Coping with winter is tough enough on the mainland. Out on the Cranberry Isles, it’s something else. Barbara Fernald’s column in a recent Mount Desert Islander tells a couple of stories about neighborliness and coping with the current unpleasantness.

A resident of Little Cranberry, Herb Stroup, had to get to the doctor, and the mailboat was going to miss its morning run because of a frozen cooling system. Word reached the crowd at the general store on Great Cranberry. Junior Bracy’s lobster boat was already warmed up. He picked up Herb and got him safely to the doctor. Herb is back home now, feeling fine.

A couple of nights later, Gail Stanley on Little Cranberry had complications after recent surgery. A Coast Guard boat came to help, but the tide was too low for it to come alongside the float at the town dock. David Thomas and Gail’s brother Richie rowed out to Dave’s lobster boat and managed to knock the ice off the mooring ball and cast off. Dave picked up Gail and got her out to the waiting Coast Guard vessel, which took her to the hospital. She’s OK, too and hopes to get home soon.

On Little Cranberry, also called Islesford, seven lobstermen are still working on days when the weather lets them – Dave Thomas, Mark Fernald, Eric Jones, Steve Philbrook, Corey Alley, Jack Merrill, and Joey Wedge from the big island – but it means chipping a lot of ice off the boats, the mooring balls and chains, and the float at the Cranberry Isles Co-op dock, often sheathed in a foot of ice.

How fortunate we are, in this frigid winter, to have resourceful and courageous folks like that, and to have an alert newspaper columnist to tell us about it.