks you can do. They’re not necessarily shortcuts, but they make the whole thing go easier and smoother. I’ve been doing this for 55, 60 years. In that amount of time, you have to learn a lot of these tricks.”

Before there was such a thing as a boatbuilding school, young men would just go to a yard and start at the bottom rung.

“Your first job is probably sweeping floors,” Rich says. “But it’s not really scientific work. You sawed a board off and nailed it up. So if you were interested, it didn’t take a long time before you were, not a great boatbuilder, but an acceptable one. Most of Father’s crew were wintertime fellows. They went fishing in the summer, or house carpentering, or had caretaking jobs.”

Rich never split his time.

“No, all I wanted to do was build boats,” he says.

He’s still partial to training younger employees himself. He tried hiring a few young fellows out of boatbuilding school. A couple of them turned out real well.

“But the majority of them didn’t fit into my place. The teachers down there thought you ought to know more about mechanical drawing and electrical drawing and that  kind of stuff. But the fellow couldn’t sharpen a jackknife, couldn’t sharpen a plane. If you can’t mix up a batch of cookies, how are you going to make cookies?”

So how would Rich describe himself as a teacher?

“Probably as close to perfect as you can get,” he laughs.

The Bob Rich-built boat now owned by Rich and Deb Helmke. Photo courtesy Bass Harbor Boat

“A very good teacher,” Helmke chimes in.

“Now, he works for me, so how is he going to say anything different?” Rich laughs again.

As their teacher/student/business owner relationship evolves, the wooden boat conversation will always bring the two men together. In a sense, Helmke’s passion for the subject and its history casts a light on a skill and heritage that comes second-nature to Rich, but which to others seem extraordinary.

For Helmke, the similarities and distinctions in the regional style shared by this shop and other yards on the backside have a certain fascination.

“Whether it’s a boat Raymond Bunker was building, or Chummy’s father was building, or Merton and James Rich were building, they were all very similar boats,” Helmke says. “Mid-ship, Raymond’s had a little quicker turn of the bilge, where Bobby’s was a little rounder. Bobby’s would have a little more rolliness to it. But Bobby’s frames would last longer. Raymond’s would tend to crack and split because of the harder turn. Raymond’s tended to have a little more flat section back aft, which made them a little faster. Other than that, the hulls were almost identical.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising that, in a way, Helmke is the more old-fashioned of the two. Although Rich never wanted to work with fiberglass, he isn’t averse to modern things.

“We have a customer now, a Ronald Rich boat, that needs new windows,” Helmke says. “Chum says, ‘We’ll get them black trim.’ And I say, ‘No black trim. We have to get them white. He says, ‘Look at any new boat. The windows are outlined in black.’ I say, ‘But these aren’t new boats. These are old boats.’ He says, ‘Oh, you’re back in the dark ages.’ And I am. I love the old style and the old boats. My theory is that, people have an old wood boat; they want it looking old. If they wanted a modern boat with black-ringed windows, they’d own a new boat. From what I’ve seen, for the most part, the traditional way they built them, back 50, 60, 80 years ago, is still the best way, for a wood boat.”

When it comes to design, Rich’s outlook starts with function.

“There’s no such thing as a good design because it depends on what you’re doing with it,” Rich says. “A long, narrow boat goes easier through the water than a short, fat one. A canoe is long and narrow. A fishing boat is short and stubby. A canoe doesn’t make a good saltwater fishing boat. And a short, stubby boat doesn’t make a good freshwater canoe. It depends on what you’re going to use it for. A lobsterboat has to be one thing, a scallop boat something else. And it depends on what generation you’re in. The latest generation of fiberglass boats has very big, wide boats, with 800-horsepower engines in them. Back when I was building that same type of boat, we didn’t have 800-horsepower engines. We had to make the boat smaller and a different shape so that a 200-horsepower engine would push it. It just evolves.”

Rich has said that one of the advantages of wooden boats is their mutability. The designs can be changed to fit a customer’s needs and desires; they evolve from year to year. The age of fiberglass changed the boatbuilding profession. It also changed relationships, says Rich. Before fiberglass, communities had something of a more neighborly nature.

“One of the things that happened when fiberglass boats came into being, everybody that had a blue tarp to throw over a hull could be a boatbuilder,” Rich says. “You kind of lost the close relationship. Back in wooden boats, you almost had to be a boatbuilder, or have a lot of boatbuilding experience. With fiberglass boats, the hull’s all done, and the cabin is done, and the deck is done. All you had to do was stick an engine in it. Lots of times, that was done.  So you don’t have to really be a great boatbuilder. Consequently, a lot of them got finished in backyards by the fishermen or by a neighbor or a friend of his. When we were building wooden boats, basically, you were his man and he was your man. If he wanted repair work done, he came to you.”

Fiberglass boats are great, he allows. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to make the transition.

“If you were born and brought up with wooden boats, unless you were a young fellow, it was hard to make the switch,” he says. “You’ve got to want to do it. Especially to stay at it as long as we Riches have. When I was six years old, I was down on the beach with a board and a nail in it and a string on it, pulling it around and playing boat. I’ve always done it and always liked it and found a way to make – to eke out – a living, and have fun, too.”

Chummy Rich’s “waterbago” is the object of affectionate amusement around Bass Harbor. Here, Rich welcomes a crowd of friends and family to watch the local lobsterboat races.

Rich and Deb Helmke’s son fishes from a wooden skiff that once belonged to Rich’s grandfather.

Music impresario, and one of Maine’s premier drummers, Steve Peer, introduces Cynthia MacCleod and Jeff Matheson for a house concert at 430 Bayside.

“We’re not even a band,” says Mikol, who adds, “We’re free radicals.” Or maybe it’s, “We’re three radicals.”

The three are scheduled to perform shortly at the home of house concert impresario Steve Peer. Peer lives at 430 Bayside Road in Ellsworth, and that’s what his living-room-based concert venue is called, 430 Bayside. At the moment, the living room, kitchen, and hallway are filled to the gills with 40 or 50 faithful attendees, who receive word of the latest musical act on tap through Peer’s email list, social media pages, and uneven attempts to remember to contact local newspapers for a calendar listing.

A couple sits closely as they listen to Carmel Mikol, center, introduce a song.

Mikol and Davis hail from Cape Breton, and McMullen from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in honor of their arrival, Peer has hung a maple leaf flag from the banister of his front porch. The flag gets a pretty fair amount of use, since many of his performers are from the Maritime Provinces, where Celtic music thrives, thanks to an immigrant heritage from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Cape Breton Island, on the northeast end of Nova Scotia, is considered an especially rich center of the genre, which is principally associated with the harp, bagpipe and fiddle.

Darren McMullen and Rachel Davis play a fast-paced tune.

Peer’s is a modest, nondescript rural home with a vast lawn that was once part of a farm field. A walk up the gravel path leads past the garage, where Peer’s MG-B sports convertible, its soft-top retracted, is serving as stowage for his signature red-and-white-striped bass drum, a style inspired by rock legend Keith Moon. Another bass drum shell and a bodhran hang from the garage wall. A spare snare shell sits atop a stack of plastic bins loaded with 45 RPMs. Speaker stands lean up in one corner. Several neatly wrapped caches of biobricks are stacked in the corner, with a metal instrument case on top.

In the dim light, a man records Cynthia MacCleod in song. The recording ended up on YouTube by night’s end.

In the entryway, Bob McCormick amiably greets all comers. A local schoolteacher, he can be seen at various Celtic programs performing the fleet-footed, stiff-armed step-dance associated with the music, and made famous by the theatrical show Riverdance. McCormick helps Peer organize the house concerts. In the beginning, the schedule was spotty. Now the venue has resolved into a regular stop on the tours of many of their music buddies from Canada.

An attentive audience and a glass of wine at a recent 430 Bayside concert by Roots to the Future.

Peer is stationed in the kitchen. Sitting on the counter are goblets and bottles of red and white wine. Peer has soaked off the original labels and printed custom legends for the band – which in this configuration is calling itself Roots to the Future – to glue onto the bottles, along with the band photo. There’s a sheet cake the size of a flatbed, to celebrate Peer’s birthday. Canapés include a plateful of 430 Bayside Veggie Bars, made from crescent rolls, Miracle Whip, cream cheese, garlic powder, dill weed, and cut-up veggies such as broccoli, red peppers, onions, or whatever you like. Peer has obviously been asked for the recipe many times; copies are neatly stacked next to the plate.

Set lists, picks, and tuner are in place for Roots to the Future, but Rachel Davis’ flip-flops are also an important percussion instrument.

Set in place at the far end of the room are a mandolin, violin, guitar, keyboard, metal chairs, a stool, a chromatic tuner, multiple guitar picks, instrument lines, chord charts, and set lists. A stylistic illustration of a conga-player hangs on the wall over the set-up. A peek reveals that Set A includes tunes called Sprites and Good Luck, Over the Mountain, and Loch Loman. A couple of songs in Set B are Daughter of a Working Man and In My Bones. McMullen, who plays the greatest variety of instruments here, has annotated his list to help him remember which instrument to pick up for each tune – mandolin, bouzouki, tenor banjo, whistles, guitar, bass, bones.

“I don’t play fiddle,” says McMullen. “The reason why I have all these instruments is because if you don’t play fiddle at home, you have to play everything else.”

Before getting to work, Mikol, Davis, and McMullen are greeting people and enjoying a nip of wine.

Peer’s sporty MG – stowage, for the moment, for his drum kit.

McMullen nods his head toward the two women. “They’re the heart of the band.”

The three explain that they have their own individual bands, but they also like to get together with other musicians to perform and record. This particular group formation will last a week, and is just one of many creative endeavors each has pursued in recent months, among them tours in France, Ireland, England, Canada, and the  United States. Just the previous week, each was in various rehearsals for different projects. As soon as this tour is out of the way, Davis heads into the studio to start another album.

“It’s fun,” says one through the hubbub.

Musicians are set up at the far end of the living room, with the furnishings, except the couch, cleared away. Listeners can also climb to the second-floor open hallway (the “cheap seats,” as Peer says) to hear the show.

“It can be grueling. Yeah,” agrees another.

The touring life usually consists of travel, sitting around during the day in a strange town, and whooping it up in performance at night. Musicians have to find ways to entertain themselves when they’re not entertaining others.

“We make up funny voices,” says Mikol. “Juvenile, actually.”

Like an inverse bed-and-breakfast where the visitor receives a paycheck at the end at the end of a stay rather than a bill, a house concert lands talent at a host’s home, usually as part of a larger tour. The talent is fed and cared for as an honored visitor. At the appointed hour, the audience shows up. Hosts generally have to do some furniture rearranging to create a performance space. Peer doesn’t have much in the way of fancy furnishings, so he just shoves his television back and fills the floor with folding chairs for the audience. The talent performs, then stays overnight. At Peer’s house, they sometimes stay longer, jamming through the weekend, sightseeing the area.

Cape Breton fiddler Rachel Davis sips wine, Celtic musician Darren McMullen behind.

For touring musicians, Peer’s accommodations stand out.

“He has a great thing going, he really does,” says Mikol. “I play a lot of house concerts on my tours, and they all have their own personalities. This one is so open and fun, and it’s really a nice one to play. He just makes everyone feel relaxed. A lot of times, at house concerts, people don’t know how to act because they’re not in a formal concert setting, but they’re not just hanging around the living room, either, because it’s an event. Here, people know what to do.”

“It feels like it’s a normal thing here,” says McMullen.

“It feels natural,” says Davis.

The chatter quiets down as people take seats. The musicians make their way up front. McMullen tunes his mandolin. Davis tunes her violin.

“It’s a treat for us to be back,” says Mikol. “We’re going to be doing a bunch of original stuff, and some traditional stuff, and some stuff in the middle. So it’s going to be a fun night.”

Lights dim. Tiny rectangles of light appear above the heads of some audience members who deploy phone-cameras.
Mikol says that her work is representative of the new wave of Cape Breton artists, who integrate traditional music into their own styles.

There’s the song that Mikol and Davis wrote, about a man at the end of his life, looking back.  It’s a lively, syncopated tune based on a wedding day jig composed by Cape Breton fiddling icon Natalie MacMaster and her fiddler husband Donnell Leahy. Davis wears flip-flops, which seems odd on a cool northern evening. It turns out that she manipulates the flip-floppiness of her footwear to keep a lively beat, as she slaps her feet on the wooden floor.

Darren McMullen, right, and another member of Pogey jam after the show, in this photo taken by Peer, which he calls “the music never stops.” (Steve Peer photo)

There are high-spirit tunes about filling cups and journeying off and back and finding love. The audience claps and cheers. From his latest album, McMullen and Davis do a fast-paced jig called Guitar, Fiddle and a Mic in the Middle with a flip-flop beat. The tune arose as the recording was made, a simple arrangement with no studio tricks, just Davis zipping along on her fiddle, driven by McMullen’s guitar. The two rock back and forth as the tune surges along.

Mikol shifts to keyboard to render a plaintive tune, accompanied by mooning bass and minimal fiddle, with lyrics based on a story she read in the internet archives of Cape Breton Magazine. A doctor who lived on the west side of the island, in the 1930s, traveled mostly by horse and foot to take care of people. His young son got very sick while he was out helping another family, and passed away. The next winter, he got a call from someone who lived across the mountain, and whose son was sick. The doctor set out with a couple of horses and a couple of helpers, in the middle of February, in the middle of a big storm. He struggled to get over the mountain, and it got so bad that the horses couldn’t go further. So he and his helpers walked. Conditions got worse and the helpers dropped back. The doctor struggled the rest of the way by himself, on foot. It took about 30 hours to get across the mountain, but he made it and helped that child.

Concert-goers can dig into 430 Bayside Veggie Bars and other snacks.

Next on the set list is a song by McMullen. He stalls.

“Nothing makes Carmel’s voice sound quite so beautiful as listening to mine afterward,” he says. The audience chuckles.

Peer threads his way through the audience to hand McMullen a nerve-steeling, half-empty bottle of wine, left over from one of his previous visits.

Says McMullen, “If you ask any of the musicians from the Maritimes or anywhere in Canada that come down and do all these shows around Maine and New Hampshire, they will tell you that the coolest guy we know in the United States…” He indicates Peer. The crowd breaks out in cheers.

“The House That Rock Built” is the legend that Peer has adopted for his venue. In his initial years as an impresario, he went the usual route and rented a larger theater. But the scale of production involved to fill hundreds of seats proved to be time-consuming and expensive. So he lent his house to the vision.

For these bottles of red and white wine, Peer soaked off the original labels and made new ones for Pogey’s concert. (Steve Peer photo)

Networked into a vast array of musicians, Peer had only to issue invitations. His venue has become a crossroad for musicians traveling through Maine between Canada and the U.S. The series features Celtic rock, folk rock/roots, and indie music. Concerts are generally scheduled for Monday evenings; the series runs through the year.

Local acts have included the acoustic/folk/rock group Stiff Whisker and the Driftwood Kids, “the trippy and most brave folk band in America, hands down!” and regional musicians Bobbi Lane, “the best folk singer in these parts,” and Katie Paquin, Trisha Mason, and Heather Hibbard.

Actually, Peer doesn’t like the word “local.”

“I avoid the word ‘local;’ it sounds like it’s nowhere,” he says. “’Regional’ is better. Did you ever call the Beatles a local band from Liverpool? Not really.”

Just a few of the acts from Canada, over the past couple of years, include the Juno award-winning, Newfoundland roots and contemporary Ennis Sisters, “the sweetest voices in all of Canada;” “monster” Cape Breton and Newfoundland players Dwayne Côté and Duane Andrews; dynamic emerging Celtic duo Cassie and Maggie MacDonald; and “tiny dynamo” Cynthia MacLeod, the Prince Edward Island fiddling sensation.

“This just in!!!” facebook friends learned of the arrival of Canada “fiddling sensation” Richard Wood with Gordon Belsher. “This will be an amazing ‘sold out’ show. When the show sells out, we will phone you. Call now. We do not want to make that phone call to you insiders on FB!”
Jenn Rawling, “a tree-climbing, fire-watching, pottery-making songstress” and “roving apothecary, gardener, seamstress, chef, bicyclist and painter extraordinaire” from Oregon, is announced on facebook, along with her partner and bandmate, Basho Parks, whose 26 years of string-playing spans symphonies, punk bands, bluegrass barn storms, roma-gypsy trios, organic electronica chamber music, and classic country.

Just a few of the percussion and other instruments stashed everywhere in Peer’s house, available for anyone to use.

And “now for a wild and woolie week of fantastic music….Put on your party hats folks and come on out…” is the communiqué on Ian Foster of Newfoundland, who swings through on his all-Maine tour of Celtic concerts from Calais to Farmington.

Hosting is fun, says Peer.

“They’ll say stuff like, ‘We could go play at an Irish festival in Kansas City with 10,000 people, but we would rather be here. We enjoy Steve, we get to ride around in his MG, we beat on his drumset, and stay out late in Bar Harbor.  So you hear that and it’s, obviously, encouraging. So here, they’re showing up in my house, in my kitchen, entertaining me along with 40 other people. It’s like, ‘Gee, it’s a Monday night where I might be sitting here watching Two and a Half Men or something on television. And instead, I’ve got these guys in the house, 40 people laughing and having a great time.’ You know, you can’t go wrong.”

The endeavor suits Peer’s personality. He likes nothing better than to hang out with a bunch of musicians, try some new riffs, bang on his drums, crack open a six-pack, invite in some friends, get people laughing, and share a few tunes.

A poster advertising one of Peer’s earlier bands, more than 20 years ago.

In the hallway, a hand-lettered poster with a couple of alien blob creatures, a row of spiraly suns, and a bright-orange Saturn advertises one of his own gigs back in 1990 –  “Live at the Grant Theatre” with “Chicken Scratch Stumbling Way Chidy Ho and guests” for $5, with $1 of every ticket going to the local chapter of Amnesty International. Half a shelf of leftover CDs, called Shards, feature remastered songs from Peer’s early punk “no wave” band, TV Toy.  Lined up neatly are vinyl albums of rock standards through the ages – Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, The Clash, et cetera., along with a pocket reference guide to more than 100 Beatles songs, a Sopranos trivia game for players age 18 and up, a box containing cymbal stand hardware, a half-dozen old tape reels, and a book on the life and times of Alice Cooper. Prominently displayed elsewhere, by itself, is a three-CD, one-DVD set of 81 Nirvana tracks, including 68 previously unreleased recordings, never-before seen footage, and a 60-page, full-color booklet. There is a biography of  Courtney Love: Queen of Noise, Abby Hoffman’s Woodstock Nation, a record guide from Rolling Stone magazine, and two volumes about Jack the Ripper.

Peer got started in music at the age of 5, growing up in Dover, New Jersey.

Copies of the compilation disk made from Peer’s early TV Toy days.

“My dad dragged me up this driveway to his jazz drumming buddy that he worked with,” he recalls. “I was trying to grab onto this stone wall and I was crying. I was looking for some rock to grab onto and not go. My dad made me do it, and made me and made me. That’s what I tell the parents of my students, you know, just put him in the car and bring him down here.”

By the time he was 10, he started drumming as a kid novelty act in a big band that was run by his drum teacher’s father. He and some other kids got together and started their own band, The Roustabouts, to play old jazz standards and stuff by the Tijuana Brass.

Peer went on to become a presence on the New Jersey club scene. He formed and led garage bands and fusion-prog groups, and was greatly influenced by “glam rock” bands emerging from Los Angeles, New York and London. The original music of his band TV Toy was at the forefront of the new wave/punk movement and landed at top clubs such as CBGB and Max’s Kansas City in the heart of Manhattan. He hung out with members of top bands such as Talking Heads, The Fleshtones, and The Ramones, drummed for Chuck Berry and shared the stage with the likes of John Cale, Southside Johnny, Blackfoot and Bill Bruford. All the while, the young man squeezed in the usual four years at college, on track to a degree in communication arts and filmmaking.
One time, when he was walking along the boardwalk in Asbury Park , New Jersey, he found out that the English progressive rock band Be-Bop Deluxe was playing nearby.

Guest beds for traveling musicians.

“They had guitar player named Bill Nelson who was a guitar god in England, and I thought, ‘What if Bill Nelson heard us? He’d probably produce us and make us famous.’ So I gave him a cassette and I got a call a month later from his management company for me to come in. They loved the band, but Bill was breaking up Be-Bop Deluxe and starting a new band called Red Noise” – a “synth-pop new wave” band – “and wondered if I would be interested in drumming. So now I was in a quandary. Well, of course, I went to England and gave it a whirl. After about a year, I came back to the states, kind of broke but sort of connected. TV Toy got back on track, but wasn’t making enough money, getting a little desperate.”

He decided it was time for a more conventional day job. Over the next four years, he taught at a school for emotionally disturbed children. On the side, he continued to produce bands and promote shows.

Then, fed up with rock and roll and the city, he sold every drum he owned and moved with his wife to Lubec, a town he knew as a sleepy little place from the vacations his parents took when he was a kid.  No sooner did he arrive – he likes to say it was all of 15 minutes, but it was probably a couple of days – than there was a knock on the door. Two guys were looking for the drummer they heard had just rolled into town.

“They said, ‘We hear you play drums. We got a country band; do you want to play?’” Peer recalls. “They were really great. They had a band called Custom Made Country – not a very imaginative name, but they could play and sing better than most anyone I had ever heard.”

Cynthia MacCleod and Jeff Matheson. (Steve Peer photo)

It was a strange but cool collaboration. Peer learned Johnny Cash and Tammy Wynette and taught his new buddies all about The Ramones and The Smiths.

“We were a cow punk band,” he says. “Worlds collided, but it was a hot act that played every weekend through out Downeast Maine and Maritime Canada.”

Peer and his wife moved to Ellsworth, to be in a bit more of a suburban area, when they had their first child.

In 1989, he became the director of special education for School Union 93.

“When I write my book, I think I’ll have in my first chapter that being a director of special education is probably the closest thing to playing rock and roll in the normal world, because it’s just so wild,” he says. “I think they go together really well. That wild end of education really ties in nicely to rock and roll, lots of improvisation, lots of problem-solving, lots of drama.”

Peer’s parquet-floored ground floor is pretty sparsely furnished, in favor of instruments and band rehearsals.

Looking to create and promote different, or at least more, music, Peer has kept a number of projects going. Among them was the label he started in 1993, Reversing Recordings, which has featured many Maine artists.

And there were plenty of sophisticated musicians who settled in the local area – folks happy to have a first-rate drummer. Now that Peer’s two daughters are grown, he plays with five bands. Most recently, he and some buddies started up the rockabilly The Crown Vics. There’s the blues band The Shambles and the “dance all night” northern soul band The Tumblers. The Larks continue to keep him the most busy with their quirky brand of “country western new wave disco punk.” His buddy, Doug Hoyt from Bangor, called and asked Peer if he was available to write and play original stuff. Peer didn’t hesitate, and signed on with Hoyt and bass player Mark McCall to become Spilled Milk.
“First and foremost, I’m a drummer,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’m going to bust my butt and play drums a lot.’ So Frank [Schwartz of The Shambles, The Tumblers, Crown Vics, and whatever all else – also a multi-band person] and I got involved with his blues band. Their drummer had moved on. Then Frank and I got talking. He’s as crazy as I am; we talk over each other constantly. We said, ‘I always wanted to have a soul band.’ We said, ‘If we could do something like that, that would be fun.’ He goes, ‘I could do that. That’s close enough to blues.’ And I was still a little antsy; I’m kind of a sucker for original material. I always think I’m going to write a great soundtrack for the next James Bond movie.”

