Burnt Island Trip Part 4: Good Morning, That Strange Prevalent Fishy Smell and Many Mysteries

Good Morning! After a breakfast of pancakes we got dressed and headed out for our morning activities. We were split into three groups, and rotated between Squid Dissection, Sea Fishing and Lobstering.

First off was squid dissection. Brave, Brave Miss Newell got to separate a whole box of half-solid half-gelatinous semi-frozen squid and put them on paper plates. The kids had just discovered that I was a vegetarian and thought this was hysterical. I kept insisting that I had no intention of eating these things! We then got to cut them up, but of course some of the girls were far too squeamish so Brave Brave Miss Newell sprung into action again.



The coolest part of the squid was pulling out the "pen"-- or rather the long bit of internal shell that kinda reminded me of the wet plastic wrapper that is left over when you eat a freezer pop. The beak was nifty, too. I wish I had gotten pictures of this but it's hard to take pictures when you are covered in squid guts!

Here's lookin' at you, squid!


Next we took the squid chunks and went down to the dock for some sea fishing. Our girls were pros at this! ...but we didn't catch anything. :(


And lastly we joined Dan Dan the Lobster Man in the Hunky Dory for lobstering. Or rather the kids and Mibee went with Dan and Elaine and I followed in the Resourceful just-in-case.



Here's the bucket with live lobsters, bait, rubber band and other accoutrements of lobstering.


The first thing Dan did was band all of the kids' claws (fingers).



Then they set about pulling up traps and seeing what was inside.



There were some females with berries; the kids watched as Dan notched them and chucked them back in. Dan also dumped out the old bait in the bags and replaced them with new.



Here's one of the girls helping to measure a lobster. Is it a keeper or a short?


In this next picture, I want you to look very closely at Dan's hand. Some of the kids noticed that Dan has a finger missing. They wanted to know what had happened but were too polite to ask. Instead they asked Mibee instead, who burst out laughing because she knew the story! Turns out that one day Dan was out lobstering with his dog. Dan tried to pull up a trap but he got his gloved hand caught in the pulley. He pulled his hand free and tore off the glove to see what damage had been done, and threw it down on the floor of the boat. There was lots of blood so he knew he had to get to the hospital. Once he was there the doctor said, "Well, that's not that bad. We can re-attach the finger right away." Dan shook his head and said, "Can't. My dog ate it."


Here's the kids with their catch: This little guy is not so sure about his lobster...


...but these crab molts are neato!


Then it was time for snack. This guy actually had to be told several times to be greedy! Get more! Take huge handfuls! He wasn't sure if Elaine was trying to trick him...


Next it was time for a navigation lesson. Here's the harbor:


Heeeeey! That's Burnt Island! I've heard of that place! :)


After our snack we were all signaled to meet up at the Lighthouse: Two blasts from an air horn and we came running from every direction from the island.


In this next activity the kids were given cards which had pictures of different things the fishermen could catch in Maine waters. Set out in front of the kids were different sorts of ways to catch or gather fish: A seine net, a clam hoe, a longline, etc. The kids had to put their fish in the type of equipment they thought were used to catch the fish (i.e., put the picture of the clam near the clam hoe).


However, I asked Elaine if I could sneak away and take more pictures of the inside of the keeper's house. She said that would be fine! So I went in and checked out the covered walkway, which I hadn't gotten a chance to explore the day before. Through the kitchen, up the stairs...


This is a sort of a mini-museum now, so I lingered for a long time near the photographs and exhibits.


I love architectural plans. This is where I got the whole living vs. dining room thing, and the bedroom vs. parlor. Of course the purpose of rooms change over time, but I crave accuracy.




It seems very romantic to want to live a lighthouse keeper's life, but then pictures like this make you change your mind:



Here is a photo montage of some of the 30 keepers that has been on Burnt Island, beginning with James McCobb and ending with the automation in 1988.


And here are the lenses that were once used in the lantern room. Note the door behind them: that's the door I was talking about earlier, that leads to the anteroom at the bottom of the tower. It's blocked off now, but you can still see it. You can imagine a keeper dashing through the kitchen, up the incline of the covered walkway, through the door into the anteroom and up the spiral staircase to the lantern room in the event of a smoke-out or other emergency.




The lens on the right is the original (note the typical fresnel shape), but the bull's eye one on the left fascinated me. This one was mounted on the weighted mechanism that needed to be cranked every six hours so that the lantern would spin around.


Self-portrait!


So how did they know what the inside of the keeper's house looked like in 1950? Well, thankfully, someone had taken pictures! The Muire family (who were living here at that time) still had much of the things in the photographs and donated them back to the island. They also provided first-hand accounts of what it was like to live here (like drinking that disgusting canned milk!).


So how accurate is the restoration? Well, let's see...

Looks familiar!

Yup, looks good!


Next, I wandered about in the rest of the house, because I couldn't resist! This little room is a little butler's pantry (I don't know what the official Burnt Island name for it was because of course they wouldn't have had a butler!) and I spied toys that were typical of that time period.




I was a very naughty girl and I touched what I wasn't supposed to: I opened the cupboards to find out what was inside them! However, what I found was very typical of the 1950's-- just some fancy dishes that were saved for special occasions (I'm pretty sure Elaine will forgive me for poking around).



Okay, so remember how I mentioned there was a secret up these stairs, and another one in the pantry?


Well, the bottom part of the keeper's house might be a living history museum, but the upstairs is a little apartment where Elaine stays. (Don't worry, Elaine-- I didn't go up there!) In the pantry, the cupboard door was ajar, and I spy with my little eye... a microwave?!?! That doesn't belong in 1950! (Click on the picture and see if you can spy it as well!)


