Cranberry transfer As summer people take their leave, islanders settle in for the winter

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CRANBERRY ISLES – The summer homes will be closed up soon, their furniture cloaked against the cold winter to come and their windows, open for months to welcome the salty sea breeze, shuttered or shaded until spring.

Their owners will say farewell to summer friends and neighbors, stack their suitcases and boxes on the wooden dock, and wait for the rumble of a ferry motor that will power them back to the mainland, to a harsh reality that awaits them after leaving the Cranberry Isles.

“We come here very happily because in Washington [D.C.] you do not go down to the post office to see people … and when you have a problem, no one comes to help you,” Owen Roberts, a retired State Department official, said as he pushed an old wheelbarrow across his lawn on a recent morning.

Roberts and his wife, Janet, bought land on Great Cranberry Island in 1973 and then tented out for three summers while building a summer place overlooking the ocean.

The couple returns as soon as possible in the spring, hungry for the privacy and peace they find only in their big, brown summer house on the rock-bound shore of the Atlantic.

Hundreds of summer residents make the pilgrimage to the Cranberrys each year, but when they leave after Labor Day, the independent and fearless souls who live on the famed isles year round are the ones who keep the roads open, the docks repaired and the home fires burning.

“I’ve been coming here since forever,” said boat builder Edward Gray, an Old Town native who discovered Great Cranberry as a boy when his grandfather retired to the island and later made it his lifelong home.

“I like the privacy of it. I can do what I want,” said Gray, whose daughter lives in Manhattan and whose son begins his junior year at Gould Academy in Bethel this fall.

“It’s not the inconvenience people think it is,” he continued. “It’s seven minutes to the Southwest Harbor dock [by boat] and then I’m in my truck.”

The town of Cranberry Isles is actually a cluster of five islands flanked on one side by Mount Desert Island and on the other by the Atlantic Ocean. Home to nearly 400 year-round residents a century ago, only 40 people now live on Great Cranberry through the winter and another 70 reside full time on Little Cranberry, also known as Islesford.

Only a handful of people live on Sutton, Bear and Baker islands in the summer.

The year-round residents are as diverse as they are private. Some lobster and fish in the Gulf of Maine while others build boats, teach school, make jewelry or keep the islands’ few retail shops open.

In the last 20 years alone, the Cranberrys’ year-round population has dropped from 198 to 128. There are just four preschoolers on the two biggest islands and just 25 youth through age 19.

Perhaps no other effort by the town in recent years to stop the out-migration has drawn as much controversy or promise as a major land purchase in Southwest Harbor last year and the subsequent building of a large parking lot and pier for island residents and visitors.

Historically dependent on MDI communities for boat slips and parking areas, many permanent residents saw the land buy as essential to keeping the Cranberrys a year-round community.

Conversely, many summer residents opposed the $3 million project, arguing it was too expensive and unnecessary to resolve the town’s longtime parking shortage.

When the final votes were cast, the year-round residents overwhelmingly endorsed the purchase. The Cranberry Connector, which opened in the spring, offers residents and visitors nearly 140 parking spaces and four floats. The town hopes to create up to 300 parking spaces over time.

Residents, both permanent and summer, have rented every available spot at both the new facility and at the existing Cranberry parking area in the village of Northeast Harbor in Mount Desert.

“Whether people were for it or against [the Southwest Harbor project], it definitely got us to know each other better,” said Barbara Fernald, who has lived on Little Cranberry Island for 27 years.

Fernald’s family has owned a summer place on Islesford since 1906. As a child who visited each summer, she “always dreamed of living here.”

“I like the combination of privacy and interdependence,” she said. “But you also have to be pretty independent. You have to like spending time with yourself.”

With the controversial land purchase behind them, the town can now move on to new challenges, said Richard Beal, chairman of the Board of Selectmen.

One of the most pressing needs, he says, is fire protection for Islesford, which has twice the year-round residents as Great Cranberry but few if any volunteers to staff a fire operation.

Great Cranberry, meanwhile, has built a fire station and purchased a fire truck. The switch for the fire alarm is in the church across the road, and the first firefighter to get there flips it on and then drives the truck.

However, the only fire hydrant on Great Cranberry doesn’t work, Beal said, although the dogs really like it.

Older residents recall the time a summer cottage caught on fire on the north shore of Islesford in the spring, when nobody was around. A fisherman saw the fire from the water. Guests arriving for a wedding and islanders went down and put out the blaze, saving the big, old shingle-style house before the ceremony began.

While there have been no serious fires in memory on any of the Cranberry Islands, Beal and others are still going to try to raise money and resources to organize a volunteer fire club on Islesford.

Solid waste disposal is another challenge for the islands, as are the severe blow downs that mark each winter when the vicious north wind sweeps over the islands and uproots scores of trees.

Despite typical disagreements from time to time between summer and year-round residents or between Great and Little Cranberry folk, people on the islands know if they ever need help, they won’t have to go far to get it. Beal, who fell last winter and broke a leg in two places, can attest. He called for help on his cell phone while lying in a snowbank near the Community Center on Great Cranberry. Within 45 minutes, he was in an ambulance at the Northeast Harbor dock and at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor for surgery an hour after that.

Like any small town, everyone seems to know everyone else, said Beal, an Ellsworth native who retired to Great Cranberry five years ago. For the most part, neighbors get along well together.

There’s an unwritten rule on the Cranberrys that you have to wave to your neighbor when they pass by in their cars.

“It’s mandatory, even if you’re fighting with them,” Beal said.