Peer gets modest. “I’m just the drummer. You couldn’t be a guitar player in four bands. That would be difficult. There’s a lot of chords and keys and notes. But drums are pretty simple.”

The house concert concept is his antidote to growing up. And he’s been having the time of his life.
“On Monday night? Having this much fun? It just isn’t right, you know?” Peer jokes.
He stops to give the matter some sober thought.
“Sometimes it’s work.” He pauses to think again. “When is it work?” He cheerfully gives up. “No, I guess it isn’t.”

His wife, Tomoko, is a former nurse-midwife, psychologist, and college instructor. She now manages her husband’s career.

Masanobu and Tomoko Ikemiya snip ripe elderberries at Peace Farm.

Both are ardent about bringing a message of peace, intercultural harmony, and sustainable living to the world. They have developed a largely off-the-grid lifestyle and eat mainly a diet of raw and live food, with the idea of having as little impact on the earth as possible. They’ve documented the evolution of their homestead in a slideshow that they present on their concert tours. Through their concerts, they have also become ambassadors for various charitable causes, from Maine’s Hospice of Hancock County to Japan’s survivors of the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster.

Masanobu and Tomoko are possibly the most warmly hospitable people on the planet.

In 2004, the couple moved permanently from New York City to Bar Harbor to create an off-the-grid homestead for themselves. Carved from their 3.5 acres of hillside woods and built up from granite ledge, the house and extensive gardens, which they call Peace Farm, is an evolving model for how to live comfortable, globally connected lives with as little impact as possible on the environment.

The dirt road to their house winds up a densely wooded hill, a couple of hairpin turns along the way, a small pond on the right, a fork on the left. By email, Tomoko cautions, “Go slowly, 15 or 20 miles per hour.”  The way seems long because it keeps bumping and bumping along. Eventually, after a sharp 90-degree turn, there’s a tree with an oval sign that says “Peace Farm.” The sign is framed in wrought-iron and decorated with colorful paintings of fruits and flowers.

A short driveway leads through the woods and opens up to a compound that includes a multi-story home, additional fixed and mobile structures, and a great hoopla of tiered gardens taking up almost every inch of cleared land and bursting with life.

A ring of the brass bell beside the main door brings the couple outside in a whirl of energy.

Tomoko Ikemiya, flanked by lime trees, heads off to harvest vegetables at Peace Farm.

“Well, here we are! This is it!” Masanobu declares in greeting and immediately starts on a tour of the gardens. Tomoko follows along, then doubles back to get straw hats to protect herself and her husband from the late-summer sun.

Both are slender and high-energy, and their faces are wreathed in smiles. Masanobu is a take-charge kind of guy, dominating the narrative as Tomoko goes off with a basket to pick vegetables and herbs. Vibrantly healthy and, really, kind of bouncy, he is more than happy to show off the various low-maintenance technologies that make Peace Farm a self-sustaining home, where they grow almost all of their own food, live almost completely off the grid, and maintain a life of harmony with the environment.

The house is situated at the top of the slope, overlooking what appears, on initial impression, to be fairly chaotic gardens built below in tiers, on the south and east sides. The guiding principle for creating the gardens is an environmental design approach called permaculture, a type of organic, localized, and do-no-harm culture that seeks to ensure that the human-built environment works in concert with natural systems.

Part of the permaculture process means keeping everything as maintenance-free as possible, Masanobu says. For example, they don’t till the soil. Plants come up by themselves, and they pick as needed. Soil is alive, he says, and tilling destroys the ecosystem. Although they might take a hand-scythe to keep the weeds a bit under control, weeds are considered part of the ecosystem and their root systems help rainwater seep into the soil.

“Some people say, ‘You must be working all day long,’” he says. “And we say, ‘No, we don’t.’ Let nature do the work. The plants know better than we do how to grow.”

But maybe the construction plan here was “kind of haphazard,” Masanobu says. “I wanted to just start where we could,” he says. “We tried to go a step at a time. At the beginning, there was nothing, so I gradually kept building, gathering the leaves from the forest, building the topsoil, getting seaweed from the ocean, gradually developing. It’s a slow process.”

The gardens are irrigated by rainwater collected off the roofs of the house and the storehouse, using a system of gutters and PVC pipes that lead to interconnected cisterns. Although they use well water for drinking, the rainwater has proved useful for other purposes, too, such as the household washing.

“I’d been hearing how we’re using up underground aquifers,” he says. “It’s like putting a straw in an orange and keep sucking. Now, everyone pokes straws into the aquifers.”

The extensive growing patches are defined by walking paths, stone walls, and deer- and bird-deterrent fencing. Two Adirondack chairs are set by a small, concrete-walled, vinyl-lined pond, full of lotus flowers and bullfrogs, a lovely meditative spot. Another, larger pit dug into the ground elsewhere, and lined with black vinyl, is almost ready to take runoff from the adjacent hillside, an important part of permaculture. A dense, semi-circular stick structure indicates where they plan to try out the German practice of hugelkultur, a way to make raised beds by using old twigs and branches.

Produce abounds. Young Japanese plum trees are yielding fruit.  Young walnut, hazelnut, and American chestnuts prosper, but are not yet yielding. Juicy, sweet grapes grow on a makeshift arbor made from rebar curved into half-hoops and tied with wire. Winter-hardy northern kiwi twine their way along ropes strung between two-by-fours screwed to the house posts. A small lime tree grows in a large planting pot, yielding fruit that will be orange when ripe.

Masanobu plucks an unripe green lime and pops it into his mouth.

“Sometimes I eat the whole thing,” he says. His face squinches. “Mm. Sour.”

Masanobu charges down another garden path and gets to talking about a Japanese scientist who studies the sensitivity of water to words or feelings.

“Nobody believes it, but he proved it,” he says. “He has taken photos of the water molecules and, actually, words change the molecules. So if you say really bad words such as, ‘I hate you!’ water molecules get all broken up. ‘I love you’ and all these wonderful words, it becomes beautiful crystals, like snowflakes.”

There are the usual suspects found in a Maine garden – carrots, peppers, beets, squash.

A fat kabocha.

Then there are goodies such as pawpaw, white raspberries, kabocha, daikon, and stinging nettle. Pawpaw is mostly grown in southern states and tastes like banana. The versatile daikon can be used raw, baked, boiled, and pickled. Stinging nettle is rich in iron and makes a good tea; its leaf, slapped against the skin, helps relieve joint problems. Dark-green and fat, kabocha is like a Japanese pumpkin. It keeps really well; in fact they still have one left over the from the 2011 harvest.

“It keeps us going. There are so many ways to cook it,” Masanobu says.

He picks a leaf of red shiso, an herb used mainly for coloring pickled plum, or umeboshi. This leaf, or any edible leaf, really, can also be used to wrap sushi, he says. It has a lemony pepper flavor.

A cement-built storehouse is one of the recent additions to the assemblage. Loosely tied strands of garlic hang under its rafters. Inside, Masanobu pokes through a bin of rich brown compost, uncovering “thousands of pets,” as he says of the wriggly earthworms. A cistern collects a nutrient-rich liquid extract piped from the pile.

“Look, this is compost tea,” he says. “We keep it alive, activated, bubbling with energy. When you give this to the plant, they just go wild because it’s alive energy.”

The root cellar, based on a design he learned about at the Common Ground Country Fair, consists of cement chambers lined with foam insulation. A PVC pipe vents warm air through the ceiling; another pipe lets cool air in from the outside. Natural convection cools the whole system quickly.

Shelves are full of Tomoko’s canned currants, kimchi, sauerkraut, and Japanese pickles.

“When you do raw pickling, like sauerkraut or kimchi, it’s alive, you know,” he continues. “Everything in the whole universe is alive.”

“Everything is alive” is one of Masanobu’s favorite things to say. So are variants, such as “bubbling with energy” and “harmony with the life force.”  He talks about everyone and everything as he would a particularly delightful child, someone to care for and cherish. In his world view, and Tomoko’s, everything in the universe is connected. He is lucky and grateful, he frequently says, to have experienced life’s fortunes. And they both want to help others who are less lucky.

The love of peace that he and Tomoko share, and their mutual passion for helping others and for taking care of the earth, is rooted in the horrors of war that gripped their families during their youth.

Before the Second World War, Masanobu’s father, Masayuki, had been working toward his PhD in biochemistry. When the United States launched its reprisal against Japan, Masayuki was drafted into the military and forced to train as a kamikaze pilot. He never flew his mission. The U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ended the war.

In a Bangor Daily News article in 2010, Ikemiya recounted his grandmother’s experience toward the end of the war. She was living in Okinawa, which “became a really horrible battleground and every night B-29s would come over and bomb the villages. And my grandmother used to just stay in the basement being bombed.

“The horror of it, everything burning, bombed, and at one point all the islanders … decided at least kids should be sent to the mainland [of] Japan to escape the danger and the American soldiers landing. So they decided to put all the kids in one boat to escape to the mainland.”

One of those children was Masanobu’s uncle, who was 11.

A section of the garden is set aside for the beginnings of a “hugelkultur” structure.

“And I think there were 1,800 kids, all their primary school kids … and it was torpedoed by an American submarine. All the kids died, and my grandmother never forgave herself for letting my uncle go.”

Masanobu’s father became a Christian missionary and went to Manchuria, in northern China, where he met and married Masanobu’s mother, Tsuneko,

also a Christian missionary from Japan. Unfortunately, the end of World War II meant the escalation of China’s long-running internal hostilities between the Chinese Nationalist Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communist Party of China, led by Mao Tse Tung. By 1946, when Masanobu was born, the family found itself trapped by a full-scale civil war. As Japanese nationals and Christians, they were in peril.

“It was a tragic, chaotic situation. If they find out that you are Japanese, you get killed. If they find out you are Christian, that’s even worse. So finally we decided to leave, as refugees.”

Masayuki and Tsuneko, with a toddler and a baby, began a horrendous winter trek back to the coast, so they could get a boat to Japan.

“Below zero, freezing weather, whatever they can carry. My mother and father were on foot in the snow and sleet. I don’t know how they did it.”

Occasionally, they were able to sneak onto a train.

“One story was that, because it was completely full, the only place my mother could stand was in front of the steam engine. When it was moving, she is next to the hot steam, and in the front is Siberia, below zero, snow blowing in her face. And she was carrying me. She couldn’t move. She was completely frozen. They get to the next station. She thought I was dead for sure. The train stopped and she ran as fast as possible. They were coming to investigate the whole place. My father was hiding in a coal bin. They hid somewhere off to the side of the railroad, and escaped.”

Peace Farm’s extensive gardens might seem a bit chaotic on first impression.

Somehow, the family got back to Japan. Masayuki finished his PhD in biochemistry at Kyoto University, then became a professor. Tsuneko became a professor of linguistics. For all of Japan, it took a long time to recover from the trauma of war, the atomic bombs, and the U.S. occupation.

“It was chaos, you know. Japan was a mess,” he says. “It wasn’t easy. They had a very difficult time. But eventually, things got better and better, and they were very happy toward the end.”

In 1962, Masayuki received an invitation to teach from Kansas State University. Masanobu attended high school in Manhattan, Kansas, and found that he loved his new home, out in “the middle of the Kansas corn fields.”

In his senior year, his advisor recommended that he go into science.

“I was very good with math and science. I had straight A’s. I was top 2 percentile in the whole nation in science. But I was very bad with other things, such as English and history. My English wasn’t so great. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe.’”

He enrolled at Kansas State to study nuclear physics.

A bubbling brew of compost tea is full of nutrients for the garden.

“This was Cold War time. The United States was trying to beat the Russians in the nuclear arms race. They were trying to cultivate Einstein. I remember standing on campus – they had a mini-nuclear plant for students to study, which was just ridiculous – wearing all these protective garments. They were explaining how dangerous everything is. In order to produce uranium for nuclear fusion, it had to be refined many times, and you have to hire all these people who are getting all this radiation already, and as you refine it they get more radiation. Those were the days when people really weren’t paying attention. They wanted uranium quick, just to beat the Russians. Now, of course, years later, they found out the people who were digging and doing the processing had radiation sickness and cancer.”

At age 16, Masanobu was a young college student, and he wanted out of the program.

“I said, ‘I don’t want to get into this. They were explaining and I said, ‘What am I doing here?’ This was the time of the Beatles and the Vietnam War and the Kennedy assassination, and President Johnson took over and escalated the war like crazy, and young people were revolting against it, and the Beatles were saying, ‘Make love, not war.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to create another nuclear bomb.’”

Masanobu had always enjoyed playing piano. In Kyoto, he had started taking lessons at age 6, but he had never thought about it professionally. At Kansas State, a music professor encouraged him to get out of physics and into music. He recommended Masanobu for Oberlin Conservatory, in Ohio.

“I went and auditioned, and they gave me a full scholarship on the spot,” he says. “So I said, ‘Well, I guess that’s what I want to do.’ But most students there were super-stars, they were child prodigies, they were trained ever since they were young, training in music theory, ear training, all kinds of things. I was just bottom of the pit. I didn’t know anything.”

He studied like crazy, the first student rehearsing early each morning, and the last to leave. By the time he graduated, he was chosen to be the guest soloist with the Oberlin Orchestra, a coveted spot for the conservatory’s top student, decided by the faculty. He played Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Masanobu was then given a full scholarship to Indiana University in Bloomington, where he earned a master’s degree with distinction in 1972.

That year, he married his first wife, Cheryl, decided to put music on hold, and instead pursued an interest in Zen Buddhism. He returned for a short time to Kyoto to find a Zen master.

A lotus pond, full of bullfrogs, provides a meditative spot.

“Most Zen training is really severe, so they don’t accept some little college kid coming in,” he says. “They are professional people who are committed. But I found a wonderful Zen master who was open to accepting young people and I started studying meditation with him. And he told me there is a zendo monastery in the United States, and he told me about the place in Surry, Maine.”

The place in Surry was Moonspring Hermitage (now called Morgan Bay Zendo), founded by Walter Nowick in the late 1960s. Nowick is a Julliard-trained pianist, veteran of World War II, and disciple of Zen Buddhism, which he studied in Japan for 16 years. As the first Westerner to have gone to Japan and completed the traditional Zen practice on their terms, Nowick taught Rinzai Zen in Surry until 1985. In the mid-eighties, Nowick also founded the Surry Opera Company, an amateur group that worked to strengthen ties with the Soviet Union at a personal level. The group went to the USSR a number of times and received national attention in its heyday.

When he was still a student at Oberlin, Masanobu became one of Nowick’s first disciples. Throughout his time at Oberlin and Indiana University, he traveled to Surry during his school breaks. After graduating with his master’s degree in 1972, Masanobu and Cheryl moved to Surry, where they built a house and started homesteading in conjunction with the Zen Buddhist community. They stayed at the monastery for 10 years. For much of that time, Masanobu didn’t touch piano.

That all changed one day, with the arrival at the zendo of another musician, Claude Monteux. Claude, a world-class flutist and conductor, is the son of Pierre Monteux, a prominent conductor who founded a school for conductors and orchestral musicians in the nearby town of Hancock.

Claude and Masanobu got into conversations during breaks in the meditation.

Part of the Peace Farm rainwater collection system.

“He said, ‘How about you, Masanobu? Before you came, were you something?’ I said, ‘Well, I studied piano and I was a pianist, but I haven’t touched piano for many years. So I don’t know, I’m just a monk here.’ And he said, ‘Well, we should get together and do something.’ And I said, ‘No, I can’t. I probably forget how to read music.’ But he said, ‘Oh, let’s do it.’ And he drove me to his place in Hancock. He put this music to me and I said, ‘What is this?’ I hadn’t read music for a long time. Then, all of a sudden, I noticed this incredibly beautiful music flowing. I looked up, and there he was playing. I said, ‘This angelic music, so beautiful, what is this?’ And I looked and my fingers are moving. I was playing! What!? I was completely intoxicated with this great music, and I was reading and playing without being aware of it. When I was finished, it was so beautiful that I just couldn’t say a word. Claude said, ‘Masanobu, you are a wonderful player. Let’s do more.’ I said, ‘Yes, yes, let’s do more!’ We started plowing through all the great literature. I still remember the Bach Flute Sonata in B minor. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful work. I was just in heaven and, after we finished, I just couldn’t sleep. With his encouragement I decided to go back to music. And he started taking me on tour as an accompaniment. He took me to Canada and other places, and gradually he introduced me to different people and my career slowly started. I started practicing like crazy.

From the quiet solitude of a monastery, Ikemiya found himself in the limelight, traveling all over the world.

Tomoko cans and stores kimchi and pickles in storehouse.

“It was quite a different life, because being at the monastery, you are completely excluded,” he says. “You meditate all day. It’s quite similar to a Christian monastery. You get up at 3 o’clock in the morning. You have all the schedules, the chanting. It’s a whole day. You really stay put. Basically you journey inside, not go out. You try to find peace within yourself and try to be in touch with your inner divine light, or whatever you want to call it. Try to be in tune with yourself. Try to clean out ego, hatred, anger, all the junk you have in yourself. That’s part of meditation.”

In 1978, Masanobu helped to found the Blue Hill Chamber Music Winter Series, which is now in its fourth decade and “is intended to help the community thrive and celebrate despite the hardship of a Maine winter,” says the website of the Blue Hill Concert Association, which today oversees the series.

Tomoko and Masanobu Ikemiya, in ragtime-era costume, take a bow at the end of Ikemiya’s “Classics to Ragtime” concert on a recent Saturday afternoon.

Ikemiya founded the Arcady Music Festival in 1980. The summer festival’s first concerts were held in Blue Hill. It quickly grew in popularity. Making up the festival’s Maine Quartet were Ikemiya and Monteux, along with violinist Werner Torkanowsky and cellist George Sopkin. Sopkin was a founding member of the Fine Arts Quartet, among his many illustrious activities; Torkanowky performed with and conducted many of the world’s major orchestras.
“We had these incredible, high-level musicians, just sparkle-divine, landed in the same place here in Maine,” says Ikemiya. “They became the core of the Arcady Music Festival. Because of such an incredible high level of musicianship, people started to come to hear us.”

Such connections helped to attract other first-rate musicians from across the nation and, eventually, the world, to perform in Maine. More than 50 concerts each summer drew packed houses and invitations to broadcast on television and radio. Ikemiya brought programs into local schools, as part of the festival’s mission to broaden cultural diversity.

“Many of the kids weren’t exposed to classical music, so we started bringing all this chamber music, and explaining this music. The kids were so open, and they loved it. I was so surprised. At the beginning I thought it would be difficult. But no, they were quiet. When you provide them with really high-quality music, they don’t want to miss it. They are listening and absorbing.”

While the summer festival was rising, so was Ikemiya’s renown. He and Cheryl moved to New York City in the early 1980s, where he found a wonderful manager who believed in his talent and wanted to promote him for orchestra and solo concerts.

Bar Harbor pianist Masanobu Ikemiya cuts a dignified figure as he plays Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring at a Saturday afternoon concert in Bucksport.

“So without me planning, just all of a sudden I was a crazy rising star: ‘Where did that Japanese guy come from?’” he says.

His musical interests took a curious tangent in the 1980s. It began when a friend of his, a gospel singer, asked him to volunteer at a homeless shelter started by Mother Teresa in Harlem, N.Y. Ikemiya didn’t have experience with troubled kids, and he didn’t know how he could be helpful, but he had been giving piano lessons to kids, so he gave it a shot. There was a piano at the shelter, and he tried loosening up the youths by playing some classical music.

“The kids just laughed at me. ‘Oh, I don’t want to sit and listen to this junk,’” he recalls.

But he persisted.

“Gradually, I’m finding out all the trouble they have. The father is a drug addict, the mother is alcoholic, they don’t want to go home, the house is a mess, kids are always fighting in the streets, a brother got shot in the head. And I’m thinking, Oh my gosh, the kids, the problems they have.”

One day, an old man walked into the place, sat down at the piano, and started pounding out some joyful, rhythmic tunes. The children loved it. Masanobu had never heard anything like it before.

An 1875 Steinway square grand piano.

“He just started pounding like a mad man, and all the kids went next to him. ‘Oh, wow, this is fun!’ They started clapping hands, ‘Yay yay, wow wow!’ I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, what is this music?’ They said, ‘Man, you don’t know this? This is ragtime, man. You’re missing something, man.’ I said, ‘Gosh, this is so good. Can you help me? I want to learn this stuff.’ ‘Oh, it’s so easy.’  He helped me out a little bit, teaching me a few things here and there. And gradually I got into it more and more.”

The more Ikemiya learned, the more the kids took to him.

“Gradually, I was able to work with the kids, because I got connected with them through ragtime,” he says. “Somehow the wall came down.”

Ikemiya took to the form with his usual exuberance. He founded the New York Ragtime Orchestra, which modeled itself after the “typical ‘theater orchestra’ which was popular not only in New York City, but all over America from the 1880s through 1920s,” according to an archived blurb on the internet. “Thrilling audiences from Tampa to Tokyo, The New York Ragtime Orchestra evokes the exciting sights and sounds of America at the turn of the century. With exuberance, humor and razzmatazz, the eleven-piece ensemble in period costumes performs marches, tangos, foxtrots, cakewalks, habaneras and ragtime for a delightful romp through America’s musical heritage. In an evening of cornets and clarinets, theatre and song, the rich early history of jazz, vaudeville and ragtime takes flight in the colorful melodies of Joplin, Gottschalk, Sousa, Berlin, Gershwin and many others.”

Ever since then, classical and ragtime have held equal standing on his performance schedule. He has played frequently at major ragtime festivals, and he positions his worldwide tours to bring ragtime to other cultures.

Ikemiya demonstrates the brighter sound of the spinet he uses to play ragtime.

“I travel all over the world giving concerts and, every time I play ragtime, it brings smiles to the people, to whomever I’m playing for,” he says. “I can’t talk to them with their language, but with the music, everybody’s smiling, they’re clapping hands.”

Ikemiya recalls the effect that ragtime had on one special demographic. Six years ago, he put on a free ragtime performance for children in a Cambodian AIDS orphanage.

“When we were there, they had absolutely nothing, in the middle of nowhere. So when I started playing ragtime, my gosh, the kids had such a good time. It’s such a happy music. It’s a rhythm thing, you know. It’s something earthy and very energetic.”

Ikemya has long returned to Japan annually to see his family and to perform.

During one of his jaunts home, in the 1980s, he gave a concert in Tokyo.

At the time, Tomoko was a nurse-midwife, psychologist, and instructor at a nursing college who lived in Tokyo. She had a friend who was also a friend of Masanobu’s sister. They went to the concert together.

Two or three years later, Masanobu was scheduled to play a concert in Osaka. Tomoko had moved to Osaka. She and her friend went again.

Some time later, Tomoko was teaching at a college in Hamamatsu, halfway between Tokyo and Osaka. This time, she found out on her own that Masanobu was playing a concert.

Recently, sitting at a table in the kitchen vestibule after a delicious raw-food lunch, Tomoko recalls those days, two decades ago.

The Ikemiyas’ light-filled home is designed for energy-independence.

“I went to the concert and he talked a lot,” she says.

That’s the case in general. Even at this moment, when Masanobu has been relegated to washing dishes in order to give Tomoko a chance to talk about herself, he can’t help but chime in.

