025_MBHH99
3/3/08
9:39 AM
Page 25
A POSTCARD IN TIME
from the author’s collection
“Tougher Than a Boiled Owl’s Butt”
I Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do. BY PETER H. SPECTRE
www.maineboats.com
|
T TOOK ME AWHILE to get the pun— “Girl and B(u)oy on the Maine Coast”—because I was too busy thinking to myself how wrong this is. After all, Coast Guard rules are adamant about aids to navigation: Thou Shalt Not tie up to, or climb on board of, or mess around with them in any way. Period. This young lady isn’t just violating the rules, she’s flaunting their violation. There are times, however, when a situation is so dire that violating the rules is, if not permissible, at least excusable. Back in the late 1980s, a Penobscot Bay schooner skipper once described such a situation—a true one—during a conversation about tough times on the coast of Maine: “There’s a rock on Sheep Island over on the other side of Vinalhaven near Roberts Harbor,” the skipper said. “They call it Tom Perry’s Rock after a fellow who nearly bought the farm back in the mid-1800s. Tom was from Vinalhaven and went duck hunting out on the ledges in late January or February or something like that. He was rowing a peapod. It was a nice sunny day, like today. All of a sudden the wind shifted and it
MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS
started to snow and the temperature dropped. Tom broke one oar trying to get back and lost the other overboard. By the time he drifted to Sheep Island, which didn’t get its name because it was populated by people, if you get my meaning, it was colder than a well-digger’s ass, like 20 below, and darker than the black hole of Calcutta. The only shelter was a big boulder. Tom tucked in behind it and kept himself awake—he was afraid if he fell asleep he’d freeze to death—by chewing tobacco and spitting into his hands and rubbing the juice into his eyes. When that didn’t work he walked around the rock to keep warm. Around and around the rock. “Was Tom Perry tough? He walked all night and in the morning took off his red flannel shirt and tied it to the stump of the broken oar and stood there in his union suit in the godawful hellish cold and waved the shirt like a flag to attract attention. Some folks over to Roberts Harbor, probably the Roberts themselves, saw the shirt and came over to get him. They had to cut Tom’s frozen boots off his frozen feet, but he lived to be 75 and they named the boulder Tom Perry’s Rock in his honor. “You wonder whether they’re still tough like that now? About five, ten years back one of those hard-case clam-diggers from over to Waldoboro was crossing the west bay from Rockland to Vinalhaven, right near here, in the middle of winter. He was in an old wooden skiff with an outboard motor. The skiff sprang a wicked leak, a gusher that filled the boat faster than he could bail it out. He managed to get to a big bell buoy before the skiff sank and climbed over and tied himself to the bell caging. He was there all night with ice freezing on the buoy. He had a knife and a cigarette lighter and he cut the tops of his boots off and ripped them into strips and made a little tent with his coat. He burned the rubber to keep warm. When a passing fisherman found him the next day—alive, I might add—his face and hands were black from smoke from that burned rubber. Tough? That clam-digger was tougher than a boiled owl’s butt.” Peter H. Spectre is editor of this magazine. His blog, which is titled Compass Rose Review: Views & Reviews from the Coast of Maine, can be read at www.compassrosereview.blogspot.com.
25