Storeless Swans Island takes stock Fire leaves residents dependent on ferry, trips to mainland for food

SWANS ISLAND – The acrid smell of burned plastic rose Monday morning from the heap of melted shopping carts and charred wooden shelves that stood where the Swans Island General Store had been.

The island’s only grocery store had burned down to a pile of blackened rubble on Sunday, and as residents shared the news of the fire they reckoned the cost that the loss would bring to them.

“It’s going to be pretty hard now,” Judy Green said Monday afternoon while waiting with her two young daughters at the town post office. “My husband is a fisherman, so there’s not much money to be able to travel on and off [island]. But there’ll have to be more times now, just to get your bread and milk.”

Other residents agreed.

“It’s a terrible thing for the island,” said John Follis, a year-round islander.

Most of the island’s 350 year-round and 1,000 summer residents leave the island for semimonthly shopping trips on the mainland, where they load up cars and trucks with shopping bags from Ellsworth’s grocery stores and Bangor’s discount wholesale stores.

They depended on the Swans Island General Store, however, for emergency purchases and as a major element of the spread-out town’s community life. The remote island, which is reached by a 40-minute ferry ride from the village of Bass Harbor on Mount Desert Island, comprises three far-flung villages.

“I think that in any rural … isolated community, the store, much like the post office, is on everybody’s route every day except Sunday,” said Dan Barnes, year-round resident and chief of the volunteer fire department. “It becomes a part of your life. … It’s very important in any community to have a store.”

Barnes, who fought the fire along with his entire 23-member volunteer crew, said that the loss of the store would be felt most by the elderly and less mobile islanders, who have a harder time getting to the mainland. He was positive, however, that islanders could cope with the loss.

“It’s just one more hardship that people will have to endure and will overcome,” he said. “They’ll borrow milk from each other. They’ll borrow tea bags or ice cream. … It’s not going to make people panic.”

The fire, which officials suspect may have been caused by an electrical malfunction in a refrigeration unit, ravaged the store and the apartment above it. Owner Eugene Webber, 32, who escaped the apartment with his dogs, had insurance. He could not be reached for comment Monday afternoon.

“Hopefully, the owners will somehow find a way to rebuild,” Barnes said.

Islanders said that it’s not cheap, or easy, to make a mainland shopping trip. The state-run car and passenger ferry holds about 15 cars, and spaces are hard to come by, especially in the busy summer season. Only four spaces can be reserved, so in the summer, some islanders park a spare car in line the night before in order to ensure they can leave.

“It’s a hassle,” island librarian Candi Joyce said. “It’s part of island life.”

In addition to the cost of the round-trip ferry tickets and fuel to larger towns, residents who miss the last boat must backtrack to find a hotel room for the night.

Year-round resident June Russell estimated that she and her husband, Cliff, spend $100 a month on gas and ferry tickets in order to shop off island.

“That’s a fair chunk of change,” she said. “And the possibility of not getting home is real nerve-racking. At least one or two times we haven’t made it home, and that’s real stressful.”

General stores are part of the glue that holds island communities together, said Peter Ralston, executive vice president of the nonprofit organization the Island Institute.

“On an island where you have one store, the loss of that store is truly a crisis,” he said.

Officials at both the Island Institute and the Maine Sea Coast Mission said that they were looking at ways to help the island cope with its loss.

“While these communities are famous for great personal independence, there is a huge interdependence,” Ralston said. “Swans Island is a resourceful, tough, successful community, but this is a big setback.”