“Tomoko says I talk too much. I have to control myself,” he says.

Masanobu’s recollections of their meeting came in a separate conversation, but they splice together seamlessly with Tomoko’s:

“He talked about the Arcady Music Festival, and also about Maine,” Tomoko continues. “He told us, the audience, about how beautiful Maine was, also how nice the music festival was.”

“I usually do,” he says. “’I love Maine and I love Arcady’ – I talk about the state of Maine. ‘I run this music festival in Bar Harbor, Maine, and it’s so gorgeous and beautiful and I’d love all of you to come to this festival.’ I entice them.”

“I was so fascinated by his story,” she says. So when her next summer vacation came up, she decided to go to the festival.

Tomoko scheduled a month-long tour that took her to see her best friend in Kentucky, her cousin in Los Angeles, and then to Maine.

“My sister told me somebody was coming, and I said, ‘Okay, that’s fine,’” Masanobu says. “So she showed up.”

“At last I met him in person,” she says. “He told me later he didn’t get a good impression of me. But I got a very good impression of him. So we started to get closer.”

A windowscreen is pulled into service as a drying rack, in front of shelves full of Ikemiya’s library of sheet music.

“Guy are blind because we don’t know how to see through the outer layer of the person,” he says. “She’s a very straightforward, honest person and she didn’t put on all kinds of jewelry and makeup and fancy clothing. I was a guy who wants to see a fancy girl, so how blind I was! She was the most important person in front of me, and I didn’t even see! That’s a lesson for all guys: We are all so conditioned to see the outside and not to see the beauty inside. Women are much more intuitive about seeing the truth, the person’s character.”

And the rest, as he says, is history.

Talk about a long-distance relationship. Tomoko was mostly in Japan, although she would return to Maine during her long vacations. Masanobu was mostly in Maine, but he visited Japan every year for a few months.

They had a quick civil wedding at New York City Hall, with just a few friends. Several years later, they and their relatives assembled in Nara, Japan, for a portrait session in traditional wedding clothes.

Ikemiya pours sun-brewed tea.

Breaking in again from the present, Masanobu, always informative, leaves the dishes, disappears into the living room, and returns with a coffeetable book about Nara, the most ancient capital of Japan. There are photos of its buildings, more than 1,000 years old, and the oldest wooden buildings in the world. It is home to beautiful pagodas and shrines that are well-preserved because there were no major wars to burn everything down, and to a statue of Buddha that is famous because of how big it is; the people at the bottom are tiny.

The couple stays in Nara every year.

“It’s a very beautiful city,” says Tomoko.

“And deer running around,” says Masanobu.

“Kyoto is famous,” says Tomoko, “but Nara…”

“Kyoto is like Paris, and of course it’s a beautiful place,” says Masanobu.

“Nara is a much more calm, spiritual place,” says Tomoko. “We love it.”

Masanobu heads off again and leaves Tomoko to talk about her transition to the United States, where her career took a turn. At the time, a strong economy drew many professionals from Japan to Manhattan, with the families settling in prosperous upstate communities such as Scarsdale. Tomoko worked in a large Japanese kindergarten, and also set up a counseling practice for many of the Japanese mothers.

Tomoko cuts kernels for a raw-corn chowder.

“Each mother was under pressure because of living in a foreign country and raising small children, and mostly Japanese husbands didn’t come home at the proper hour, and they have to go back to work in the morning,” Tomoko describes. “One child, when his father went to work, he said, ‘Bye, Dad, please visit again!’ He didn’t know that his father lived in the house. So the mothers had strong pressure.”

Masanobu lived in Manhattan, but Tomoko visited him on weekends. Each summer, they traveled to Maine.

Fifteen or 20 years ago, she gave up her counseling career (she never worked as a nurse-midwife in the U.S.) when Masanobu’s career became really busy. He needed Tomoko’s help with the administrative side of running a large-scale music festival and his concert tours.

“She started helping me and, of course, she started going with me everywhere,” he says. “I said, ‘Life is too short without you around. Please come with me everywhere.’ We try not to be apart at all.”

Tomoko’s counseling ways come in handy for their busy lives.

Tomoko pours corn chowder into gleaming wooden bowls.

“She’s so wonderful, because I need oftentimes counseling for sure, with this chaotic music life I was running,” he says. “She was a savior to me. I don’t dare do anything without her advice.”

“Masanobu had a lot planned,” she says. “And he had the New York Ragtime Orchestra. It had 14 or 15 people, and somebody had to organize the tour. So I did. It’s a full-time job. And also I needed to go with them everywhere they went.”

“We had a blast,” Masanobu says. “We went all over Japan, and Florida, New England, upstate New York.”

“I miss it!” Tomoko says, then laughs. “But I don’t want to do it again.”

“She was like mother hen,” Masanobu says. “Fifteen people she had to take care of. Sometimes they say, ‘Oh, gosh, my room has a funny smell.’ Or, ‘I want to fly to Japan on the aisle seat, not the window seat.’”

“And diet or health conditions; sometimes people have allergies,” Tomoko says. “I had to take care of everything.”

Nowadays, she manages his solo tours.

“Just one person, so it’s very easy,” she says.

“She just has to worry about me,” he says.

Half a cup each of walnuts and sprouted sunflower seeds go into raw corn chowder.

A great one for histrionics, with a beaming temperament, it’s no wonder Ikemiya is attracted to the bubbliness of ragtime. I had a chance to see this, and his talent for an entertaining spiel, one winter’s afternoon, when he gave a concert at a 200-year-old church in the riverside town of Bucksport. For his first set of classical music, he strode energetically down the aisle between the pews, dignified in a charcoal-gray suit, his demeanor grave. He sat silently at the piano and performed works by Bach and Haydn. After a bow, he launched into an edifying discussion of the “water pieces” by Ravel and the late Stonington composer, Kay Gardner, next on the playlist. Of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, he said, “It’s a beautiful French impressionistic work. You can see the beautiful French impressionist color of water, the play of water,” while for Gardner’s Rhapsody in A minor, he commented on what a pleasure it was, when she was alive, to be able to discuss a piece with the composer.

After the intermission, Ikemiya’s comical alter-ego appeared, as he bounded down the aisle in a straw boater, sleeve garters, club-collared striped shirt, and jacquard vest, his face alight.

Pesto, squash chips, and kimchi salsa, all prepared as raw or live-food dishes.

“I love ragtime because it’s so full of humor and joy, and oftentimes, we classical musicians are always so serious all the time,” he said. “Ragtime really makes us smile and enjoy life and have humor. It’s such an important part of life.”

He demonstrated the marching-band pulse that anchors the syncopation, which goes like so – “da-da da-da dah dah.” He talked about some of the classical greats who were influenced by ragtime.

“You never think of someone like Stravinsky having anything to do with ragtime, but actually Stravinsky loved ragtime,” Ikemiya said. “He wrote several pieces with ragtime in it. Then we have Erik Satie and Ravel and Debussy. Debussy wrote several pieces with ragtime influence.”

Debussy’s Golliwog’s Cake Walk showed how the French impressionist composer turned away from and had some fun with the heavy influence of German Romanticism.

“He kind of laughs at it – ‘Ha ha ha!’” he said. “He decided to attack the Romantic school. Richard Wagner was the greatest one and his greatest work was Tristan and Isolde. The first time I saw and heard this opera, it was so incredibly powerful, I just couldn’t sleep all night. It was so inspiring, such a great powerful work by Richard Wagner. But Debussy decided to make fun of the Tristan theme.”

His face drooped into a mournful expression as he played a few bars of the theme, bass-heavy and ominous.

Sliced tomatoes, dried in a small dehydrator and stored for later use.

“I’d better stop now, because this goes on, like, six hours. It will put you to sleep,” he said, as the audience laughed.

George Gershwin was heavily influenced by ragtime, he said, and his Rhapsody in Blue should reflect that. But many orchestras play the climax of the piece slowly and pompously, like a straitjacket, really. He banged out several loud, ponderous measures of chords, his arms like giant machine pistons. Then he dramatically toppled onto the floor as though from the weight of the sound, eliciting an explosion of laughter from his listeners.

“It’s just so slow, you know?” he said, picking himself up. “But the conductor, you don’t fool with him – ‘Okay, whatever you say, sir’ – and that’s it.”

The ragtime sets have proven to be a great time for Tomoko to get in on the action. She became intrigued by the music through the many ragtime festivals around the country. The most fun one is the Scott Joplin International Ragtime Festival in Sedalia, Missouri, where Joplin spent part of his life.

“Everybody’s ragtime everywhere,” says Masanobu. “They have the main stage, and there are always washboards. She really got fascinated. At the restaurant, you wake up and go have breakfast and somebody’s already playing ragtime in the street. They have the player piano going, and people dancing.” People wear period costumes, and they have a parade. Tomoko really got into it, and she began to accompany Masanobu on washboard.

“At the beginning, she was really shy,” he says.

“Because I didn’t have any experience on the stage,” she says.

The woodstove generates heat for the household’s hot water and radiant floor.

Masonobu teases her. “She’s so humble – ‘Oh no, I can’t, I shouldn’t be onstage, oh no, no.’”

It’s hard to imagine any couple looking as happy as the Ikemiyas do when they perform together, Tomoko with her washboard strung over an elegant period gown and lightly dancing behind her husband as he pounds the keyboard.

“We have a blast,” he says.

“Proletariats of all countries, unite!” reads an honorary certificate, written in Cyrillic and English script, that was presented to Ikemiya in 1989 by the director of the Kurgan (Siberia) Philharmonic Orchestra.

The certificate, which hangs on the wall of the stairwell, thanks Ikemiya for his “excellent art” and for the concerts and meetings that promoted “friendship between the Soviet and American people” when he performed across Siberia.

Around the same time, he received an Official Recognition Award from the Maine State Senate for his “contribution to the cultural life of the state” with the creation of the Arcady Music Festival.

In 1995, he received a United Nations award for “Promoting World Peace” and, along with members of the New York Philharmonic, was invited to celebrate the United Nations 50th anniversary in a gala concert.

Wearing a straw boater and sleeve garter, pianist Masanobu Ikemiya revs up a concert with some ragtime tunes.

Over the past three decades, Ikemiya’s career as a performer has been an extension of his philosophy, as he seeks to foster cross-cultural awareness and harmony in the world. His performances have taken him to the former Soviet Union, Mexico, Argentina, Taiwan, Cambodia, Philippines, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Portugal, Brazil, Guam, Hawaii, India, Korea, Canada, the United States, and Southeast Asia.

In Japan, he performs regularly with major orchestras such as Tokyo Symphony, and appears on national TV and radio. He has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, Maine Public Broadcasting Network television and radio programs, and on classical radio stations in New York City and Boston.

He has been a guest artist with the New York Philharmonic Ensembles and joined with members of the Philharmonic in a chamber music concert in the Golden Pavilion Temple in Kyoto for its 600th anniversary, a performance which was broadcast throughout Japan. Ikemiya has appeared in solo recitals at New York’s Lincoln Center, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and other venues.

Between 1995 and 2004, he toured annually in Japan with members of the New York Philharmonic and with the New York Ragtime Orchestra.  In 2004 the ragtime orchestra gave a highly acclaimed performance before an audience of 47,000 at the Osaka Dome in Japan. He and the orchestra have recorded five ragtime CDs, and he was nominated for a Grammy Award for the album Ragtime Classics. In all, he has recorded nine CDs on various labels.

At his concerts, part of the program is dedicated to the causes the Ikemiyas are involved in. These days, they present a slide show that shows, on the one hand, how things at Peace Farm are going and, on the other, images from the earthquake and nuclear disaster that hit Japan in 2011. A series of photographs, snapped through a telephoto lens by a resident of a coastal town who was on a hill above the scene at the time, shows a neighborhood that was largely intact just after the earthquake, but was wiped out by the tsunami just 20 minutes later.

“First slide, 3:15 in the afternoon, and 20 seconds,” he said at the Bucksport concert, as Tomoko clicked through the slides. “Now the tsunami is coming. One second later, it’s like this already, and then, 40 seconds later it’s all over the place, and then a minute later the whole village was wiped out. It’s hard to imagine that in one minute everything we grew up with, our community got like this. So the strength of nature is incredible.

Old photos from Ikemiya’s family in Manchuria, Japan, and Kansas.

“This is just one of the towns. All the coastal towns – it would be like Bucksport or Bar Harbor – would be wiped out in a few minutes. Most people didn’t have a chance to escape.

“And, of course, the nuclear disaster is still continuing, the radioactivity leaking and threatening the whole island, and actually the whole world. You can’t escape because radioactivity goes all over, streams in the air and ends up here.

“I just want you to see how everything looks normal, like a regular city. What this teaches us is our normal life, what we have, is so precious because that could be taken away any moment, any time.”

“If you want to eat, you have to grow,” is the Peace Farm policy, Tomoko says, with a laugh.

“I always tell people that I’m in charge of vegetables and he’s in charge of soil and fruit trees,” she says. “But, of course, Masanobu is helping to grow vegetables, too. And also I try to preserve food, like pickling, canning, or freezing. I have to make sure we have enough food year-round.”

The back-to-the-land lifestyle, with its self-sufficient, do-no-harm practices, had long been an idea that appealed to the Ikemiyas, given their peace activism and efforts to foster cross-cultural harmony.

Masanobu had long known Maine’s back-to-the-land “gurus,” Helen and Scott Nearing, the Brooksville couple who were well known by the 1960s for their leadership in the movement. He got to know Scott Nearing before he died, in 1983, and became long-time friends with Helen, a classical violinist, when she began attending Arcady Music Festival concerts.

“She was a fan of mine. I was so lucky in that she always taught me all kinds of things, before I even made a move,” he says. “I always went to their Good Life Center in Harborside and admired their way of living. So we wanted to follow their footsteps.”

The tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, tipped the decision. At the time, the Ikemiyas were at their apartment in New York.

“We didn’t actually know what happened,” he says. “Tomoko’s sister called from Japan. ‘Are you okay?’ It was midmorning. So we turned on the TV. There was nothing, because the Twin Tower antennas all went. So we couldn’t see what was happening. Then a few radio stations were working and we were able to get other channels on TV, and finally we realized what happened.”

George Sopkin, Werner Torkanowsky, Ikemiya, and Claude Monteux formed the core of the Arcady Music Festival.

As the city began its gradual recovery, the terrible event persuaded the Ikemiyas that their idea to live a more harmonious lifestyle was a good one.

“We need to find a more sustainable, gentle, peaceful way to live with the environment, with nature, with fellow humans, and so on,” he says. “We started thinking, We can’t go on like this, because city life is completely artificial. All the food is brought in, nothing is grown there. It’s just sucking in everything from everywhere else. A typical example is Wall Street, of course. So we started thinking, You know, it’s time to move out. Because 9/11, all of a sudden, the bridges were closed. And all of a sudden, a few days later, food was getting scarce. The supermarkets were running out and everything was blocked. It shows how vulnerable this whole way of living is. This is not good. We just started sensing, We need to start living in more harmony and in a sustainable way. Also, this high-speed, modern life, typical Western civilization, materialism, chasing after money, was right there. You see this at the peak of the whole thing.”

They had their summer house in Maine, and decided to live there year-round. They would simplify their lives, and pursue a homesteading lifestyle that would least impact the earth. They would grow their own food, try to live off the land, and covert to solar energy.

For Tomoko, a “city girl,” as she says, the idea seemed a bit overwhelming.

“When he told me that he wanted to do the homestead thing, my first reaction was, ‘Whaaaa? I don’t know if I can do it!’” she says. “I didn’t have any philosophy. I was just surprised. But more and more, I learned things, and then I came to appreciate the work in the garden.”

They spent their first full year in Maine in 2004.

“The first year, the winter was very hard,” Tomoko says. “But fortunately, we have very good friends. Melita Brecher is from Finland. She loves winter and the snow. So at the beginning, nobody made me feel better when I asked, ‘How is the winter in Maine?’ ‘Oh wow, it’s very cold and not so great.’ But Masanobu and I go to the same yoga class as Melita every week. So when I asked her about Maine in the winter, she said, ‘Oh, it’s great!’ She goes to ski every morning. She told me how the winter is joyful and she goes skiing and snowshoeing. So finally, I got interested in Maine in winter.”

Melita lent Tomoko a pair of snowshoes and Tomoko went snowshoeing in the garden. They also went dogsledding.

An early Arcady Music Festival poster.

“So now I’m okay,” she says.

Since that first year, Tomoko has discovered a meditative quality to gardening.

“When you spend time in a garden, you forget about time. You just concentrate on what you are doing,” she says. “So naturally you just think of what you are watching, or this moment. You can just enjoy thinking, or smell the flowers. I just concentrate and enjoy now. That’s a very good lesson to me. Because when I went to graduate school to learn psychology, [I learned] you have to live now and concentrate now, because you have just now and not the future and not the past. But I just learn that in my head: I didn’t experience it at that time. I don’t think I understood it at that point. Now, I experience it. That’s a very good thing. Also, I like sowing seeds. From the beginning, you can see the whole process. It’s life. So I learn a lot from the process.  So the vegetables, we are able to see the whole life, and each moment, they are sharing their life. That’s a wonderful thing.”

Masanobu is hunting through the pantry shelves, which hold many home-canned goods, vegetables and fruits dried in a small dehydrator, and bunches of herbs.

He finds a jar of naturally sweet elderberry jam to mix with kombu cha, a tea.

“This is very healthy,” he tells me. “You’re going to be so healthy by the time you leave. You’ll be jumping out of your skin.”

The drink is refreshing, tasty, and slightly fermented.

“Isn’t that great?” he enthuses, and takes a drink. “Ahh, keeps us going.”

He leads me on a tour of the house. In addition to raising and storing almost all of their food, preserving precious water resources, and collecting “humanure” from their composting toilet, they seek to make the house as energy-efficient as possible. The woodstove incorporates a water-heating coil, controlled by a thermostat, that heats the household’s hot water and radiant floor. Solar panels on the roof feed into a solar collection system and radiator on the second floor; pipes feed heat to difference zones in the house.

“People say electricity is clean energy,” he says. “But how it’s produced is a tremendous amount of fossil fuels, coal burning, nuclear generation and so on. We wanted to not use that kind of electricity.”

Ceremonial items from a traditional wedding.

The living room has gone for storage of memorabilia and for gardening paraphernalia. Cardboard boxes and plastic bins are full of video and audio recordings of concerts. There are old posters from the music festival, announcing featured acts from Japan, the Philippines, and China.

“I always tries to have groups from all over the world,” Masanobu says, plucking one of the posters from a pile.

A poster from the 1985-1986 winter series, written by hand, with a hand-drawn picture of a rural church, announces concerts at the Tarratine Club in Bangor, the Somesville Union Meeting House, and the Holy Redeemer Church in Bar Harbor, featuring grade-school and high school guest soloists, tickets $7.

“I hate to throw things out and have it be forgotten,” he says.

A pamphlet from 1991 advertises a summer season that opens with a gala performance of Ravel Meets Bunraku, followed by the Arcady Festival Orchestra, with Ikemiya conducting, the Little Singers of Tokyo, Viennese Masters on Original Instruments, and Eastern and Western Strings. There were 50 concerts each summer, with acts traveling around Maine and 50 Little Singers to house.

“We were exhausted,” he says. “That was a major operation.”

Back behind some boxes are copies of the book, in Japanese, that his father wrote in recent years about his experience during World War II and its aftermath, and in Manchuria. The book was widely read in Japan.

“When he wrote the book, that was helpful. He didn’t want to talk  about it all his life,” Masanobu says. “Toward the end of his life, we urged him, Please write. He started writing about all his war experiences. That helped him be more at peace. He’s in Okinawa now. He’s really happy because that’s where he was born and, at the end of his life, he gets to be there again.”

The Ikemiyas had a quick civil wedding but rounded up family in Japan, several years later, for a traditional wedding photo session and reception.

A hall table holds traditional elements – incense, Japanese geta sandals, guestbook, and various symbolic items –  from the ceremony surrounding the making of their wedding portraits. Lining the stairway walls are photographs – his parents in Manchuria; his parents just escaped from Manchuria, holding their toddler son and baby daughter; Masanobu as a boy at the piano; his parents’ wedding right after the war; his father in uniform, standing beside the propeller of a fighter plane during the war; his parents, wrapped in overcoats, standing on the campus at Kansas State University in 1962; Masanobu as a rising musical star, grinning wildly in the company of Claude Monteux, Werner Torkanowsky and George Sopkin.

Ikemiya’s studio takes up the second floor, with large windows on three sides that overlook the gardens and distant hills, and twin triangular windows at the peak of the steeply pitched cathedral ceiling. French doors open onto a second-story deck.

The room was designed with acoustics and concerts in mind. Ikemiya sits at the Steinway and produces a lush sound. Then he plays ragtime on a spinet, which has a brighter bounce. Tucked under the eaves is an 1875 Steinway square grand piano, an earlier form that was once the piano of choice, but is rarely seen today. Ikemiya made his New York recital debut at Merkin Hall in 1993 on this perfectly kept specimen.

“This is one of the best pianos of the American 19th century,” he says. “At first, people think it’s some kind of table.”

The sound is gorgeous, softer than his other Steinway, but richly resonant.

“When I was in New York, I did quite a few concerts on this,” he says. “The Metropolitan Museum director really liked this piano, too. They have several like this on display.”

As is true of many households, the kitchen is the heart of domestic activity.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves hold part of Ikemya’s library of sheet music, right next to bins of recycled containers and cardboard. A small greenhouse off the kitchen is pungent with the aroma of humus, holy basil, and potted tomatoes. A window screen is pulled into service as a drying rack for bunches of herbs.

Today, they’re doing a demonstration of raw-food cookery. Masanobu pulls out cookbooks full of recipes for all phases of a raw-food menu, from appetizers to desserts. He’s made me a copy of a page from Gabrielle Chavez’ book, The Raw Food Gourmet, which explains that the raw and living foods lifestyle supports overall health and healing, provides more energy, avoids chemicals added and nutrients lost, and fosters harmony, peace and appreciation for one’s own body, mind, and spirit, for animals and plants, and for the earth.

Eating raw and living food “is like eating the essence of life,” he says. It provides a direct connection to cosmic energy, and increases vitality.

“We get more connected to the universe. The further you go away, you have less contact. That’s why we love to be in nature. We need to eat food straight as much as possible.”

“And it’s very economical,” says Tomoko.

Processed or cooked food lacks harmony with the life force, he says, “and you just go downhill.”

Raw food is food that’s not cooked, leaving its nutrients intact. Living food contains active enzymes. Examples of live foods are yogurt, miso, and sprouted seeds.

Originally, says Masanobu, preparation of raw-food and living-food dishes seemed complicated and time-consuming. Gradually, it became easy to figure out how to make good meals quickly, which is important to the Ikemiyas, who are always on the go.

Sun tea is brewed by pouring water over herbs and letting it sit in the sun, explains Masanobu, who made a jarful earlier in the day. Lots of people make sun tea, he says, but most just put in some mint and maybe one or two other herbs. He learned from Deb Soule – founder of Avena Botanicals Herbal Apothecary and Gardens in Rockport – to put in all kinds of herbs.

For this batch, he threw in rose petal, calendula flower, anise hyssop, mint lemon balm, nettle, lavender, and holy basil.

“Feel that, it’s still warm,” he says, proffering the jar. “Solar heat really warms it, especially if you leave it in the greenhouse.”

Photosynthesis lets you get all the nutrients in the tea.

“Usually people use dried herbs for tea. But this is just straight,” he says. “We never know how it tastes, because I just throw in whatever. But it doesn’t matter, anything that’s in season. So let’s try this.”

He pours the tea through a strainer.

“All right, cheers! Kampai!” says Masanobu, then explains, “Japanese toast.”

The tea is tasty and refreshing. The lemon and holy basil stand out.

“What I like about this is that, somehow, it makes our minds clear,” he says. “And stable energy, rather than coffee,” he mimics hyperactivity, “just bwaaaah!” He mock-slumps. “And then you’re down. But this is just steady and natural. Something grounding, and yet you’re aware of every moment. You’re clear and feel alive and grateful that you’re living on planet earth.”

For a raw corn chowder, Tomoko shucks an ear of corn while Masanobu peels garlic and drops the skins into the compost.

“I found this corn chowder recipe on the internet, and I modified it a little bit,” Tomoko says.

Raw food culture is pretty big on the internet, she says, “You just type in ‘raw food.’ So many.”

Using a chef’s knife, Tomoko cuts the raw kernels from the cob and tosses them in a blender. She adds a cup of water and half a cup of raw cashews. She prefers just cashews, but Masanobu likes walnuts and sunflower seeds, too, so she adds a quarter-cup of each. The seeds have been soaked for about an hour, and they come back alive, says Masanobu. Seeds can be soaked for as little as 20 minutes, or overnight. Flax seed is popular, too. They get their seeds and nuts from local health food stores.

Sea salt goes in the blender – Maine sea salt, naturally – and a little bit of cayenne and a very little bit of garlic.

Tomoko prefers a K-Tec Champ blender because it’s strong and consistent for their raw-food method. In about 10 seconds, the ingredients are blended to soup consistency.

“When you do raw foods, you don’t need pots and pans, but you need a really good blender and food processor,” she says.

I notice that a wok and fry pans hang on the kitchen wall.

“We do eat cooked food,” says Tomoko. “Especially in the winter time, still we eat raw food, but it gets too cold. We do eat cooked in the summertime, too. So we are not 100 percent.”

For now, they buy grains from the local co-ops, and dairy products from a local farm. They feel that vegetables, legumes, seeds, and grains provide all the protein that a person needs.

“This protein myth that we’ve got to have meat to survive is not true,” Masanobu says.

The diet works for them. One doctor told Masanobu that he was the healthiest person he’d ever examined.

The chowder is done.

“Everyone asks for this recipe quickly because they love it,” says Tomoko, as she pours chowder into polished wooden bowls. We sit down at a little round table by a sunny alcove.

“Before we eat, we always say grace. Three oms and shanti shanti shanti, and we hold hands,” Masanobu says.

There’s a quiet moment of drawn-out oms – his deep, hers higher-pitched – followed by a singsong shanti.

“Thank-you. Namaste,” he concludes.

The chowder is delicious. The corn is sweet, the garlic piquant, and the salt and cayenne balance it.

Another recipe uses a spaghetti-maker – a modified grater that allows produce to be clamped in place and cranked through the sharp sieve – to create, in this case, long strands of zucchini. The “spaghetti” is topped with pesto made from raw basil, garlic, and walnuts, crushed and mixed with olive oil. Cheese could be added, or nutriyeast, or flaxseed powder, or anything, really. They like to experiment.

Masanobu goes back to the counter to chop up a few tomatoes, then mixes that with kimchi, to make kimchi salsa. He had made the kimchi, a picked vegetable mix, earlier in the week, giving it time to ferment.

“It’s really simple,” he says. “I put all kinds of things in it – garlic, ginger, napa, cucumber, nettle, daikon, other things. Whatever vegetable, I just picked out of the garden.”

He added salt, to break down the fibers and draw out the juices, and a little cayenne to make it nice and hot.

“Then I just massage it with my hands. Of course, it’s good for your piano hands. Good exercise. I pound with a mallet, too. And gradually, juice comes out.”

The kimchi tastes pleasurably of garlic and ginger.

“This is nothing special. I just mix it and we eat it,” he says. “It’s something different, you know? And it’s so good for you. People always say, ‘Gosh, what do you eat!? You don’t cook anything!’ People are so used to meat and potato and having everything cooked. I say, ‘We don’t have to.’ And it’s simple and takes less preparation time. And it’s good for the environment because we don’t have to use gas for cooking.”

“It is so good,” says Tomoko, as we spoon kimchi onto cracker-like slices of squash that had been dried in the dehydrator.

Outside, the breeze makes a quiet shushing sound in the trees that surround the gardens. Bullfrogs croak in the lotus pond. Soon, the couple will make a push to get their produce into cold storage, or canned or dried. They will continue their multi-faceted community volunteer work, about which they are passionate. They put on free concerts for the Hancock County jail, the Emmaus Homeless Shelter and, weekly, for a local nursing home and adult day care center; they put on concerts to raise funds for charitable causes; they donate food from their farm to Emmaus and to food banks; and they volunteer for Hospice of Hancock County. Ikemiya has a lineup of concerts in Maine and beyond, including charity concerts scheduled in Japan, where they will return for a few months over the winter. Peace Farm will lie fallow until the following spring’s ventures in sustainable living.

What’s noticeable about Peace Farm is that it is as normal and comfortable as any other home. Somehow, “back to the land” conjures up an image of self-denial, constant labor, drafty farmhouses, and too many bean-centric meals. On the contrary, the Ikemiya house is warm, sunny, and modern. With a schedule that has them coming and going on concert tours, there’s nothing about the farm that ties them down. In fact, says Masanobu, the farming itself – integrated as it is into the natural ecosystem – just isn’t hard work.

“ You know, we feel any little bit we can do whatever to stop the global warming or save the environment, in our little way, whether to take a bicycle instead of using a car, or walking instead of driving, anything, growing a small plant instead of buying, it helps. That’s what we’re trying to promote. Every little bit helps,” Masanobu says. “I don’t want to think, just because I came to the earth to live, I ended up destroying, consuming all these things, and left, making a mess out of it. I want to leave as little footprint as possible. That goes to the teaching of don’t harm other living beings. The commandment says, Thou shall not kill. Most people think it means other people. I think it means all living beings.”

Today, he has become something of a standard-bearer for the art and craft of wooden boatbuilding, through Great Harbor Boatworks, the business he owns with his wife, Lorraine.

Richard Stanley sights down the 19-foot daysailer that he is teaching apprentice Ryan Snow how to build.

“During my time in my father’s shop, I learned from working on lots of different boats that were built by lots of different builders: Wilbur Morse, Charles Morse, Bobby Rich, Ronald Rich, Nevins, Herreshoff, Bob Direktor, Raymond Bunker, Hinckley and Farnham Butler, as well as my father,” Stanley writes in a short biography. I learned how they did things – how they put things together, what worked and what didn’t. From each job, I’d incorporate what I learned into my new work. Even sanding bottoms, you get a sense of different hull shapes: you can see what works and what doesn’t, what looks good and what doesn’t.”

At age 50, Stanley is a tall man with a thatch of graying hair, gray stubble, and a gruff voice that fetches up deep in his throat. His back is hunched, his gait is stiff, and his eyes have a preoccupied look. All traits combined give the initial impression that he’s taciturn. He’s not. He’s a sweet guy and a great storyteller. Although he has a wild background from his younger years, he’s mostly all about wooden boats, thanks to a passion he inherited from his father, wooden boatbuilder Ralph Stanley.

In 2011, apprentice Ryan Snow was learning how to plank the hull of a 19-foot daysailer.

“When I was a little kid, I just wanted to be with my father all the time, and I wanted to be a boatbuilder. That’s all I wanted to do,” Richard says. “So I was with him as much as I could be.”

Over the past two years, he has been passing on  his skills to  a local student, Ryan Snow.

“That’s what I hope to find more of in the future, local kids who would like to learn,” Richard says. “It makes me really happy.”

For his efforts, he was a recently awarded a $4,000 grant from the Maine Arts Commission in its traditional apprenticeship category. That award followed on a grant, from the same commission, of $13,000 in its individual artist fellowship program.

The Stanleys and Tony Menzietti work on Mbuoya, a 29-foot Ralph Stanley design, built in built in 1990 and in for rehab.

Last year, the yard received a visit from Governor and First Lady Paul and Ann LePage, at the end of which the governor humorously offered to sign on as Richard’s apprentice once his term was done.

These distinctions come at a difficult time for the boatbuilding industry in general, as builders of pleasure boats strive to maintain and build new markets while the economy continues to founder. In an industry that has turned mainly to fiberglass and composites, such recognition signals the value of Stanley’s heritage. The company’s facebook page is a testament – with more than 11,0000 “likes” and streams of comments in a variety of languages – to the enthusiasm inspired by the Stanley roster of boats.

Now, Great Harbor Boatworks is waiting out the “great recession.” The yard has storage and rebuilding projects that are paying the bills. But Richard’s real goal is to get back to building boats – something small, no more than 30 feet long, a simple design, inviting to the average boater, pleasing to the eye.

“That’s where my passion is,” he says. “Designing and building boats. It’s the artist in me.”

From the age of 5 or 6, Richard loved being at his father’s shop. Unbidden, Richard would be out back, where boats were stored, happily scrubbing bottoms. He got to sweep up shavings, knock in the bungs, grease the ways, and do some sanding.

Richard shows Ryan how to ensure the hull is plumb and level.

His father’s first shop was in the old shop out back of Ralph’s grandmother’s house, on Main Street in Southwest Harbor.

“I’d be up there as often as I could, pretty much every day,” he says. “And that little shop, every day, was cold and narrow and dark. He built one 44-foot lobsterboat in that barn. He had to pull it outdoors and put the top on.” He laughs. “They had Playboy centerfolds all along the walls. Gee, I loved that.”

The planer sat at the front of the shop, and a little door was cut into the wall at the height of the planer, with a hinged cover over it.

“You could send things through the planer inside and, unless it was a short piece, you had to go outside and retrieve it from the outside and shove it back through. But it worked.”

As Richard got older, their relationship could be frustrating. He’s always admired his father’s talents, and still goes to him for advice occasionally. (Recently, he asked his dad to take a look at a half-model he had carved, and learned that the bow could perhaps be made a bit fuller.)

In 2011, the gang had a good start on the daysailer.

But as a kid, there were many times when he was eager to dive into the next stage of learning, long before he was actually allowed to.

“I was using the bandsaw at my junior high shop class before I was allowed to use the bandsaw at my father’s shop,” he says. “He was very cautious, always worried about me getting my hand crushed or cut.”

So he learned by watching.

“My father had a crew that had been with him numerous years,” Stanley says. “I would watch them. I also went to other yards around when I was a kid. There were 14 different boatyards. And I would go to those places and watch them. I’d stay back, out of the way, and watch. And when I saw an opportunity to help, I would, as long as I wasn’t going to be in their way. Ronald Rich, you could go and watch him – at least I could. Some people he didn’t like at all being there. I could go in there and watch, but I couldn’t touch anything. And that was okay. I’d spend a lot of time there.”

The Southwest Boat Corporation was just down the road from the second shop his father built, in 1973.

“They’d be working down there on various types of boats,” Stanley recalls. “They were doing a lot of repair work on sardine carriers and things like that. I’d go down there, and they’d be tearing these big bows of these sardine carriers apart and putting on new stems and forefoots and new deck pieces and tearing out the sterns and everything. I would watch the guys doing that. There were a few guys I knew, and I could give them some help once in a while.”

He jumped at every chance to go with his father to the other boatyards.

Richard and Lorraine Stanley are seen here in 2010, having launched a new name and website for their business, Great Harbor Boatworks. They have been assisted with customer relations by their Newfoundland, Mr. Percy. Behind them is a boat they rebuilt.

“I just loved it,” he says. “I got to go to Jimmy Rich’s. They were building a powerboat over there one time, and they had just got the rabbet all cut and chiseled out. And they were sandpapering it! They were sandpapering a rabbet! And I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen that before!’ That’s how fussy Jimmy Rich was about building boats.”

At a machine shop and boatyard on tiny Little Island, in Bass Harbor, where his father had metal fittings made, Stanley remembers “great big lathes and milling machines and all this junk everywhere, and just a little path through there and a little area to work at the machine. Otherwise it was just stacked with metal junk. You’d go in there and ask Father Power for something, and Father Power would go to his junk, and he knew right where everything was. He had a few fingers missing, you know. He’d dig around and he’d pull it out, and, there it is! It was really fun to go to places like that.”

Once in a while, he got to visit Raymond Bunker, at the Bunker and Ellis shop in Manset. One time, when Richard was in high school, Bunker popped into the Ralph Stanley shop.

“I was making this half-model of a powerboat,” Stanley says. “At the time, Raymond Bunker was still building boats. I don’t know why he came over, but he comes in and he sees me sanding on my half-model.  And he says” – Stanley adopts a big, gruff voice – “’Let me see that, sonny!’ So I let him have it. He looks at it. He says, ‘Huh! It’s too wide! Got the right idea though!’ Another time, he comes in and I was working away – this was later on after he retired. He comes in, chewing his pipe, and stands around looking. He’d ask Ralph a few questions – ‘How much deadrise to that sheer you got?’ – you know, stuff like that. And he’d be watching me. And he says, ‘Ralph, you have a few more boys like that, you won’t have to work!’ Another day, Raymond comes in. I’m left-handed, and I was painting a boat and he sees I’m using my left hand to paint. And he says, ‘Sonny!’ He’s in his 80s, so I guess he had the right to call me sonny. He says, ‘Sonny! You’re putting that paint on backwards!’”

As he got older, Richard learned a lot from taking apart derelict boats and from repairing and rebuilding the many wooden lobsterboats that the older generation had at the time.

“I worked on boats that were built by old Eulie and Frank Rich,” who had a boat shop in Richtown. Their narrow, full-bottomed boats rolled quite a bit, and fishermen called them Richtown Rollers. “I worked on boats that Ronald Rich and Bobby Rich and Jimmy Rich built. I worked on boats that Raymond Bunker built.”

He recalls taking out some bow planks from a boat that Bunker and Ellis built.

“I couldn’t believe what I saw,” he says with a laugh. “The forward floor timber in the boat was still square, right off the bandsaw. It wasn’t beveled. The forward edge just fit against the planking, and the rest of it was just all gap. They just put it right in and put the screws in the corner. I said, ‘Jesus Christ, we’ve been overdoing this forever! My God, this boat’s how old here, and there’s never been any problem with that?’ I said, ‘My God, there ain’t no sense to doing what we’ve been doing!’ But then it comes time for me to put the floor timbers in. I think about that, and I’m saying, ‘Eh, I guess I’d better fit it.’”

In 1982, he graduated from The Boat School in Eastport. In 1983, he began to receive a name credit with the construction of the schooner Equinox. In 1986, he acquired a quarter interest in his father’s business.

“One time, we got a Friendship sloop planked up, and my father says, ‘Well, the boat needs the interior’ – and he leaves,” Richard recalls. “So – there my interior career started. I went and looked at the other boats. I’d watched him do it before. A lot of times he did a lot of the interior work himself, in the evenings and nights when I was around. I’d seen that and I had some idea, and I looked at other boats we had in the yard to see how he did it. And I went from there. Now,” he lets loose a wry chuckle, “was that the most efficient way to learn how to do that? Probably not. But probably it stuck with me a lot better.”

Richard Stanley at the helm, and Lorraine to his left, sail on Resolute during the 2009 Friendship sloop race in Southwest Harbor.

If it sounds like he worked a lot, he did.

“There were years there I did a lot of partying. But I was still there to work.  I was always waiting for the police to come,” he laughs.

Gradually he became the shop boss, teaching many employees over the years.

“A guy off the street is usually much more teachable than a guy who has worked at other yards or a guy who’s gone to a boat school, because they know the way they’ve been taught,” he says. “Whereas there can be 12 different ways to do things in boatbuilding. I’ve done most of these 12 different things, and I know which one works the best and gives me the results I’m looking for. Other people are looking for other results and other ways can work better for them. But in my shop, you’ve got to do it this way. And it can be a hard for people to accept. So you have to retrain them. But if you get someone of the street, they’re more apt to listen to you.”

“He’s spent his entire career dealing with a crew of whoever shows up,” says Lorraine. “So it’s not like he needs a crew of highly trained technicians. He needs people who can follow directions. And with that he can build a boat.”

“And people don’t want to argue with me,” he jokes, being a big guy.

In the age of fiberglass and composites, wooden boatbuilding is a venture with its ups and downs, Stanley says.

“Around here, there’s a few people who can build wooden boats,” he says. “But it’s something that’s dying out. When I was a kid, there was a fair amount of wooden boatbuilding going on. But it was dying out. Most of these people were old, and only a few were passing it on to other generations. So it’s been a dying thing.”

Stanley recalls a surge of interest in the 1970s, when the idea of building wooden boats had a romantic aura for “back to the land” homesteaders.

The 19-foot daysailer under construction by Richard Stanley and his apprentice.

“It looks very romantic from the outside, but it’s just a lot of hard work,” he says. “And you have to use a lot of awful chemicals. White lead paste is very toxic and there are lots of different paints and chemicals. So that type of back-to-nature thing was not quite what it looked like. They thought that’s what they wanted to do and they go into it, and then they said, ‘Oh, this isn’t what we thought.’ So that renaissance of wooden boatbuilders kind of died off.”

Richard and Lorraine met one day in 2000, when he was fixing the rudder post box and doing some other repairs on the old wooden tour boat, R.L. Gott, that her father, Kim Strauss, runs from Little Island Marine in the summer.

“I don’t know if it was the day before or the day of her birthday,” Richard says.

“That was the day before,” says Lorraine.

“And I see this young lady walking around and I thought she was attractive,” Richard continues. “At the end of the day, her father and she were together, and we just started talking. I started telling them about how I was building this little Friendship sloop for myself and I was going to work on it that evening. And she showed up with a tin of cookies.”

“Well, you invited us by for a tour,” says Lorraine.

“Well, I remember I invited you for a tour. But that evening you just came over.”

“That might have been Monday evening.”

“I remember it was that evening.”

“Well, anyway, it was pretty quick.”

“It was pretty quick.”

It was oatmeal chocolate chip cookies – Rosemary’ recipe from Frankie’s diner in Ellsworth.

“I felt quite lucky to get it from her,” says Lorraine.

With the hull planked up, Richard and his apprentice began work on the floor timbers and deck framing.

“So then, ‘cause them cookies were really good, we just got along,” Richard says with a mischievous smile.

Lorraine has big, beautiful eyes set in a pixie face and a boyish physique, and she gives the impression of running on high-octane energy. She comes from rusticator roots on Gotts Island, thanks to her father’s grandfather. She spent her childhood summers out there until 1990, when she went off to college, where she studied narrative nonfiction writing and went on to do field studies and internships. After graduation, she took a series of unsatisfying jobs – newsletter editor for a national environmental group, carpenter’s helper, then editor of a free weekly in New York City, which turned out to be, basically, selling ads.

Then she landed a job that was more fruitful. As receptionist for a graphic design firm, also in New York, she took on every project that anyone put before her and was soon learning about some key concepts of running a business, such as corporate identity and branding.

Still, she was tired of the city. So in 1999, so she moved back to MDI. She worked for her father, which is how she happened to spy the man who was fixing her father’s boat.

Apparently, Richard’s presence – the reputation he had developed for himself by that time – was something of an event.

“A lot of people came and went in the yard,” Lorraine says. “But it was, ‘Oh, we’ve got Richard Stanley coming!’ It was an older wooden boat and it needed somebody who knew what they were doing. So I was, like, ‘Who is this guy? What is up?’”

All summer long, Lorraine had noticed a beautiful boat in the harbor named Cinchona.

“I thought it was the prettiest boat out there,” she says. “They said, ‘That’s Richard Stanley. He’s the one who built Cinchona.’ I said, ‘Really? It’s such an incredible boat.’”

Lorraine was quite taken by what she saw and heard.

“He was the first person I’d met, since I’d been back, who seemed like he had a lot going on,” she says. “He was very confident. He seemed to know who he was and what he was doing and why he was doing it. And you could either like it or not. I liked that. He also struck me as being very capable and competent. He grew up around here and hasn’t been away a lot, but he really had an open mind about life in general. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been around people who have been here all their lives and they’re all set and they don’t want to hear it. Richard was curious about all kinds of different topics.”

Lorraine continued to visit Richard at his father’s shop.

“I asked him if he wanted any help – knowing absolutely nothing about boatbuilding,” she says. “I mean, looking at a keel and not knowing how it was supposed to end up in a boat.”

Just like that, he took her on.

“I never dreamed of being a boatbuilder,” she says. “I wanted to be helpful and get to know Richard.” She laughs. “And we didn’t necessarily think it would be a great idea to work with each other and try to be a couple. Who says that’s a good idea?”

At the time, Lorraine was struggling with alcoholism. Richard, 10 years her senior, had emerged from his own wild period, and understood what she was going through. But she also posed something of challenge for him. He kept her working, learning as she went along, at the storage yard or with him in the construction shop.

It took a few years, but after one encounter too many with the law, Lorraine got herself into a substance recovery program, and stuck with it.

Ryan shaves a bit off a brace that will support the hull.

“Oh yeah, pretty much the day he met me, he said he hated drinking,” she recalls. “I tried to hide it and I was just forever waiting for the hammer to come down. And I couldn’t understand why it didn’t. He just believed I was a good person. And he kept hoping I would find a better way. I’ll tell you what, he’s got a lot more patience than me or other people. He gives people the benefit of the doubt.”

Although the transition from Ralph W. Stanley, Inc., to Great Harbor Boatworks was probably inevitable, the timing could have been better.  For the boatbuilding industry in general, the global financial crisis that began in 2008 resulted in a swift plummet. Industry-wide, things were still in decline in 2009, the year the 1902 Friendship sloop Westwind, which had gone to Ralph Stanley’s shop in 2007 for a complete overhaul, was inched down the ways and towed, then trucked, a few miles to Richard’s new shop.

For Ralph Stanley, a National Heritage Fellow and Boatbuilder Laureate of Maine, it was time to retire, and to pursue his other interests in local history, making fiddles,  playing music, getting out on the lobsterboat he built in 1960 for his father, Seven Girls – named for Ralph’s seven sisters – and still do some design. (Historical information about Ralph Stanley is largely sourced from the book Ralph Stanley: Tales of a Maine Boatbuilder, published in 2004 by Craig Milner and Stanley). He had been building boats since 1946, when he launched  a 15-foot lapstrake dory, from his first shop. Ralph launched his first lobsterboat, a 28-footer, and his first lobster-style pleasure boat, a 26-footer, in 1953. One or two boats per year came out of Ralph’s shop for the next four decades, many of them still seen in local waters every summer. Ralph built his first sailboat, the Friendship sloop Hieronymus, in 1962. At 50 years old, the sloop is still used by the original owner and his family.

A succession of lobsterboats followed. In 1973, he rebuilt the 1904 Friendship sloop Dictator. That same year, he met the first president of College of the Atlantic, Ed Kaelber, and built a Friendship sloop for him called the Amos Swan. Kaelber ended up investing in the business, enabling Ralph to build a new shop, next to the house he inherited from his father on the Southwest Harbor shore. From then on, Ralph’s career took a turn toward building more Friendship sloops and other pleasure craft.

Ralph suffered a number of serious ailments over the years. As the 1980s and ‘90s wore on, Richard recalls, he took charge, increasingly, of construction, while Ralph continued with design and did select tasks on the projects.

As Richard and Lorraine explored the possibility of taking over the business, it became clear that the purchase would mean closing and selling Ralph’s construction shop on the shore, moving operations to the storage yard in Manset, and changing the business name as a way to reposition Richard as the head of the firm. Under the old Ralph W. Stanley name, people called up expecting to speak with Ralph.

“My father has a great reputation with most people. I think that’s a good thing,” Richard says.

Still, there was something of an eclipse factor in the situation. And the couple wanted to emphasize that, while they would be continuing along the traditional path forged by Ralph, they also have “an eye toward the future and a focus on innovation” and “the best of modern marine technology,” as the company website says.

Then the economy went in the gutter.

“So we decided we would just do it, the two of us,” Lorraine says.

Existing storage customers remained with Great Harbor Boatworks, and the business has been sustained by Richard’s longstanding rapport with existing owners.

“We have a business, we have solid, long-term customers,” Lorraine says. “We like them, they like us. And we’ve been able to hang in there, through what’s been a really difficult time for the economy and not a great time for the boatbuilding industry.”

Running the operation has been a learning experience for both. Richard knew how to build boats. Lorraine had some experience with marketing concepts, from her job at the graphics design firm in New York, but had to jump into taking a bookkeeping class.

“For a long time, I’ve seen that people who start small businesses are usually really good at what they do, but they don’t necessarily have a great handle on running a business,” she says. “It’s a real horns-of-a-dilemma thing, because if you devote all your time to being a great businesses person, you’re not doing what you said you want to do when you started your business.”

It didn’t take long for the daily minutiae of running a business took its toll.

“It’s been a struggle for us, getting caught up in the day-to-day of, ‘How are we going to get through this moment?’” she says. “We weren’t able to stand back and say, ‘Wow, this is not so shabby here.’”

As the couple waits out the recession, the company’s Facebook page, which was recently up to 11,736 “likes,” has been a good indicator of the high level of interest people have in the product. It’s a perfect outlet for Lorraine’s penchant for photography and promotion. She continuously documents works in progress and scenic vistas. There’s a photo of Catawampus coming out of the water for another winter, Endeavor getting rigged up to go in, and shots of the elegant brightwork on decks and pilothouse of the elegant yacht Nathaniel. The first of two coats of glossy Epifanes Monourethane deep green is shown off. A detail shot of the mast hoops on the cutter Resolute elicits the comment, “The craftsmanship, the knowledge of proper rigging, the artist eye to see this shot and the ability to capture it. Thank you for sharing.”

Photos of Hieronymous receive 672 likes and a long stream of comments from facebookers around the world:

“Are you already smackin’ your lips thinking about another one?what a girthy gal!!”

“This is Corfou island speaking (Greece).the beauty of this boat is out of any coment.This boat is simply ALIVE.”

“adoro queste Poppe|!!!!!!!!!!!!!muy muy bonito ¡¡¡¡”

“Spettacolo!!!Prachige lijn! Mooi bootje!& Splendid line! Nice boat! (Translated by Bing)

There’s quite a bit of back-and-forth among boat enthusiasts about the current rebuild of Mbuoya, a Cautamet, Mass., boat that arrived earlier this year for rehab. The 29-footer, built in 1990, is named after a Tanzanian guide the owner came to know in his travels.

“i am a fibreglass moulder and have done it for a passion for over 30 years,” says one. “just love ur work keep it up”

“Ever try carbide scrapers?” asks another commenter.

Lorraine responds: “We sanded the bottom with sanders hooked up to vacuums and then I vacuumed up the residual mess, which was quite a bit….we sometimes use carbide scrapers. This bottom had had bottom paint rolled over unsanded bottom paint (apparently) and was in need of a solid going-over, which it got. It has always seemed odd to me that people are so willing to give the bottom work to the lowest paid worker in the yard/bidder for the job. That is, after all, the part that keeps the water out.”

The preoccupied look in Richard’s eyes, it turns out, may be pain, in which he is constantly. A certain stiffness and misalignment to his upper body are a giveaway to the accident he was in when he was 17. It was the winter of 1980, and he was a passenger in the backseat of a Subaru station wagon. The car spun out on black ice, hit a tree, was hit by another car, and crashed up against a telephone pole.

“I broke the second, third and fourth vertebrae in my neck, the third in three places and the other ones in one place each,” he says. “It was a miracle I wasn’t paralyzed.”

Stanley came to before help arrived. He got out of the car and began to walk the rest of the way home.

“I was rubbing my neck, going, ‘Oh, my f***ing neck. I gotta go home. I’m hungry,’” he recalls. “My cousin chased me down the road and convinced me to come back because he could see there was something really wrong. He convinced me to come back to the car and sit down.”

It turned out that help was delayed because the accident was the second of two that happened within minutes of each other in Southwest Harbor. Finally, an ambulance from Northeast Harbor arrived, and he was whisked off to the hospital.

“I come to in Bangor and they had this stainless steel bar with these two bolts in my head,” he says. “No one was in the room, other than this other patient. I didn’t know anything, why I was there, what had happened. I was freaking out, with this bar in my head. I was, like, ‘I’m getting out of here.’ So I reached up and I started pulling it off my head, but I couldn’t get the tips of the bolts out of the side of my head.”

He mimes himself struggling, then laughs at the freaked-out reaction he’s getting.

“Oh god, that hurt,” he laughs. “And before I know it, I’m surrounded…”

“Ya think?!” Lorraine expostulates.

“…and pinned to the bed, and they’re taking this bar off my head and they’ve stuck these sandbags around my head and I was like freaking out, ‘Man, this is not right! Let me go!’ And they got this new bar ‘cause I bent that one. They started tightening them bolts in my head. And I’m, like, ‘Holy frig!’ The pressure those bolts make when they go in your head. God, does that hurt! I still feel that pressure today. And they didn’t use the same holes! They made new ones!”

A strangled sound of dismay comes from Lorraine.

“I was livid, man, I was mad!” Richard continues. “They sedated me then. Put me right out. When I came to, though, there was this girl in this wheelchair who had been all stove up in a Trans Am T-top that had rolled over I don’t know how many times. Her legs were wrapped around the T-top and she broke her neck, she broke almost every bone in her body. And she was there because they wanted someone next to me to try to calmly tell me why I was there. She offered to do so, I guess. So she was there when I come to, a nice-looking blonde girl. I was all cast and bandages, but she was a nice-looking girl. I say, ‘Oh, I’ve gone to heaven!’ I was 17 years old. So she told me what she’d gone through and what was going on with me. And it was okay then.”

Richard had an operation. Doctors took a bone from his hip, made new pieces out of it, lined the vertebrae up the way they ought to be, and chinked the pieces around the vertebrae. They drilled holes in the bone, and held it all together with stainless steel nails and wire.

“I could have done the operation myself, you know,” Stanley laughs. “They were just using tools that I use – stainless steel nails and stainless steel wires, and twist them up like bread ties, and get the right tension on them. And all that’s still in there. It all fused together.”

These days, he’s also got degenerative disk disease in his back. His day-to-day tasks don’t help that situation.

“I have to watch what I do now. It put me in the hospital. I lifted a mast up on the horses, and the third time it just screwed up my back. I thought it would get better, but it just got worse and worse, and off to the emergency room I went.”

On a recent afternoon at the yard, Lorraine is painting a hatch for Mbuoya. An employee, Tony Menzietti, is up in the loft, sanding one of the boat’s bench seats and periodically running the shop vac.

In a separate building across the way, Richard and his apprentice, Ryan, are standing in back of a half-built daysailer, which sits on jackstands under Westwind’s hulking hull. Richard is hunched forward, one eye closed, observing the alignment of a plumb bob.

He steps aside and tells Ryan to observe how the bob hangs.

“You keep sighting it,” Richard says. “The problem is, there’s more board on this side than that side. Center it up here. You see that?”

The two shift their attention to the bow and pull out a laser level. The job today is to brace up the hull, then build some staging. They hunt around for scrap lumber for the braces. Ryan carefully uses the bandsaw to shave off an inch or two.

The 19-footer has come along quite a bit since Ryan began his apprenticeship with Stanley, two years previously. Now he’s a high school sophomore and studies Stanley’s moves – just as Stanley must have studied his mentors when he was a teen.

Back at the stern, Stanley judges they might have overcompensated on the way the boat leans.

“Too much angle,” he mutters. “Gotta come more like that.”

Ryan begins to remove the jackstands that have supported the boat up to now, as Stanley wedges the braces against the hull and nails them to footings attached to the floor. Over the next few weeks, they’ll be fitting in the floor timbers and starting on the deck frame.

Stanley’s father drafted the Friendship sloop-inspired design for this boat in 1985. It was the smallest design Ralph had made in 30 years, during which time he built power and sailboats in the 20-foot and 30-foot range. The design came about at the request of a Greening Island summer resident, who owned a Stanley 26 lobster-style yacht built in 1963, the Annie T., and wanted a stable and easy-handling boat for his 15-year-old son. The construction of the boat, dubbed Bucephalus, was documented in a book called Boatbuilder, written by Hope Herman Wurmfeld.

The keel for latest iteration under construction was actually put together at least 15 years ago. When Ryan’s family contacted Richard about an apprenticeship, Richard figured it would be a good project to work on. He’s modified the design so the boat will have an open cockpit, as opposed to the little cuddy cabin his father designed for the early 19-footers. There will still be dry storage up under the bow and under the aft seat.

With the recent grant from the Maine Arts Commission, Richard says, he will be able to buy tools for Ryan. First on the list is a two-inch framing chisel.

Employee Tony Menziett prepares to sand a bench for Mbuoya.

Stanley likes teaching. Interviewed in 2011, he wryly said, “I don’t have to pay him, so I’m a much better teacher. It’s much more relaxed – I don’t yell and scream too much.”

“I love wooden boatbuilding because I have a way to be able to imagine the finished product before it’s done, before it even begins,” Richard says. “I can see that boat all finished. And what I love to do mostly is build keels. If I could just do one thing in life, I would just be a wooden boatbuilding keel-making fool. I just like doing that. I like working those big pieces of wood, and I like cutting the rabbets and timber gains and shaping it. I like doing that. My father liked to plank the boats. I like planking boats, too. And I like lining up the planks and making the plank lines come out nice and looking right.”

A boat’s beauty is embodied by its proportions, simplicity, and usefulness.

“What makes it most beautiful is the people enjoying it,” he says. “I thought I’d be able to build lobsterboats my whole life, and then the fiberglass lobsterboat business came in and – no more wooden lobsterboat. There are still some wooden lobsterboats being built, and some people still want wooden lobsterboats. I was just talking with a guy the other day who had been in wooden lobsterboats all his life, then had gone to fiberglass, and he’s having a new wooden boat built because he cannot stand it, and he said he will never step or work in a fiberglass boat again. Just physically hard on the body. They are not the same boat. You take a fiberglass copy of an Arthur Spurling rowing skiff, and you take that same wooden boat, and I can step on the thwart on the wooden one and still have two inches of freeboard. That fiberglass boat, I’ll be taking water on. Another thing is, when you’re rowing that fiberglass boat, and you stop rowing it, that boat dies in the water. You take that wooden boat and you start rowing it, and you stop rowing it, it just” – he pauses for an appreciative chuckle – “keeps on gliding. Yeah. I don’t know what that is.  I’m sure there’s someone with a PhD somewhere that can figure that out….Fiberglass is cold, dead material, it’s dense and heavy, and it’s smooth, so you’d think it would carry momentum. But there’s some kind of drag that’s stopping it. I could be a total Looney tune. But the wooden boat, even though the wood is dead, it seems more alive. It carries that momentum. It doesn’t have that drag on it.”

Wooden boats are more comfortable; fiberglass boats have a hard, slapping feel, he says.

Each plank marked for placement.

“In a powerboat or sailboat situation, the weight of the wood is different than the weight of the glass. You’ve got the hard, heavy, dense wood down the center of the boat. And then you’ve got the hard, dense wood, with the floor timbers, coming up out of the boat. And then you’ve got hard, dense wood for making the frames. But then you’ve got this soft, lighter wood making the planking of the hull. And then the tops are heavy. With fiberglass, you have a thicker, heavier, dense keel in them, but you’ve got that dense, heavy fiberglass going all the way up and then on top as well. So the weight proportions and placements are totally different in a wooden boat than a fiberglass boat. And I think that has a great deal to do with the motion of the boat. The motion of a fiberglass boat will be much snappier. The motion of a wooden boat will be a much softer roll. It will ro-o-o-o-oll and will come back soft, and it won’t snap you. A wooden boat will give you a much softer, nicer ride. And the sound of wood in the water is a whole different thing than the sound of fiberglass in the water.”

A boat’s simplicity can be inviting to the average boater.

“All these fancy, big boats are pretty – and a lot of work,” he says. “It’s exciting to sail on a big boat like that – you’re heeled over and you’re really powering along. But it’s quite exciting to be in a little boat powering along, too. And it’s a lot easier. And you can get into lots of place you can’t get into on a big boat. Smaller boats are more fun to use, I think. There are a lot of people who like their fast race boats, and people who like their big ocean cruising boats. And there are people who like their small boats. So there’s a lot of diversity in there.”

A boat’s proportions are a nuanced affair. The Annie T., with the curvy, low sweep of its sheer and the pleasing proportion of its pilothouse, is an example of a perfect boat. The 26-foot lobster-style pleasure boat was designed and built by Ralph Stanley, and launched in 1963.

“It’s a really beautiful wooden powerboat,” Richard says. “It’s just ultimately, to my eye, correct.”

Another boat  might be similar – but just not quite right.

In 2009, Richard Stanley checks the cradle holding Westwind on its descent from his father’s shop to the water, en route to his new shop a few miles away.

By the same token, the Annie T. is not made for a six-foot-tall person.

“If I go to the Annie T., I can’t stand up in that boat,” he says. “I have to duck. To make it right for a six-foot-tall person, you’d have to change the height of the sheer. But I think that lower sheer is why that boat looks right. Now, if it were a longer boat, if it were just another couple of feet longer, you could make that boat look right by having the higher sheer at the six-foot headroom. But being that length, to make that boat look as beautiful as you can, you can’t make it have six-foot headroom.

“You could make it look pretty all right, by raising the sheer up and making the house a little taller. But you’ve made that boat’s lines not what they should be. Does it ruin the boat? Does it ruin the boat’s handling? No. It makes it more functional. So a lot of times you have to compromise when you’re building boats.”

Richard’s dream is to custom-build boats to his own designs.

“I just like creating, and I think wooden boats are beautiful. I think they feel good in the water under your feet. They are dead wood, but they’re so alive. They have my life in them, my eye and my life, my feel, and that’s what I like. I love to create and build the boat. But I really like seeing them being used. These people [who say], ‘Oh, this boat is too beautiful to be used!’ Noooo! Don’t hurt me – use it!”

Westwind is carefully moved down the ways in 2009.

Kyle Stanley is seen here in 2001, at age 18, after a near-fatal car accident.
(Photo courtesy of the Stanley family)

A senior at Mount Desert Island High School at the time, he had been drinking. Stanley was a passenger in a car that took a corner too fast and flipped. Stanley was ejected through the windshield. His skull was fractured and his third and fifth vertebra broken. He had cerebral hematomas on both sides of his brain, two collapsed lungs, and a crushed aorta.

First, the doctors thought it would be a miracle if he survived. When he did, they thought it would be a miracle if he were to walk again, and if he were to regain normal cognitive functions.

Eleven years later, Stanley is married, has a solid work life, and he and his wife, Natalie, just had their first baby. They have a lovely home, and they’ve bought land for a future house that they plan to build themselves.

It’s been a long road. He’s one of the lucky ones, and he’s acutely aware that things might have been far different for himself and for his family.

Stanley says he wants to tell his story so that his own mistakes as a teen can serve as a cautionary tale to today’s kids.

Several weeks after the accident, Stanley woke up from a hospital-induced coma, with a halo on his head to support his neck, in the intensive care unit at Eastern Maine Medical Center.

Kyle and Natalie Stanley are seen here in the nursery of their Franklin home, a couple of weeks before the birth of their baby boy.

“I thought I was in the Bangor mall,” he says. “My sister looked like someone else to me. She said, ‘Kyle, can you wriggle your ears?’ That’s something I’m able to do. I wriggled my ears, and she smiled. I remember that clearly. I was 195 pounds before, and over the course of the hospital stay, I went down to 130, which is deathly-looking for a guy like me, as tall and skinny as I am.”

When he woke up, he tried to pretend that he was okay and everything would be fine.

“I would smile every day and give people the thumbs-up,” he says. “But the reality of it sets in after the fact. What I worry about more than anything was that I was not comprehending how much it affected the people who loved me. I didn’t realize how big it was, because I was just here one day and there the next. I tried not to let it affect me. But it certainly took its toll on my mother and father.”

Everyone in his family suffered from a sense of huge emotional loss, he says. But today, they find joy in the moments they have together as a whole.

“One of the greatest things about being alive today is to realize that I can give my parents a grandchild and they won’t miss out on the rest of my growth and development and the future that I hold. That would all have been gone. It would have been a different world for my whole family. Though, still, it was different all the way along. It’s really tough on people to almost lose a child. It’s probably the scariest thing a person could go through. And I didn’t acknowledge that as much as I could have.”

During his hospital stay, he progressed swiftly through physical therapy, and through what was apparently his natural ability to heal quickly. He rebounded nearly 100 percent within the next year or two.

“I suppose, in every way possible, I was a miracle,” he says. “I was in the hospital for just under three months. As soon as I got out of the hospital, it was like taking baby steps to become the normal teenager that I wanted to be.”

Stanley is 29 now. He recalls that, in grammar school, he was interested in art and had a real talent for basketball. All of that came to a stop in high school, as he sought his place in the social scene. He believes he was an ordinary high school kid – discovering drink at age 16, successfully keeping it from his parents. He found the social, party life helped him feel accepted by others in school.

Stanley with his baby boy and his parents, Frank and Ellen Stanley.
(Photo courtesy of Kyle Stanley)

“I was trying to gain friends, and it just felt good,” he says. “I didn’t like being home alone. So when I started to drink and party, all of a sudden I had all kinds of friends, and that was the driving force for me. All of a sudden, I felt like I belonged somewhere. That’s where it starts for a lot of kids. At grammar school in Tremont, we were so pure. I didn’t want to drink. I thought cigarettes were a horrible thing, and all that changed so fast when we got to high school. It was shellshock.”

A lot of high school kids were, and continue to be, involved in the same scene, he says: “The percentages would just scare you.”

Stanley’s accident occurred the day of the homecoming football game. He left school early and went to see a supplier who would buy him alcohol in Bar Harbor. It’s not hard to find a supplier.

“It’s different for everybody,” he says. “I knew a lot of people. I grew up on the island. Even if you can’t find a supplier, you can usually replace vodka with water, if you chose to, in your parent’s cabinet, and they wouldn’t know it. There are many options. For some people, it’s acceptable. You see it a lot, so it becomes normal.”

Stanley went back to the school to serve a Friday detention, then went to the football game. He talked with some people, then drove around with a friend. When the car flipped, Stanley, who didn’t have on his seatbelt, went through the windshield. The police found some 50 beer cans spread across the road that night.

“I made a lot of missed judgments and mistakes that night,” he says. “I had made similar bad decisions before, but this time I nearly lost my life.”

The accident set him back developmentally. At a time when he was supposed to be figuring out where to go in life, he was instead forced to focus on long-term recovery.

“At 18 years old, you want to be thinking about your future. I was thinking about that day,” he says. “So I slowed down in ways that are hard to explain. I had to regroup. It took time.”

Still, he returned to a school routine, taking classes through the internet to get credit, and graduating with his class. He started classes at Eastern Maine Community College in Bangor, but didn’t follow through on his hopes to earn an early childhood education degree. Instead, he fell in love with the woman who would become his wife, Natalie, and they began their life together. Natalie finished her studies in radiology and now works at Maine Coast Memorial Hospital in Ellsworth. Today, Stanley and his father run a baking soda-blasting company cleaning boat hulls. When the season is out, he does summer barge work for Captain Wid Minctons, owner of C/V Charles Bradley. He’ll continue in the carpentry business this winter with his father.

“I realized, Okay, I lived through something that could have killed me. I need to do something with my life. I realized, I’ve got this second chance in life. There was all this positive movement, but I couldn’t follow through with it very well,” he says. “When you look at it all, I’m just fortunate that I’m here. I’ve found reason for life, I’ve found enjoyment in everything, I’ve found the want and the will to work, to achieve things, to be studious, to be me. It’s taken a long time to get there. There have been a lot of setbacks. But every negative thing that has happened in my life, including this near-death experience, has taught me so much, and I have benefited positively in so many different ways.”

But he doesn’t want the lesson to stop there. As a member of the community, and especially now, as a parent, he hopes that others will learn from his mistakes.

“You’ve got to enjoy every day, live in the now,” he says. “Life is wonderful. People take it lightly. They don’t realize how big a deal life is, and the opportunities we have. Especially as kids, we don’t realize what we’re getting into. We forget how important it is to follow the basics of safety. There’s a lot to be missed if you die in a car at 16 or 18 years old.”

This is the message that he wants to tell today’s high school kids.

“I really don’t want this message to be so much about me, but about the entire MDI community and about how we should be educated enough to take care of one another,” he says. “There are reasons all around us that, if we pay attention to them, we can grow stronger as an island community.”

Stanley cites at least eight other MDI children who died in car accidents within roughly the past decade.

“We remember, from MDI High School, the accident injuring Jonathan Griffin in 1998. A scary moment, although, fortunately, he survived,” Stanley says.

He recalls Josh Sprague, a Bar Harbor teen who died in a car accident one morning when on Route 2 near the high school. Josh was an MDI graduate who spent much of his spare time playing basketball at the Y with friends. Stanley was a freshman in high school when Josh died.

Clint Chernoski, of Southwest Harbor, also died in a car accident when Stanley was in high school, as did soon after John Dow.

Chelsea Rae Ordway, 16, died unexpectedly in a car crash on Feb. 27, 2001. A junior at MDI, she enjoyed music and attending concerts and being on the internet.

Kelley Seavey, 17, and Nichole Jacobs, 16, both of Tremont, died in a single-vehicle accident in May 2001. Kelley’s younger sister was also in the wreck, and survived, with severe injuries. Kelley was a cheerleader at the high school and would have graduated the next month. Nichole was an enthusiastic joy to be around and the life of her family.

There was Blaine “Bubba” Thomas Alley, 17, who died on Aug. 10, 2005, in a car crash in Town Hill. Blaine was an incoming senior at MDI High School and was looking forward to the carpentry program at The Boggy Brook Vocational School.

Michael Alan Lewis, 16, died in a car crash on August 19, 2009. Michael enjoyed being outdoors. His passion was riding four-wheelers, snowmobiles, and racing his dirt bike with friends. What he enjoyed most was putting a smile on everyone’s face.

“Although it is impossible to prevent many accidents, a lot of these situations could have been different with better decision-making, like not driving too fast, remembering to wear seatbelts, not talking or texting on cellphones, not acting young and bulletproof,” Stanley says. “There’s no one to blame. It’s just so unfortunate, these examples, how they happened and how they have traumatically impacted the lives of their loved ones, and the communities that raised them.”

Kelly and Nichole were from his hometown of Tremont.

“Their accident had a big impact on everyone who knew these girls when they died,” he says. “Clint came from next-door Southwest Harbor. His loss was also very hard to accept. Josh died when I was a freshman in high school. It also rattled the entire school and community. I didn’t know Josh, and I didn’t realize the effect it would have on me.

Generation after generation, we’ve all lost friends in high school. It seems as though you can talk with someone who lost friends in car accidents 40 years ago in high school as well. People who live on Swan’s Island lost friends of high school age on Swan’s Island; you can’t even drive that fast out there. Generation after generation, we all raise our kids and we try to raise them right, but we forget. And next thing you know, things get serious. They did for me. And when I went through this accident, I recall all my friends wearing their seatbelts and telling other people, ‘Wear your seatbelt.’ And it lasted for three months and then it just faded away. And then Clint died. And all Clint’s friends were saying, ‘Wear your seatbelts.’ And then they forget after a short period of time.”

Stanley was a dear friend of Clint Chernoski’s sister.

“I watched her family break down after his death. It was scary,” he says.

He has also seen the terrible grief suffered by John Dow’s parents.

“They miss their son,” he says. “I feel terrible about it. It’s hard to not consider their pain when I see them, but it’s something I’m fortunate I don’t have to worry about for my parents. I couldn’t imagine what that would have been like for them. My heart continues to go out to my peers mentioned, and everyone affected with their loss. I have done a great deal of thinking about them. It has never been easy to understand.”

The worst thing a community can do, he says, is to forget the lessons learned. He wants people to remember these kids, who have taught life’s most important lesson – to experience life itself.

“People have died in high school for years. And it’s probably going to continue to happen. But we don’t want it to, so how do we prevent that? I think it’s by remembering that these things happened,” he says. “By verbalizing the fact that we’ve lost children, verbalizing the fact that your child mean the world to you – tell them that you love them more than anything else out there, and please just do mom and dad that one favor and be responsible, do what you know inside is right.”

Parents, friends, family, neighbors, and members of the schools and community must act together to make sure that children coming into driving age have safe vehicles, wear their seatbelts, and drive and act responsibly, he says.

“These are things that all parents want. It’s simple, right? But we get caught up in daily life, and the important things, like wearing your seatbelt, which would save your life, gets overshadowed by other stuff,” he says. “We take things for granted. The seatbelt thing – you’re ‘not going to crash’ necessarily on the ride to the store, so you don’t wear your seatbelt. But what if you did crash? Everybody around you is affected, and their whole world changes. That’s my message. Things do happen, when you least expect it. We don’t want to fail at something so obvious and so simple as paying attention and wearing seatbelts.”

And he wants high school-age kids, for generations to come, to remember what’s truly important in life – and that is, to resist terrible influences that can rob them of life.

“What you’re doing in high school does not define who you are as a person,” he says. “Kids in grammar school look at life differently than kids in high school. They go from being pure, in a way, to experimenting in growing up, which involves a lot of negatives. Believe it or not, the perspective changes for a high schooler crossing into the next chapter in life, too. To become an adult, you may have to go through some negative experiences, but that doesn’t define who you are, who you always were. But you can ruin your life by trying to be something that you’re not in high school, by joining that scene, by having those friends. You would be impressing friends that are likely gone as soon as you graduate. You want to enjoy yourself at high school age, but don’t let it change who you are as a person.”

The drive to experiment, to look at the world in different ways, is part of the human experience, he says. And it’s prevalent during high school years, when the world gets bigger, when there are more personalities and more options – and a need to be accepted.

“I would say to kids, Trust yourself and trust what’s right. Be you and love who you are and take care of your mind and your body. You only get one chance. Don’t destroy it before you find your calling in this world, as I did. I nearly lost what I could not see ahead of me. I would have never found my future as a husband and a father. I would have never found myself as a confident and happy man. I nearly took the joys and promises of my continued growth through life away from my entire family. But it’s only because I could not see past the importance of social acceptance at the ages of 16, 17, and 18. I stopped listening to what I knew was right, and instead I put myself in dangerous situations. With this new school year, we all as parents and kids need to pay attention.”

He adds, “Let’s enjoy one another just a little bit longer. Let’s enjoy this incredible earth for all it’s given us. We shall all continue to marvel in our human ability. So let’s safely enjoy our wonderful lives on MDI.”

The cooperative got its start with a group of just 11 local artists, who found strength in numbers.

The store is currently owned and managed by five of the original artists: Cherie Magnello, Chong Lim, Sue Hill, Abigail Goodyear and Margaret Bundy.

Abigail Goodyear and Cherie Magnello, two of Island Artisans’ founding members.

The galleries are cornucopias of fine work.

There is Carole Beal pottery, handmade and handpainted with images that reflect a birch forest or a silhouette of the mountains and islands of Acadia. Atlantic Art Glass is hand-blown glass made by Linda and Ken Perrin.

Copper and glass clocks.

There are scarves handwoven in silk and wool blends by Lucy Tracy, bags by Pam LeBlanc, felted work by Jodi Clayton, tapestry bags by Erda, and handwovens by Janice Jones, Laney Lloyd, and Elsa Fletcher.

Precious metal and gem jewelry.

Chong and Judy Lim of Island Designs in Bar Harbor focus on embossed and handmade paper. Cheri Magnello, who markets her work under the name cherbijoux, offers contemporary jewelry designs in precious metals and gems. Sue Hill makes handspun and hand-dyed yarns. Richard Hill fabricates clocks from copper and enamel. Beth Herrick makes handpainted porcelain, and Anne Wheeler makes natural wood boxes and wall art.

Sweetgrass baskets.

Garlic baskets are crocheted out of colorful raffia by Libby Mitchell. Kathie Krause, of Monhegan Island, makes wire and shell wreaths from periwinkles and other natural materials gathered on Monhegan Island.

Gerald Neptune Jacobs, of Morrill, weaves baskets from hand-pounded and split brown ash, incorporating birch bark strips and pine cones scales. There are lobster trap floating rope baskets, wall sconces, handblown glass, wooden serving and mixing spoons, good-luck Japanese dolls, woven copper tapestries, and other works by jewelers, weavers, potters, basket-makers, printmakers, sculptors, and more.

Abigail Goodyear and Cherie Magnello are two of the founding members of Island Artisans.

“It originated as the Island Artisans Cooperative, in the mid-1970s,” said Magnello.

The cooperative started out in the Gull Building, in a space that became too small for the group’s needs. In 1982, the  founding members incorporated and bought half of a storefront building on Main Street, a great spot for catching tourist traffic.

“It gave us a lot more presence than an individual artist can have, a lot more impact,” Magnello said of the cooperative. “The kind of work that we’ve always tried to display in here has, over the years, built a pretty big reputation for this store. I think that was part of the impetus then –  to have a collection of really good-quality art.”

Over the years, said Goodyear, the membership has grown to include not only local artists but those from throughout Maine. The cooperative has made a point of welcoming emerging artists, she said. And 12 years ago, the cooperative opened a branch gallery in Northeast Harbor.

In the 1970s, said Magnello, the Bar Harbor arts scene was vibrant among the people participating in it and living in the area.

“But it hadn’t been hugely visible,” she said. “Bar Harbor was still relatively sleepy. There was stuff going on, but it changed radically in 10 years. It was really the 1980s when it started to hit its stride. So there was some comfort in numbers, in having this to do with other artists.”

“Did you see, last night? There were, like, a thousand squids over there,” says nine-year-old Liam, who points to the sea. “It was so cool.”

Hegira, Helen Brooks, and Osprey.

The boat is temporarily tied up to a town dock in Southwest Harbor, awaiting the arrival of more family members and a guest for the Friendship Sloop Society’s Southwest Harbor Rendezvous.

Parked elsewhere along the shore and on moorings are fishing boats, yachts, Coast Guard vessels, and a multitude of dinghies. The blue sky, traced by the harbor’s semi-circle of wooded hills, is fuzzed by a shimmer of heat and the timeless sound of lapping waves.

Scott Martin comes down the ramp wearing the pirate’s hat that’s usually seen when he’s aboard his Friendship sloop, Eden. Miff Lauriat follows soon after, sporting a crisp white button-down shirt and cherry-red shorts, to catch a ride to his cherry-red-hulled sloop, Salatia.

Alice E., Banshee, and Endeavor round a mark.

On Gladiator, some members of the family wear T-shirts emblazoned on the front with “71,” the boat’s number in the society’s registry, which keeps tabs on the provenance and ownership of all known Friendship sloops, going back more than a century. On the back of the T’s is the image of a gladiator’s helmet topped by an adornment of centurion plumes, and the words “Team Gladiator” and “Navigo, Cucurri, Devinco,” the fighting words, in this case, meaning, I sail, I zip past you, I conquer your butt.

Ben, who is 14, is tasked with making sure the lifejackets are handy.

Hegira picks up speed.

“Two years ago, a boom swung near our boat and almost hit five of us off,” he says. “No one’s ever really fallen off of this boat, that I know of.”

“You should fall off the boat, to have the experience,” jokes his grandfather, Bill. “It’s a good day for it.”

The Southwest Harbor Rendezvous is part of the summer-long circuit of Friendship Sloop Society races. The grandest event on the circuit will occur a week later, with the Homecoming, in Rockland, where the sloops will figure in three days of racing, a parade of sail, and an open house for the public, at the docks.

The crew aboard Endeavor help the sail catch a puff.

The Zuber family has sailed Gladiator at the Rockland Homecoming almost every year since they bought the boat, 45 years ago. The society was formed in 1961 by Bernard MacKenzie of Scituate, Mass., who owned a Friendship sloop named Voyager. According to a history written up by Betty Roberts, an early member of the society, MacKenzie sailed Voyager in a Boston Power Squadron race in 1960, and won. This inspired him to have a homecoming race in Friendship, which was a center of this type of boat construction in years that bracket the turn of the 20th century. The society’s first race drew 14 sloops, and the registry listed 22 members. Today, the registry totals 281 boats, including a fair amount of the original sloops and many wood and fiberglass reproductions. Races moved to Boothbay Harbor in 1985 to accommodate the growing fleet, and again in 1995, to Rockland. The race series this year includes Rockland, Southwest Harbor, Pulpit Harbor, and Marblehead and Gloucester, Mass.

Little wind made fending off here and there a necessity.

The Zubers added the Southwest Harbor Rendezvous to their racing ways a few years ago.

“We like this race,” says Bill, the family patriarch, who is fit-looking and sports a goatee and mustache. “It’s very informal and there’s not as much blood and guts kind of stuff going on. It’s just a real fun thing.”

Bill and his wife, Caroline, who has a cheerful personality, bought Gladiator when the boat was 65 years old. At the time, the couple lived in New Jersey. They later moved to Friendship, and their three sons were raised with the boat as a kind of older sister. Their youngest, Andy, began sailing on Gladiator when he was in the womb, and now, according to his family, it’s hard to wrest control of the vessel from him. Ben and Liam are his sons, and they, too, have been sailing from their pre-birth days.

Surprise and Hegira below the Bear Island light.

Ben wears a cap bearing the image of Marvin the Martian, and Liam sports a desert hat given to him by his father, who joined the army right out of high school and spent a year in Egypt. They explain that they get to take the helm sometimes, but not when the race gets serious.

“When my dad’s racing, he just goes into a mode,” says Ben. “Nothing else matters except racing.”

“When you try to talk to him he just goes, ‘Shh!’” says Liam.

“And he’s a little more aggravated,” says Ben. “But we still love him.”

At age 110 this year, Gladiator is the second-oldest known Friendship sloop. Alice E., which lives in Southwest Harbor, is the oldest.

Gladiator was built in 1902 by Alexander McLain, on Clam Cove in Bremen, and was used for long-lining swordfish and working offshore in the cod fisheries, as well as for lobstering. Daniel Simmons of Waldoboro bought the boat for $450. Mrs. McClain sewed the sails.

Salatia.

Alice E. was built in 1899. Its documentation, describing its early fishing and later yachting days, goes back to the early 1900s. Alice E., 42 feet overall, was first used as a working lobster boat.  In the 1930s, it was purchased by a doctor and renamed Depression.  The boat sold at one time for $15. Although renowned Friendship sloop builder Wilbur Morse’s name is mentioned in the earliest document, the boat’s provenance is unknown. Today, Alice E. is owned by Karl Brunner and is part of his commercial charter fleet.

A century ago, McLain and the Morse were two of the biggest names in the Friendship sloop-building world. The towns of Friendship and Bremen are on Muscongus Bay, and there were other builders of repute in those towns and elsewhere around the bay, where the design was developed for commercial fishing, be it lobstering, seining for herring, hand-lining for cod, sword fishing, or mackereling.

Banshee drifts along on a hot race day.

“It is certain some of these fishermen had seen a Gloucester fishing boat, and being impressed with the lines, had incorporated some of its features into their own hull designs,” Roberts wrote. “These men did not build a ‘class boat’ where every hull is the same length. From existing records we find that the original builders constructed sloops varying in length of 21 feet to 50 feet. Probably the average length would be about 30 feet to 40 feet. The basic design was scaled up or down depending on length, and followed a pre-set formula. They all had an elliptical stern, and most of them a clipper bow, and were gaff-rigged.”

Wilbur Morse’s name, in particular, came up as “father” of the sloop because of the large number that came from his shop.

“Because of Wilbur’s mass production and his shop being in Friendship, this great sloop acquired the name of the town he was building in,” Roberts wrote.

In the early 20th century, the advent of motors and modern equipment lured fishermen away from the sailing sloops. But yachters turned their attention to the boat’s fine lines and reputation for seaworthiness.

Helen Brooks sails off the Claremont Hotel.

According to one of the boatbuilding world’s “bibles,” Howard Chapelle’s American Small Sailing Craft, the sloop evolved from a centerboard boat to a deep-keel hull.  As the sloop grew in size, double headsails came to replace the old single jib.

“The small sloops were jib-and-mainsail boats; the larger ones, often as  long as 36 to 40 feet on deck, had a staysail and jib and often a fidded topmast carrying a gaff topsail and, usually, a jib topsail as well,” Chapelle wrote.

The design’s low sails, great beam, and deep draft gave it a good reputation in heavy weather; by the mid-20th century, this led to the conversion of many of the boats into cruising yachts.

“This was their great quality – they would bring you home as well as they took you out,” wrote Chapelle.

Hegira.

Mount Desert Island has what is said to be the largest concentration of Friendship sloops anywhere in the world. At least a dozen of the sloops live within 10 miles of Southwest Harbor. And today’s premier builders of the sloops live in Southwest Harbor. Ralph Stanley, and now his son, Richard Stanley, have built and restored wooden sloops for many years. Jarvis Newman is known for his fiberglass versions.

Ralph Stanley, who is a 1999 National Heritage Fellow under the National Endowment for the Arts, and who is now retired, was one of the last remaining builders of wooden boats in the age of fiberglass. As part of his repertoire, he built Friendship sloops ranging in size from 19 feet to 36 feet, some of them seen regularly in local waters. Richard Stanley was largely responsible for running his father’s shop in recent years, and now has his own boatbuilding business, where the vintage Friendship sloop Westwind, built in 1902 by Charles Morse, has been undergoing rehabilitation.

Newman created fiberglass versions of the sloop. The 25-foot fiberglass sloop became known as the Pemaquid, although the original Pemaquid referred to a keel model of the Friendship sloop that was first produced in the early 20th century. Thanks to documentation made available by the Watercraft Collection of the Smithsonian Institution and then published by Chapelle, the Pemaquid is a mainstay for many aficionados who want to build their own. Newman created the mold for the fiberglass line some 40 years ago, from a wooden sloop called Old Baldy, which was built in 1965 by James Rockefeller Jr., who owned a boatbuilding shop called Bald Mountain Boat Works in Camden. At the time, Newman gave Rockefeller free storage at his own shop in Southwest Harbor, in return for letting him take a mold off the boat. He went on to produce 20 Pemaquids. Old Baldy ended up sitting in a barn in New Hampshire, out of the  water for a decade. But Newman kept track of the boat, and bought it in recent years. He restored it, and launched it in time for the Southwest Harbor Rendezvous in 2011.

In the late 1970s, Newman restored one of the original sloops, named Dictator, a 31-footer that was built in 1904 by Robert E. McLain. Once he finished, he took a mold off the hull and, over the years, built numerous fiberglass reproductions. The original Dictator today belongs to film industry professional who splits his time between Deer Isle and Burbank, Calif.

On this hot July day, many of Stanley and Newman’s sloops can be seen prowling around the start line, which is also the finish line, off the north end of Greenings Island. Not coincidentally, the line is pinned down at one end by Ralph Stanley’s motoryacht Seven Girls, where Stanley serves as the race committee chairman, aided by committee colleagues – Jill Schoof, the timer and statistician, and Rodney Flora, the cannoneer, who themselves own a Friendship sloop, Wings of the Morning, built in 1967 by Roger Morse. All are seated in deck chairs comfortable enough to wait out a couple of hours of racing.

Surprise’s skipper, Steven Keblinsky, gets off a water balloon shot.

In 1979, Stanley built Endeavor, which is now cruising onto the race course under the helmsmanship of Skip Fraley. Endeavor’s owner, Betsey Holtzmann, is passionate about the open air and the sea. The boat is a dependable sight on the course, but was almost lost forever in 2001, when it sank during the Rockland race. A strong gust of wind and sloppy sea conditions, aggravated by a bilge pump that had been switched off without the skipper’s knowledge, and poorly stowed backpacks carrying  a couple of hundred pounds of stuff,  flipped the boat. Five people went over, picked up minutes later by Stanley.  The 25-foot boat went down in 110 feet of water, along with Holtzmann’s “second home” worth of stuff, stowed below – a seaside library of children’s books for her son, sea-themed craft works by area artisans, childhood mementoes, her son’s silver baby cup.

A handy bucket of water balloons on Gladiator.

Holtzmann hired a salvage operator who, after many passes, found the boat a month later, sitting upright, embedded three feet deep in mud. The boat was hauled up, fixed up, and ready to sail the following summer. For good measure, many of Holtzmann’s treasures were still in good condition.

For today, Newman’s Old Baldy is back on shore. But other Pemaquids are sailing into sight. Regulars from Massachusetts include Banshee, owned by Carole and John Wojcik, and the full-bellied Hegira, dressed in green and ribboned in gold, owned by Laurie Raymond. There’s Osprey, built in 1973 and one of two Pemaquids used in the making of the Jim Carrey movie, “The Truman Show.” One was destroyed during the movie’s storm sequence. Osprey survived the movie and now belongs to Steve Hughes of Southwest Harbor. At the moment, though, Newman can be seen at Osprey’s helm.

One of Newman’s most cherished Pemaquids is surely Salatia, owned by Miff Lauriat and Marjory Russakoff of Southwest Harbor. The red hull stands out on the water, and Lauriat, as the organizer of the Southwest Harbor Rendezvous, is one of the society’s most enthusiastic voices.

The local boat Eden, owned by Scott Martin, is a 25-foot wooden Pemaquid built by do-it-yourselfer Ed Coffin, of Owl’s Head, in 1971. Coffin wrote a book about his project, which shaped up in what he called his “Tug and Grunt Boatyard” and which involved a fair amount of blue car-body putty. Coffin called the boat Ray of Hope for his wife, who was alcoholic. One day, Coffin said, he hoped his wife would recover.

That didn’t happen. In the meantime, the boat was sold to another owner for the charter boat trade. Martin, who has struggled with alcoholism, worked aboard the boat for a time, then bought it some 15 years ago. The boat soon came to represent his own shot at redemption – the one thing he was able to hold onto through the years, as he lost everything else. In 2009, Martin was approached at a dock by an elderly man who recognized the boat. It turned out to be Coffin, who shared his story. Shocked by the connection, Martin re-dubbed the boat Eden’s Ray of Hope.

The venerable Alice E. stirs a certain nostalgia with its arrival on the course.  It is accompanied by Helen Brooks, also owned by Brunner and previously named Baschert, Yiddish for “destiny.” Brunner renamed the boat after his grandmother, who helped him get his excursion trade started, in 2002. One of the largest boats in the fleet, at 42 feet overall, Helen Brooks was built in 1970 by another big producer of Friendship sloops,  Bruno and Stillman, Inc., of New Hampshire.

Gladiator.

Two other boats that serve the tourist trade are usually given the day off so they can join the race. One of them is Chrissy, a 1910 Charles Morse build, owned by Ed Zimmerman and operated in Bar Harbor. Another is Surprise, owned by Steven and Andrew Keblinsky. Surprise was built in Round Pond, using local oak and cedar trees, and has continuously sailed Maine waters since 1964. First employed as a lobster boat fishing from Monhegan Island, and also carrying firewood, it entered passenger service in 1979, and was later donated to the Atlantic Challenge Foundation in Rockland.

On the Dictator model Gaivota, the society’s vice-commodores, Kathy and Bill Whitney, raise linen-colored sails up the boat’s hefty wooden mast; they have outfitted their boat with an old-fashioned gallery rail that encircles the cockpit.

Gladiator is able to proclaim itself as “the Friendship from Friendship,” meaning that Caroline and Bill Zuber live in the coastal town by that name. The boat has a hearty aroma of old wood and salt.

“We put a lot of salt in her. It keeps her from gathering rot and things,” says Bill.

Nine people are on Gladiator today. That’s small, actually, compared with the time they carried 18 people for a Rockland race.

“It looked like a Haitian refugee camp,” says Andy’s older brother, Bill Zuber III, who has come up with his partner from New Hampshire. Andy’s wife, Candace, is also here, along with her daughter, Ally, age 16.

Boating is a new activity for Candace and Ally. They like it pretty well.

“I have to say, though, I’m a fair weather girl,” says Candace. “I don’t like the fog and the rain.”

She peers up at the cloudless sky.

Bill Zuber at the helm of Gladiator.

“It looks like fair weather,” she says.

That’s one way to put it. It’s actually going to be a day of water- and soda-guzzling, with the temperatures reaching into the 90s and the sun beating down.

Gladiator is, essentially, a member of the Zuber family, too. Its journey home began when it landed in Bill and Caroline’s hands.

It was 1967. The couple lived in New Jersey. They were building their own sloop, and went on the hunt for a ready-made mast to install. With their friends, Dot and Stu Hancock, they spotted two white Friendship sloops in a nearby boatyard. Both were named Downeaster.

“One had the builder’s name, Lash Brothers, on the trailboards and had been built in 1963,” according to a write-up by the Zubers in this year’s race program. “The other had no builder listed, but in the cabin was a deck carlin with the inscription ‘86611 No.7.’ The owner’s name was listed on a card with a telephone number.”

The two couples bought the second boat, for $4,600.

A few months later, the two men set sail from New Jersey to Friendship Harbor to race in the three-day Friendship Sloop Regatta, and to register their boat with the society.

Caroline Zuber sees off her clan.

“The voyage was made with a barely functioning Model K Chris Craft gasoline engine, a ‘Dutch Log’ to calibrate speed underway, a compass and an ancient RDF [radio direction finder] for navigation,” the Zubers wrote. “The fuel was lashed in jerry cans along the cabin sides – not exactly U.S. Coast Guard approved condition, but they made it.”

The wives drove up to Friendship. When the second day of racing was cancelled due to fog, the couples went off to Rockland to the Customs House to research the number that was on the carlin.

Southwest Harbor Rendezvous organizer and owner of Salatia, Miff Lauriat.

“We pored over the dusty volumes listing all the documented vessels in the United States and soon determined that Downeaster was not the original name with that number,” they wrote. “In the 1902 book, however, it was determined that the original name was Gladiator and she had been launched in 1902, documented in the Waldoboro Customs House, and had been built for Daniel Simmons of Waldoboro by Alexander McClain.”

The family doesn’t know what became of the boat between 1927, when it ended its fishing days, and 1941, except that it was probably used as a yacht or day sailer in the Chesapeake Bay.

The new owners restored the original name of Gladiator and, soon enough, restored the boat – and themselves – to its rightful waters. In 1971, the Zubers bought property in Friendship. In 1973, Bill accepted a full-time job at Hurricane

Andy Zuber maneuvers on the final leg.

Island Outward Bound, a job he had for 16 years. Gladiator went along, to become part of the training fleet. The family later ran the boat as a commercial day sailer.

Andy remembers a call they got from an older man, who recognized the boat as the one his dad used to own, when he was a kid. There were old photographs to be viewed.

“It was weird for me to see pictures of a whole other family growing up on the boat,” says Andy. “It makes me realize how old it is and how lucky it has been that people took care of it.”

There was a five-year period, in the 1980s, when Bill rebuilt the boat, making it “bombproof,” as Caroline says.

“He said, ‘If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it right,’” she says.

But the frames and planks are original.

“It’s a museum in itself,” Bill says.

Down below, mounted prominently above the forward bunks, is the original carlin carved with the number 86611. Hanging on a wall in the head is a framed copy of the 1902 license.  Stowed under the companionway is a section of Gladiator’s original rudder, which Bill polished up and the society now uses as a trophy.

Ben and Liam lead the tour. A table bolted to the sole was removed, leaving behind phantom bolt holes. The galley is fixed up with a small stove, a couple of kettles, a freshwater tank, a cutting board, plastic storage bins, mugs on hooks, and a cooler. A curved ceiling member signals where the outer edge of the original cuddy cabin was; at some point in the boat’s history, the cabin was doubled in length. The bunks along the sides used to hang from chains. The boys call the bow bunks the “mouse house.” That’s where they usually sleep, and it’s a lot roomier than it appears, says Ben.

Ben Zuber prepares to lob a water balloon.

“One time I fell asleep down here and I actually slept through the whole, entire race,” says Liam. “I think it was last year.”

The hull is painted green. The decks are white and the cabin top is white and tan. Grab rails and trim are made from glossy teak. A skull-and-crossbones flag has been hoisted atop the mast. The bowsprit, like those on almost all the Friendship sloops, is highly ornamented. In this case, there’s a small, carved-wood gladiator’s helmet at the tip, an ivy twine, a bunch of gold stars, and “1902 Gladiator” painted in bright red. A plastic party cup props open the cabin’s overhead hatch.

As a last-minute addition this year, the boys say, the family painted more skulls-and-crossbones on each side of the keel, which will surely intimidate the competition during the summer’s races.

Andy is probably Gladiator’s biggest fan. But sailing is in the blood of the entire family.

Liam Zuber is full of exuberance on race day.

“We sail all the time, except in the winter,” says Liam. “We sail for fun, and we just like sailing. It feels natural.”

Bill enthuses about Gladiator’s “gentle” personality, in terms of how it moves. It’s a heavy, big-boned boat, at 19,000 pounds, probably because it was built for offshore fishing. It sails with a certain gravitas.

“They wanted a boat that had a little more sea-kindliness when it was rough,” Bill says of the design’s original customers.

He and his wife have a certain well-weathered outlook on this family member.

“This boat has been part of our life for a long time,” says Caroline.

“It’s also taken the biggest part of our fortune,” says Bill.

“This is all the vacations we never took,” Caroline jokes.

Alice E.’s name in the 1930s reflected the era.

By now, everyone is spread around. Andy is firmly in charge at the helm, although he lets his father and brother have a go once in a while. A couple of books emerge; one is about quantum physics and consciousness.

“A light summer read,” says Bill III.

The group languidly observes the scene. There’s a resident osprey nest on top of a ledge marker. An airplane growls overhead. The sky-blue boat Chamar sails out from Northeast Harbor; her captain wears a sky-blue polo shirt.  The mega-yacht Rebecca, out of Newport, sits on her mooring, her flag drooping ever so close to the water. Gladiator does a slow circuit around her endless length and her highly polished bow, which reflects the shimmering sea.

A Hinckley picnic boat zips by, and the family speculates about the price. And then they agree that nothing is as pretty as their boat.

The lobsterboat Gizmo can be seen in the distance; men haul traps, extract lobsters, then toss the traps back to the depths. The lobsterboats Nighthawk and Takin A Break speed by.

Bill III recalls the 2010 visit of President Obama and his family to Mount Desert Island. That was a great to-do for the fleet, which was in the middle of the rendezvous when the First Family arrived for lunch at the Claremont Hotel, which overlooks the finish line.

Always ones to throw together a show when the opportunity presents itself, the sailors put on a display of sail after the race, having learned of the first family’s proximity through Jarvis Newman’s daughter, Kathe Falt, who returned to shore after viewing the start of the race, only to be stopped and patted down by a Secret Service agent. Falt called Lauriat on his boat, and the word went out among the racers, by cellphone, to form a parade after the finish. With considerable foresight, Lauriat’s wife, Marjory Russakoff, had told her husband to contact the local police department before the race to let them know that the event involves cannon blasts, thus avoiding upset for the Secret Service.

Ben stretches out on a bench, a spare lifejacket over his face for shade. Folks dip their feet in the water, trying to cool off.

People are starting to wonder. “Where is the breeze?”

Liam and Bill III have gone below to fill tiny balloons with water. Gladiator is one of the main perpetrators in the fleet’s infamous water balloons fights. They gently place the filled balloons in a bucket and hoist the bucket on deck.

“They’re starting to get holes,” Liam groans, when one of the balloons spurts.

Ben emerges from below wearing a pirate hat.

“Aaay, arrgh,” growls Andy, pirate style. He steers toward Gaivota. “Could I have a grenade? I want to get the vice commodore.”

There’s Endeavor, with Holtzmann, her son Abe, Skip Fraley at the helm, and Kathy Van Gorder snapping pictures.

“Prepare for broadside,” announces Andy. “I think Surprise is trying to surprise us.  Prepare to be boarded!”

There’s a melee of grunt-inducing tosses and pirate growls. Many balloons hit all targets.

The sloops circle the committee boat. Everyone smiles, waves and yells at each other. The Cranberry Isles mailboat, Double B, motors in and noses up to the fleet, carrying spectators to view the day’s races.

People are starting to get hungry. Where’s the peanut butter and jelly? Gladiator is in fighting trim. It’s time to make sandwiches.

“Stand by to go somewhere else,” announces Andy, performing a jibe.

The talk becomes laconic, something about Miracle Whip versus mayonnaise versus mustard. Soda is broken out of the cooler.

Other types of sailboats can be seen gathering in the distance, in the Western Way. That’s the local International One Design fleet, taking part in the second day of the Hospice Regatta of Maine, now in its 16^th year and earning money for a good cause. The cruising class drifted off in the morning.

The Friendship sloop race occupies its own little niche, tucked up by Greenings Island.

Some years, all the activity on the water makes for quite a whirlwind.

Perhaps not today.

“Twenty-two minutes for the race to start, and there’s no wind,” says Bill.

Seven Girls pins up the first flag. The sloops mob up the committee boat.

Miff Lauriat and his gang on Salatia sail up.

“Which radio channel?” yells Bill.

“We don’t use radios, just smoke signals,” shouts Lauriat. “If you’re on fire, we’ll come.”

Bill scrutinizes the flags on Seven Girls and a chart from the race in 2008, and figures out the route, which is pretty much the same over the years, involving circuits around a couple of gongs and tipping off the Bear Island lighthouse.

“We’re going to go to the narrows this time,” Bill says. “We’re going to go where we didn’t go last time.”

“Sounds like Star Trek,” says Bill III.

Eden approaches. Balloons fly. Martin wears his pirate hat, a crewmate wears an eyepatch, the mast flies a skull-and-crossbones.

Voices burble: “They’re loaded.” “Arrrrgh!” “Uh oh, they have a water blaster!”

“Watch out for those guys!” yells Bill, his straw hat tumbling into the water.

“It looks like we beheaded you!” yells the Eden crowd.

Bill III grabs the hat with the gaff hook. The committee gets down to business and fires a cannon, signaling the race’s imminent start.

Andy and Bill get serious, as Gladiator and the other boats maneuver behind the start line. Andy reckons it’s 20 seconds to the start. The cannon goes off again.

“How about right now?” he says, heading up to the light air.

The wood of the boat creaks pleasantly, as it drifts along at the pace of a turtle. Bill reckons the wind will come around at some point.

Over the years, the fleet has collectively suffered various mishaps and many joys. Endeavor sank. A mast broke here, a gaff broke there. Gladiator ran aground in fog; no damage ensued. People fell overboard. A bowsprit went through Eden’s mainsail. Eden finished the race and tied up back at the dock, where “rivals” descended, whisked the sail to a sailmaker for repair, got it back the next morning, and had it back on the mast in 20 minutes.

“That mainsail was so perfectly stretched that she was really fast. It was really fun. We all contributed to Eden’s success,” Lauriat said at the time, then added ruefully, “This year, I promised myself, no adjusting anyone’s outhauls.”

One year, Wayne and Kirsten Cronin of Rockland showed up on the first day of racing on Tuesday, in their boat Rights of Man. But on Wednesday morning, they were too busy to join the fleet, due to the fact that they were having their baby.

“We regard that as the best excuse for not racing,” Lauriat said that summer. “We have a prize for youngest child in the race. A few hours old would win it.”

It’s all about good times and good stories. Everyone’s kids join the scene. Multiple generations have grown up with the sloops. Sure, there are trophies for the fastest boats under and over 25 feet, for the first Pemaquid sloop, for the fastest Class A original sloop built before 1920. There’s also the Rum Line Trophy, given in commemoration of the sloop’s working heritage, which drafts the original sloops into a contest to haul milk crates, one of which holds a half-gallon of rum. The youngest crew member wins a prize, as does “the woman who keeps sloop, crew, and family together,” the sloop that sails the furthest distance to be in the race, the sloop that finishes in the middle of the fleet, the sloop that places seventh in the fleet, the latest owner and restorer of a sloop, and the crew member who best represents the spirit of friendship. Along with the cookouts onshore, the trophy rum is shared all around, in paper cups.

Today’s casualties might be more of the slumbering variety.  Lulled by the sway of the boat, the senior Bill has gone below to take a nap. Dolphins crisscross Gladiator’s trail. The kids are broiling hot. There’s a lot of flopping in the scant shade on the side decks, feet over the side, hands paddling the water. The bottles of frozen water don’t melt fast enough to gulp down. Everyone’s parched.

Andy pipes up, optimistically, “Uh oh, watch out, we might get a little breeze. Just for a minute.”

“Did we actually get a gust of wind?” asks Liam.

“Gust, no. Zephyr, yes,” says his dad.

The kids wet their T-shirts in the cool ocean water, and put them on.

“Oh, yes. Ooooh. I feel so happy!” Ben exults.

Suddenly, the sound of other sailors whooping it up can be heard, as the lead boats round the Spurling Rock bell.

Bill pokes his head up to check on progress.

“Hi, Cap,” says Andy. “We’re almost to Spurling Rock.

“I guess I’d better stay down here, then,” Bill says.

“Yeah, that helps,” teases his son.

Suddenly, Bill III hops up.

“Hey, guys, get in the cockpit,” he tells the boys. “We’ll be going around the mark in a bit.”

The gong is louder. There’s excitement in the cockpit, and suddenly a flurry of activity. It’s taken more than an hour of sailing, but finally the fleet gets to make its  first maneuver. Relaxation time over, a cluster is caught in a contest of bumper boat. Lack of wind and an ebb tide brings out the friendliness of the Friendship sloop gang, as Alice E. fends off a buoy and other boats fend off Alice E., no damage done and no hard feelings. Salatia, which was lurking on the wrong side of the committee boat at the start and watched Eden, Osprey, and Peregrine waft ahead in a no-wind area, now has an advantage. Lauriat found a bit more breeze and is now maneuvering around the shenanigans to chase Helen Brooks and Surprise, in company with Alice E.

Now it’s Gladiator’s turn.

“Jibe ho!” yells Andy, as he whips the wheel around. The gong comes within spitting distance, the sails flip sides and fill with a freshening breeze for the next leg. Abruptly, there are wind shifts and currents to negotiate.

Gaining speed, Andy pummels the deck with glee.

“Come on, baby, let’s go!” he says. “Ha-ha ha-ha ha-ha!”

Maynard, seen in the film’s frame from behind, grabs Rusty.

“You’ll never know what it’s like to see your only son’s baseball cap float away with the tide, will ya?” he says, as Thom Willey, the production’s first assistant cameraman, shifts the focus from Maynard to Rusty’s face, which now dominates the frame and whose expression responds to Maynard’s anguish.

Thom Willey of Southwest Harbor is aboard Ryan Post’s lobsterboat, Instigator, for Anatomy of the Tide. The boat was often crammed with as many as 19 or 20 people, including the actors, hair, makeup, sound, camera, script, director, assistant director, boat captain, and director of photography.

Two young men are on a boat which is, in reality, tied to a dock, but seems to be underway, accompanied by the music of mournful bagpipes. Willey has a sharp focus on the hard-knock face of Donny, a shaggy-haired guy, who is shadowed with a play of light on his neck, seen left of the frame’s center.

“It’s a big moon,” Donny tells Kyle, who is seen in half profile in softer focus. “Okay? It’s big enough to see even during the light of day. And a moon like that controls the water.”

A newspaper is thrown on a table, flashing the headline, “State officials to regulate lobster traps.” Crickets chirp. Church bells ring a portent.

Kyle walks down a trail through a field, looking thoughtful, hands in pockets, his movement tracked by a camera on a dolly. He stops and gazes down at the harbor. The frame slowly fills with a shot of only his eyes, as the dolly pushes in toward him.

A coil of fishing line on a lobsterboat’s deck snarls a boy – a young Maine actor – and pulls him, screaming, overboard. The camera crew lies on the deck to work the camera, which is propped on a sandbag. An unseen stuntman, positioned on the far side of the deck, pulls the rope that is tied to the ankles of the screaming boy, who wears protective kneepads hidden under his rubber raingear to prevent injury.

In a church, the art department has cut off the striking side of a matchbox and fixed it to the doorframe. Donny, in shadow, a grim expression on his face, strikes a match, seemingly against the doorframe itself. The camera goes in for an extreme close-up to catch the way half his face lights up with the flaring match.

Down below on the lobsterboat, Willey, director of photography Daniel Stephens, and sound guy Rob Sylvain, are all squeezed into bunks and corners, as two actors play out a traumatic scene, practically nose-to-nose. There’s no room for the camera crew to maneuver. The dark cabin is lit only by the daylight that filters through the hatch, making it tough to know if the shots were properly focused.

“We’d wing it,” Willey says. “And then these guys acted their hearts out. They’d go and collect themselves or give us a minute. And I’d grab the camera and I’d get my eye up to the eyepiece and I’d play back the shot just to see it. There were one or two that were a little fuzzy, but most of them we were able to get.”

Willey is a highly experienced professional in the art of “pulling focus,” a continually shifting and highly nuanced aspect of any film. The film is Anatomy of the Tide, the latest production Willey has been involved in over more than 20 years in the industry. Most of the independent, made-in-Maine film was shot a year ago, although Willey was pulled in for a reshoot of one scene earlier this summer.

The movie, with a budget of $1 million, was written and directed by Joel Strunk, a tuna fisherman who fishes out of Rockland. The coming-of-age story tells about three island boys, in their final summer of adolescence, who play out hopes, dreams, dark secrets, tragedy and triumph.

Willey is the boyish-looking guy who owns Southwest Video, a video rental store in Southwest Harbor. He’s also a lieutenant with the Southwest Harbor Volunteer Fire Department, and has liked firetrucks since he was a kid. He was one of the firefighters who was nearly killed during the 2008 fire that destroyed three buildings in Northeast Harbor. He and others had just edged away from the flame, when a massive explosion occurred from the rupture of a pressurized 250-pound, debris-covered propane tank, a situation called a “boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion” or “blevy.”

Willey, left, is with Anatomy Of The Tide director Joel Strunk and visual effects coordinator Marc Dole for underwater effects shots at the Bowdoin College pool.

“We were quite close,” he says offhandedly.

As a focus-puller, Willey depends on his well-developed sense of distance estimation and pre-set marks from blocking rehearsals to accomplish the job, which is continually modified based on dialogue, actor movement, camera movement, the director of photography’s directions, and unforeseen circumstances. His main tools are tape measures and rangefinders.  He must continually change the distance setting of the camera lens in correspondence to a moving subject’s distance from the focal plane, while also keeping up with shifts from one subject to another within the frame. He checks his work through the camera’s monitor, rather than directly through the viewfinder, which is the purview of the camera operator.

“I don’t like to really pull off the monitor. I like to look at the lens,” he says. “If you pull off the monitor, you don’t get a feel for the lens, and if it’s soft on the monitor, it’s already soft on your film or memory card.”

He and the camera operator are joined at the hip. Often, the focus is on the “lowest number on the call sheet,” which is usually the star.

“So if you’re shooting a scene and there are two or three actors in it and you’re not sure who should be in focus, go for the biggest name, a mentor, camera assistant Doug Hart, always told me,” Willey says. “But that’s just a failsafe. It’s the director of photography’s choice.”

For Anatomy, Willey kept continual tabs on the wishes of his DP, Daniel Stephens.

“We were shooting a bar scene; there was not a lot of light,” he says. “They were playing pool. The camera was handheld. We were just getting bits and pieces of what we could get. That was a case where a monitor on the camera was good because I could see what he was framing. Our eyes would meld together and I would know where to go with the focus, whether I wanted to go deep or go shallow.”

The key is the actor’s eyes. In one scene, an actor walks away as Willey manipulates the focus while the camera is shooting over the shoulder of another. The scene is tightly shot and the focal plane is miniscule. Willey anticipates the timing as the first actor turns around and his eyes are seen again.

“I had to find him,” says Willey. “It’s a little soft. And then, Boom!”

Willey rigs a camera on a helicopter strut mount for aerial shots of scenes on Monhegan Island and on the water, for Anatomy of the Tide. The camera can be operated from the cabin. At $1,000 per hour, the helicopter rental was one of the most expensive aspects of the production. By contrast, Rockland lobsterman Ryan Post donated the use of his boat for the film. Post has himself produced an educational DVD called Maine Buggin’: A Year in the Life of a Lobsterman.

His position is considered one of the most important jobs in the making of a movie. It must be precise. It can be affected by timing errors, missed marks, the considerations behind lens and aperture size and shot distances, and minute details such as a bit of fluff stuck to the lens. The focus-puller is just as much responsible for calling a scene to be reshot, if some part of a take is “soft,” as the director or the actors are when the acting isn’t the best.

As a low-budget film, Anatomy used just one camera, so the crew did multiple perspectives multiple times. More money on bigger studio films means two and sometimes three cameras. There might be both a first and second unit, the first dealing with the actors, the second shooting stuff like landscapes, cutaways, a hand opening a door.

The director of photography has a gaffer, who’s in charge of the electricians, who position the lights. The DP is also in charge of the camera crew – the camera operator, first assistant cameraman/focus-puller, and second assistant cameraman. The first AC is never more than arm’s length from the camera – “another Doug Hartism,” says Willey. The second AC delivers fresh film magazines, deals with the paperwork of how much film was shot and what the scene was, claps the sticks – the iconic clapperboard essential in helping to synchronize picture and sound, gives the marks, moves support equipment as the camera moves, and hauls cases of lenses.

“This is pulling focus,” says Willey, as he plays a scene from the trailer that shows two men talking on the beach. Seagulls squawk in the background. The camera is handheld and then cuts back to the dolly shot. “I’m keeping him in focus. When he moves an inch forward, an inch back, half-foot forward, half-foot back, I have to adjust the lens to keep him in focus. You’ll see this character make a turn, and he’ll be shifting in focus.”

“I promised to never take Kyle out on the boat…” the actor, James Colby, says. “Here we go again.”

“I had to look at the lens, realize the actor was moving, and realize the camera was moving,” says Willey. “So not only was it two feet away, but I had two planes moving, which I had to look at. Which is why the more depth of field you can get, the more things will be in focus, all without looking through the camera. That’s when it gets technical. And there’s a talent to it.”

Moviegoers may not realize that they’re being encouraged to focus on one character versus another.

“Oh, start looking,” says Willey. “You watch any TV right now, you’ll see the focus shift all the time.”

Watching all the movies Willey has worked on is like watching a backlit shadow puppet screen with silhouettes of his life.

A sample call sheet for a Rockford Files reunion movie lists sets, scenes and actors for each day’s work.

In the Coen Brothers’ 1994 film The Hudsucker Proxy, Willey is somewhere off to the side of the giant gear mechanism for the film’s clock tower, an important visual motif, hauling on one of the ropes that swing the pendulum.

“It’s in there. You’ll never see us,” he says.

The viewer might not even notice the pendulum.

“The shots they used have the clock and the gears moving, so the pendulum is not the focal point,” he says.

In film school, Willey had seen Raising Arizona, the Coen Brothers’ second major film. The cult hit is about a criminal recidivist who, with his policewoman wife, kidnaps one of the “Arizona quintuplets,” infant sons of a magnate. Blackmail, robbery, anti-theft dye cannisters, and football stardom ensue.

Willey was thrilled to be working for the Coens, no matter how minor his role on the crew.

“One time, I was pumping smoke into the set, and one of the Coen brothers peeked around the set. He just smiled at me and shook his head in approval and I thought, ‘Well, what more could anyone ask?’”

At his video store, Willey is pleasant and workaday, stashing returns according to their genre, ringing up rentals. Usually there’s a poster on his counter about the latest projects of the town’s junior firefighters. He has a way of forming his lower lip into a little V that makes him seem like he’s on the verge of smiling. But he never really smiles, so customers might not be aware of the wildly happy grin that lights his face when he’s on a film set. In the albums of memorabilia that he keeps at his house, countless buddy photos show him posed with behind-the-scenes personnel and famous actors, always smiling, his eyes dancing.

Willey lives up a narrow side road that leads past the old masonry business started by his grandfather, Guilford B. Willey, in the 1940s. His father, Shirley “Shirl” Willey, and uncle Bert Willey took it over while his mother, Alberta ran a sewing shop downtown. His father died in 2010, his uncle retired, and the cement block building is now a centerpiece for weeds and junked equipment.

On a recent evening during a downpour, after picking up his teenage daughter Cara from her summer job, Willey heads home and pulls out some old newspaper clippings of his childhood exploits. In 1981, he’s a seventh-grader, wearing thick glasses, who has won the award at his school’s science fair for his exhibit on animated films, which he made when he went to check out a commercial that was being filmed at Noel Paul Stookey’s animation studio in Blue Hill.

Resembling the barren landscapes in Iraq, remote areas outside El Paso, Texas, were chosen for the location of Courage Under Fire, where scenes such as a helicopter crash were filmed.

“Willey displayed the step-by-step film-making process and showed a short moon landing cartoon he had animated,” the clipping says.

In 1993, he is one of two local filmmakers profiled on Maine Public Television’s Wide Angle: Maine Film and Video. The photo shows a young, skinny man with big eyes, posing with the sticks. By that time, he’d worked on the Stephen King movies Pet Sematary II and Graveyard Shift, and on The Hudsucker Proxy.

There are several fat albums, stuffed with behind-the-scenes photos and memorabilia. The cover of the fear fiction magazine GoreZone features a splatter zombie with rotting teeth, but also announces Pet Sematary II: “Ghouls’ night out!”  A storyboard is full of sketches, divided into comic book-like segments, that visually detail the shooting of a scene: “Marjorie moves up the stairs,” “Cut away to Marjorie’s feet walking.”

A photo shows cameras, lights, an umbrella reflector, a couple of bounce boards, wires, and the metal framework and strapping holding it all in place, atop heavy plywood on the hood of a red sports car for the Steve Carell comedy Dan in Real Life. A Universal City Studios call sheet for a Rockford Files reunion movie lists the sets, scenes and actors, including James Garner, needed for day 16 of the 1994 shoot: The interior of The Danish Coffee Shop must be completed (“Rockford pieces together Danny’s investment with Acropolis Pictures); then the exterior of the coffee shop (Rockford parks car, grabs Angel, and demands “Who killed Danny?”)

A poster of Stephen King’s The Langoliers tells viewers to fasten their seat belt. A photograph from the Gulf War film Courage Under Fire shows a crashed helicopter shrouded in smoke. A photograph of Southwest Harbor shows Main Street covered in potato flakes, the stand-in for snow, and filled with filmmaking gear, trailers, traffic cones, and tarpaulins under a lowering sky, for King’s Storm of the Century.

There’s a photo of a 1:24 scale model set of New York City skyscrapers for Hudsucker. A sign used on the airplane for Langoliers instructs “Tie curtain open during taxi, takeoff, and landing.” A flyer announces a wrap party, at Los Bandidos De Carlos and Mickey’s in El Paso, Texas, with music, food and spirits, to celebrate the completion of Courage. The cover of TV Guide features a photo of Colm Feore as the evil Andre Linoge from Storm in the Feb. 13-19, 1999 issue, announcing “Exclusive! The fright master on his terrifying new miniseries. Plus: The stars, scares and secrets.” Photographs show the camera department’s trailer decked with strings of holiday lights and décor; tall towers that spin out fake rain; and the remote-controlled model of the Oscar Meyer Weiner mobile, which Willey helped shoot for a commercial in Monument Valley.

There’s the image of a toy car that Willey and others mounted with a camera during their film school days at Ohio University. The school’s master’s degree program took three undergraduates each year; Willey was one of those undergrads.

“We didn’t have a camera mount for the school cameras, so I took a bike rack and had a local boatyard build me a transit,” he says. “We didn’t tell them we were putting the camera on the side of the car. The film professors saw these shots and said, ‘Wow, cool!’ And then they asked us not to do it again. But we were guys who wanted to make movies and we knew what we had to do to get the shot.”

Completing his degree in 1990, Willey was headed back home to Southwest Harbor when he dropped off his resume at the production office of Graveyard Shift, which was shooting in Bangor and was based on a Stephen King short story.

“When an abandoned textile mill is reopened,” says Wikipedia, “several employees meet mysterious deaths. The link between the killings: all occurred between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. – the Graveyard Shift.”

Unimaginable horror comes alive in the dead of night on locations that included the village of Harmony at the oldest woolen yarn mill in the United States, in Bangor at an abandoned waterworks and armory, and near the Eastland woolen mill in Corinna, which subsequently became a Super Fund site.

“By the time I drove from Bangor to home, there was already a message on the machine,” Willey says. “They were looking for a production assistant for the camera crew. So I went back the next day. The interview consisted of the director of photography just looking at me and going, ‘Okay.’”

The car for Steve Carell’s character in Dan In Real Life is rigged with cameras and reflectors.

The movie was under the direction of Ralph Singleton, who had Willey doing production assistant stuff such as clapping the sticks and keeping up with the mountain of paperwork behind each scene.

“I learned more in three weeks on a major feature film set than I did in four years of film school,” he says. “I knew why I was going for a polarizer and I knew how the mechanics worked, but the process of making a motion picture is completely its own entity.”

A year later, he was reading the Hollywood Reporter and discovered that Singleton was down in Georgia, producing Pet Sematary II, the 1992 sequel to the 1989 horror adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same name.

Wikipedia: Jeff and his father, Chase, are at their summer house. Jeff learns about family murders and a cursed burial ground. Zowie the dog is shot, buried at the burial ground, and returns from the dead. Zowie kills. Gus returns to life as a sadistic zombie. Jeff’s mother returns to life and kills. Jeff and Chase move to Los Angeles to start a new life.

Willey called the production office in Georgia to apply for a job as camera assistant. The lady on the phone said there were already plenty of camera assistants in Atlanta.

“I thought, ‘Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained,’” Willey says. “So I bought a plane ticket, flew to Georgia from Maine, rented a car in Georgia, drove to the film studio, and found the lady I talked to on the phone. She could have killed me. Her eyes just pierced me—‘You crazy kid what are you doing?’”

Willey found out that some of the Graveyard guys were on the Pet II shoot. The others heard Willey was in the building; they all circled the corridors and found each other. Willey volunteered to work for a week, just to get more experience. He was given the job of assistant to the second assistant cameraman for the second unit, which was special effects and animals and stunt drivers and cars and accidents. Then the second AC headed off to Los Angeles to film aerials. So two and a half months worth of work landed in Willey’s lap, “because I bought the plane ticket, because I took the initiative,” he says.

Connections carry the industry. The director of second unit for Pet II was Peter Chesney, a special effects coordinator, producer, and second unit director of major Hollywood films. One day in Georgia, Willey peeked over Chesney’s shoulder at some paperwork he was doing, and noticed that it referred to a boat he was storing at Jarvis Newman’s boat shop in Southwest Harbor. Chesney went off to work at the Coen Brothers’ 1994 film, The Hudsucker Proxy, in North Carolina.

Wikipedia: Innocent Norville Barnes works in the mailroom at Hudsucker Industries. Nice Waring Hudsucker throws himself out a window. Evil Sidney Mussburger promotes Norville to president. Brassy reporter Amy Archer searches for clues. Moses operates the clock tower. Norville invents the hula hoop. Mussburger’s plan fails. Norville slips from a window ledge. Moses stops the clock. Time freezes. Hudsucker appears as an angel and saves the day.

Willey figured he could use the Maine connection with Chesney to get a job on Hudsucker, but he didn’t have Chesney’s number. So he drove to North Carolina, got stopped at the Panavision lot, staked out the front gate one morning, and noticed that those who got in had red passes. Willey had an old red pass from Graveyard Shift, stuck that into his rearview mirror, and put on a hat that Chesney had given him that bore the name of the company Chesney worked for, Image Engineering.

“I waited for two cars to get in line, then I drove up,” he says. “And when those cars went through, I just waved at the security guard and went right into the lot and parked. I just walked around until I found Image Engineering on the side of a truck and I walked in the truck and found Peter.”

Willey on the set of Dan In Real Life, in Providence, R.I.

In 1994, Willey drove off to Los Angeles, ready to work but also fine with just visiting friends he’d met on various sets.

“That’s when I received the phone call that they were shooting a film in Maine,” he says. “So I’d driven all the way across country looking for work, and I got the call for Langoliers,” a two-part TV movie based on a Stephen King novel that was filming at the Bangor International Airport that summer.

Wikipedia: On a cross-country red-eye, passengers awaken to find that the crew and fellow passengers have disappeared. The plane lands at an empty airport. Have they flown through a time rip? Craig goes insane, stabs Dinah and kills Don. Dinah telepathically communicates with Craig. Hundreds of creatures head for the plane, consuming everything in their path. Bob says the Langoliers are the timekeepers of eternity. The plane flies back through the time rip. Bob realizes they should be asleep to survive. Nick volunteers to fly the plane, knowing he will die. Nick vanishes. The plane lands. A flash hits the passengers and they are in the present.

Part of The Langoliers set is still at the airport – a plane that arrived in pieces from Arizona on eight tractor-trailer trucks.

“We assembled them in one of the hangars,” Willey says. “And then we cut them up, so they could be pulled apart and put together if we wanted to shoot a certain angle. I think they use them for fire training now.”

The director of photography on Langoliers was Paul Maibaum, who has worked on nearly 100 films, and who is now shooting Sons of Anarchy, a TV show about a biker gang. Maibaum’s first assistant, Doug Adam Jr.,  is a stickler for accuracy, and Adam pushed Willey. Apparently, Willey impressed. After Langoliers, Adam invited Willey to Los Angeles to help shoot a Rockford Files reunion movie, A Blessing In Disguise, for television.

Wikipedia: Eight Rockford TV movies  were made from 1994 to 1999, reuniting most of the cast from the show, which ran from 1974 to January 1980 and featured James Garner as Los Angeles-based private investigator Jim Rockford, who had a famous evasive maneuver that involved speeding backwards in his gold Pontiac Firebird, sharply turning, spinning 180, and shifting to speed forward.

During the filming of the movie, Garner’s vision was partly obscured, while he was driving the famous Firebird, by two cameras mounted on the hood.

“He ran into a guy,” Willey recalls. The guy “flipped right up over the hood of the car. Shut down production for the day. Made national news, I think.”

The guy was okay.

“He turned out to be an illegal. The scuttlebutt around the crew was he did it on purpose – the guy, not James Garner.”

A year later, Willey was driving cross-country when he stopped at a production office in Austin, Texas, where a TV movie called Tornado was underway.

Wikipedia: “Whoa! It’s like a tornado out here!”

The script was basically the same as the Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton storm-chasing blockbuster, Twister. The production studio was eager to get Tornado on TV before Twister came out, Willey recalls.

“I walked through the door, said, ‘Hey, I’m looking for work,’” he says. “They said, ‘Well, the director of photography is in the other room. Do you want to meet him?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ They went and got him and out pops Paul Maibaum. He said, ‘What are you doing here?’  I said, ‘I’m looking for work.’ I said, ‘Did I find any?’ And he said, ‘Yes, you did.’”

A selection of favorite skyscrapers were put together in a 1:24 scale model set for the New York City backdrop in The Hudsucker Proxy.

Willey continued on west to El Paso, where a film crew needed an assistant for the movie Courage Under Fire.

Wikipedia: In one of the first films to depict the 1991 Gulf War, Serling is involved in a friendly fire incident. Boylar’s parents are told their son was killed by enemy fire. Later, Serling must determine if Walden should posthumously receive the Medal of Honor.  Ilario praises Walden. Monfriez calls Walden a coward. Monfriez lied to rescuers, telling them Walden was dead. A-10s napalm the wreckage. Serling leaks the story to prevent another cover-up. Monfriez commits suicide. Ilario goes AWOL.  Serling tearfully tells the Boylars the truth.

“They needed someone to help on video assist, just to move the monitor around. After that was done, I went to camera,” Willey says. “That shoot was so remote because it had to look like Iraq. We’d get up at 4:30 or 5, travel 45 minutes to the set, and set up camera equipment. There were stuntmen  everywhere, and firearms, and helicopters flying  over shooting rockets, and cameras on cranes. At one point, we had 12 cameras going for a shot that’s supposed to be a napalm run from a jet. The effects guys filled four-inch PVC pipe full of gasoline and wrapped it in primacord. We had two or three cameras on helicopters, and other cameras on the ground, and we were running around trying to turn on all the cameras. It was a trick to get everything on in time, before they touched it off. They touched off this giant explosion of fire and flame. It was quite incredible.”

The crew and actors would finish a day’s shoot and head back to the hotel long after hours.

“We’d be lucky if we found anything to eat,” he says. “We’d have a drink in the bar, go to sleep and then get up and do it all over again.”

A few times at the hotel, Willey got to ride in the elevator with Meg Ryan down to the bus. One day he wrapped early enough to go back in the cast van, and found himself talking with Matt Damon.

“I had no idea who he was,” Willey says. “He and Ben Affleck had only done a few things at the time. I was trying to work movies more than watch them, at the time.”

The crew was usually treated to the sight of Lou Diamond Phillips, in the cast van, mooning the larger crew bus every morning.

“I’d be sitting there half-awake, and they’d say, ‘Oh, here he comes again.’ And the van came by with Lou Diamond Phillips’ butt in the window, stuck there, every day.”

After some commercials and a Suzanne Somers cable movie, Willey got his next big job in 1999, when the Stephen King moviemaking cabal dropped the horror TV miniseries Storm of the Century right in his hometown.

Wikipedia: A blizzard hits Little Tall Island. All access is blocked. Linoge brutally murders a resident, knows everyone’s darkest secrets, enchants the small children, desires an heir, reveals his true form as a dying man, and says he needs someone to carry on his work. The townspeople agree. Parents draw from Linoge’s sack of “weirding stones.” One parent draws the black stone and her child is taken. Linoge flies off with his protégé. Some Little Tall folk commit suicide.

The bulk of the shoot was in Canada, where tax incentives saved on production costs, and where the look of the Maine coast was captured just as easily.

“Maine could do a little more to attract production to the state,” Willey says.

A poster for The Langoliers,” a two-part Stephen King TV movie, filmed at the Bangor International Airport, about destructive “timekeepers of eternity.”

But many scenes were shot in Willey’s backyard, which meant seven months of work at home.

“I literally just walked out of my apartment, down the street and into the production office,” he says. As a local, he helped first with locations. When the camera crews arrived, he shifted jobs.

“It was a big, big, big deal,” he says of the production’s arrival in town. Alterations were made to some of the buildings on Main Street, and a mock post office was built on the green. There wasn’t enough snow, so enormous amounts of potato flakes were brought in, along with snow from parking lots in Ellsworth.

“It was funny. I had to scrape, like, three inches of potato flakes off my shoes. When I went back to the apartment, I could stand my coat up in the corner.”

Later, the crew moved to the shore road in Manset, where they were shooting toward the Moorings Restaurant.

“Being a member of the local fire department, I happened to have my pager on,” Willey recalls. “We were shooting through a window, and smoke started coming out of the Moorings. The only reason I took notice of it was because they were the ones making our lunch for the shoot that day. So I said, ‘Guys, that’s a little too much smoke coming out of this restaurant.’  And the fire pager goes off and yes, there’s a fire in the kitchen at the Moorings Restaurant. I asked the director of photography, ‘You know, we’re just doing this one little shot. Maybe I could go save lunch.’ He said, ‘Yes, by all means.’ So I ran down and waited for  the firetrucks to show up, put on the fire gear, went in, and we put out the fire. And I thought, This is an opportunity I cannot pass up. So I walked back to the film set wearing my fire gear, the air bottle and everything, and walked up to the camera just like nothing had happened, and started to pull focus for the shot. There were a couple of grip electrics there who had to get their photos taken with me. They just thought it was super funny.”

Willey has an idea he’d like to take King out for lunch one day, just to thank him for all the paychecks that have come his way as a result of the author’s various enterprises.

“Graveyard Shift was responsible for my first car,” he says. “Indirectly, Pet II helped start to build my house. Langoliers helped pay for more of the house and another car. And Storm of the Century helped me make my own documentary. For a while there, my resume was this big Stephen King horror show. People would say, ‘Is that all you do?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, I live in Maine. Of course, that’s all I do.’ I always wanted to ask him, ‘Maybe I can just buy you a burger at Dysart’s. Just sit and tell you the stories I’ve seen, because of you.’”

Not far away, in Eastport, Willey went to work on one of the first reality TV shows, Murder In Small Town X.

Wikipedia: Contestants converge to be amateur investigators and solve fictional murders. One investigator discovers clues and the other is “murdered” from the show, in the manner of classic slasher films. Ángel Juarbe, Jr., a Bronx firefighter, was the last surviving investigator.

The crew was not allowed to talk with the “investigators,” Willey says. But he recalls striking up a conversation with Juarbe, because they were both firefighters.

“That was 2000. He was kind of a celebrity,” he says.

Willey recalls driving one morning to the Augusta Civic Center to work on a Godsmack music video. By the time he hit Ellsworth, the radio said a Cessna had hit the World Trade Towers.

“Then they said it was a larger aircraft, and by the time I was past Bangor, the radio went dead,” he recalls. “Angel was in the Marriott Hotel when the second tower went down. They found him in December. He was the way a firefighter would be; he looked invincible. He was helping to save lives.”

The Southwest Harbor Volunteer Fire Department’s new ladder truck was numbered 112 in honor of Juarbe’s unit, Ladder 12. Juarbe had given Willey a T-shirt.

“I wear that shirt one day a year, every Sept. 11,” he says.

Subsequent years brought more TV movies and a TV series – Frozen Impact, Killer Flood: The Day the Dam Broke, Bereft, and Landslide, all shot in Vermont; and the film Finding Home, shot on Deer Isle.

Willey was called to Finding Home, which is about a family’s troubled past on a remote island, when the project went over-schedule and the original crew had to take off for other films they had contracted for.

“They called me because their second AC was leaving, so I came,” he says.

Then the first AC had to leave as well, so Willey moved up. But that made him nervous, because he would be working under Doug Hart, one of the most respected figures in camera assisting/operating/cinematography circles. Willey had taken a class from Hart, who is a teacher at what was then called the International Film and Television Workshop, and is now the Maine Media Workshops, in Rockport.

“He literally wrote the book about being a camera assistant,” Willey says. “I got really intimidated: ‘Wait a minute, I’m going to be working for Doug Hart?  You want me to work for the man who wrote the book?’”

Hart showed up.

“I was super-stressed. I was trying to do the best job I could. We were down at the dock. It was the same house where Mel Gibson shot Man Without A Face on Deer Isle, humping cases back and forth. And I hear this voice. ‘Thom, sit down. You’re making me tired.’ The more we worked together, the more fun it became, and I realized how easy it was to work for him. We did three more movies together.”

The Steve Carell comedy Dan in Real Life, underway in Rhode Island, came calling in 2006.

Wikipedia: Dan is a newspaper columnist, widower, and controlling father. There’s a family get-together. His daughter Cara doesn’t want to go. He makes her. Dan and Marie feel a connection, but her boyfriend is his brother, Mitch. Cara’s boyfriend shows up. Dan kicks him out. Dan serenades Marie in front of Mitch. Marie and Dan kiss. Mitch punches Dan. Dan gets Marie. Dan’s column is chosen for national syndication. The film opened in 2007 and ranked number two.

Willey got the call in the middle of Southwest Harbor’s haunted hayride, which he was helping to run as one of the fire department’s community events.

Part of Southwest Harbor was taken over for Storm of the Century in 1998.

“I had to bail,” he says. “I was there the night of the hayride, but had to leave the next morning, so I couldn’t help with the cleanup.”

Most of Willey’s jobs come through the back door. Dan was no exception.

“The industry is so word-of-mouth. ‘We need someone to fill this camera position. Who do you know? Who’s good?’” Willey says. “They called people in Rhode Island, but everyone was busy. So he obtained a list from the camera union. He got my name from the list, found out I knew Doug, and talked with him about me.”

On the set, Willey ran into a grip who looked familiar.

“We worked together for a few days, and we said, ‘Where are you from?’” he recalls. “I told him I lived in Southwest Harbor. You should have seen the guy’s face. He pointed at me and said, ‘You’re that guy! I knew that I knew you!’ And then he started telling the whole crew. ‘Yeah, we were shooting this thing and the restaurant started to burn and Thom took off, went and put it out, and came back in all this fire gear!’”

Willey could have chosen a different lifestyle. He could have moved to industry hotspots such as New York or Los Angeles, where he’d have full-time work in the profession. Or he could have been a nomad, traveling from one production to the next.

Early on, he got a taste of the nomadic life, as part of “a very large small community, where everybody kind of knows everybody – and that’s when the calls start coming.”

Early on, he realized how happy he was behind the camera.

“We were shooting Pet II in Georgia,” he says. “We had two cameras mounted on top of this truck, and we were flying down an industrial parkway at about 60 miles per hour, two stuntmen in front of us, one in a truck, one in a station wagon, banging against each other, trying to drive each other off the road. And I started to grin. I looked over my shoulder, and the first AC said, ‘It’s hit you, hasn’t it?’ I couldn’t even say anything. All I could do was shake my head and smile from ear to ear, because we were actually doing that. How often do you get to do something like that? How often do you get to meet some of these people? How often do you get to shoot in these locations with these actors, and find yourself in the most interesting of situations?”

And early on, he realized that his family in Maine was more important than a career elsewhere.

His roots are deep. His ancestor Ichabod Willey founded Cherryfield in the 1700s.

A page of storyboard from Pet Sematary II.

“I tell everyone he had a little incident upstate New York at Halloween. He disappeared, came to Maine, and changed his name,” Willey says.

His grandfather moved from Cherryfield to Southwest Harbor in the 1920s.

Other ancestors lived in Crawford Notch, in New Hampshire. That’s where a rockslide killed the Samuel Willey family in 1826. The family fled their home during the storm to a prepared shelter but were buried by the slide and died in a mass of stone and rubble. Their home was untouched. Mount Willey is named in their memory.

“I’m still researching this, this but I think it’s where the term ‘It gave me the willies’ came from. You think about this landslide going around the house, and if they’d only stayed in the house, they’d be alive. I could be barking up the wrong tree, but it’s still a good story.”

Willey married and started to build his house on family land. He bought the video store in 2003 to get an income stream going in-between shoots, and he and his wife adopted two daughters.

“I wanted to be close by,” he says. “I literally chose family over industry. My career would be much different if I’d stayed in LA or New York. But do I want to stay in LA or New York? Yeah, you get the connections, but I wanted to be around as much as I could for my family. I met a director of photography at the workshops, and he literally got on his knees and bowed in front of me, because I didn’t make the decision to take industry over family.”

Sometimes, he’s asked if he’d like to write or direct. In 1998, he did write and produce his own film, a 30-minute documentary about Richard Estes, one of the world’s foremost photo-realists, who has a home in Northeast Harbor.

Willey arrived at the idea when he was on the roof of Estes’ house.

“I was with my dad, the stonemason,” he says. “The chimney blew over in a big storm. So we were standing on the roof in the rain and I said, ‘Has anybody ever made a documentary about you?’ Nope. ‘Would you like somebody to?’ He was curious about the process. So we took a day and did an interview on 16-millimeter film.”

The film describes Estes’ influences and techniques, his boyhood home in Illinois and his life as an artist in New York and Maine, and how he creates his urban landscapes and other works. The film was aired on PBS, but Willey aims to shoot more footage one day.

But as far as production work goes, camera assistant is fine, he says.

“I like being below the line, as it were, in the thick of production,” he says. “It’s interesting, it’s fun, it’s a lot of work, it’s physically demanding – but the rewards are usually worth it. I remember my dad, the first time he saw my name on the screen, that’s all I needed. He was proud of his son. ‘That’s my son up there!’ Dan in Real Life premiered in Bangor and I took the family up to watch it. Proud dad was walking out of the movie theater and he told the usher, ‘My son filmed the movie!’ So this usher started yelling at us, ‘Hey! Hey, you!’  I turned around and he said, ‘You filmed that movie?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, that’s illegal. You can’t do that. Where’s your camera?’ It took a few minutes of telling the guy that, no, I was part of the camera crew that helped shoot the movie. I didn’t film it while we were watching it in the theater. I had to go and talk to proud dad and say, ‘Dad, next time you mention that to somebody in the movie theater, you may just want to tell them that I was a member of the camera crew.”

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