Next up: A GPS treasure hunt and Survival!

Burnt Island Part 3: Tidepool Exploring and a Treasure Hunt

That afternoon we were given free reign to explore tide pools. We all had plastic tubs to collect our creatures, and our job was to look for as many different things as we could. We started first with the obvious, taking samples of rockweed, periwinkles and barnacles. Then we started exploring deeper crevices and under rocks to find seastars, mussels and crabs. A couple people found these disgusting eel-like things called gunnels. Someone even found a hermit crab, which made Mibee squeal and run away screaming (or maybe just shirk away in squeamishness). Lots of the seastars we found were missing limbs, which was cool. Under a shelf-like rock Mibee found an anenome but it was probably just a bunch of fish eggs (maybe the gunnels's).

We put our loot into an artificial tide pool and surveyed our finds:



These rubber boots are awesome for exploring tidepools:


I know this picture is blurry, but it's the best I could get of our little tidepool zoo:


We also found some orange fish eggs of some sort... even Elaine didn't know what they belonged to.


Next up was the Treasure Hunt where we used compasses and pretty realistic-looking piratey treasure maps. This was one of the first times I've actually been successful at explaining how to use a compass. The whole "don't turn the compass turn your body" thing was not working for these kids. Finally I hit on a great metaphor: I knew the kids had used Logo their math class, so I said, "You have to start by telling the turtle which way to face, right? And the turtle stands in one spot and you can spin it in a circle to head in any direction? Okay, you are the turtle. The compass is your nose so it sticks out flat in front of you. Point your nose to 220 degrees!" ...And the kids got it! Yay for Logo turtle! :)

We walked all over the island looking for "the signs of the pirate" that were taped up at different points on our walk. Here's some things we found during our treasure hunt:

A wringer...


The garden...



Turtle Rock at sunset...



An osprey nest... On the way in I had seen the osprey fly in with a big stick in its mouth. Later I saw a crow antagonizing the osprey and really irritating the heck out of it. I wish I had gotten a picture of that. Poor osprey.



The fog bell: (see it up there at the base of the tower? They used that before they used foghorns. Originally it had a little wooden building it sat in-- kind of like an A-frame--but now it just sits outside).



A picnic spot...

And X may mark the spot, but it's not all that obvious. Mibee hadn't figured out that I couldn't see it until we were right on top of it and then I felt really stupid and she laughed at me. The kids got their treasure and we put it back, and then we waited and watched for the next group to try to find it. It wasn't obvious to them, either.


So here's a pretty picture of the sunset...



And a little while later we got to see the Light doing what it's best at... (Funny story: poor Maria tried a hundred times to get her camera to catch the flash at exactly the sixth second... but she kept missing it! Her camera had a delay on it and she just couldn't time it right. Me? I got it the very first try! Hee hee!)


We didn't go to bed for another couple of hours, but it was too dark to take any more decent pictures, so I'll just have to describe what we did. We headed into the Keeper's house and sat on the floor in the Living/Dining room. Elaine had done some extensive research learning what life was like for a lighthouse keeper, and she had collected many old photographs. What she did was hand each of us a copy of a photograph and had us describe what we thought was happening in the photo. Some were easy (a keeper milking a cow, for instance-- keepers who had cows didn't have to drink that disgusting canned milk!). Some were a little tougher: one man was cranking something but it was hard to tell what, and it turned out to be this weight system that turned the lantern to make it flash-- it was similar to the weight system in a cuckoo clock (the Burnt Island light needed to be cranked every six hours to keep it spinning-- the weights dropped down through the cylinder that the spiral staircase revolved around). My picture was of a little rowboat that was carrying a heavy fog bell, and some men were pulling it up the shoreline (with a rope-and-pulley system) to the lighthouse while another man stood on a plank to counterbalance the rowboat. Someone had a copy of this picture:


...and I was like WHOA!! That's the wreck of the Oakley Alexander in 1947, and Nana and Grampie had gone to Cape Elizabeth to watch the rescue effort, and they had that picture-postcard as a memento (which Mum had kept and had scanned into her computer)! You have no idea how surprised I was to see that! I was like, I know that picture! :)

After looking at the pictures for a while, we had a few more things to do before going to bed. We learned a little bit more about some of the old gizmos and gadgets that were used "in the olden days"-- things like rug beaters and thunder jugs. One of the coolest things that was in the kitchen was a mason jar of tickets-- at first I thought they were the ration stickers from WWII, but no-- they were S & H stamps (the famous Green stamps that were precious to every frugal housewife), which of course makes a lot more sense. Turns out these belonged to the Muire family and they had never traded them in for the goods. A visitor to the island asked if the museum would like some old S & H stamp books, and of course they said yes--and so she sent them nearly a dozen, all partially filled in. Stuff like that fascinates me! It's the sort of thing that makes the museum seem very very real to me, very authentic.

Then it was our turn to head up to the lantern room to watch the Light doing its very important job. Did you know the bulb is only about the size of your thumb? I knew the fresnel lens makes it seem a million times bigger so you only need a small source, but seeing the actual tiny bulb makes you think--huh!

Afterwards we all went into the covered walkway and sat against the wall for a Bioluminescence activity. (I should explain that the walkway no longer opens up into the tower base: the door is blocked off now--though you can still see it--and the old fresnel lenses that have been used over the years sit right in front of the door). This walkway is sloped due to the ledges beneath, so the windows look funny-- they are straight and level but the floor is not, so when you're inside it looks like the windows are tilted like badly-hung picture frames!

We were each given a tiny speck of a sea animal that produces a luminescent material (like what's inside a firefly) and a bit of water to grind it up into. We rubbed our hands together and whoa!--they started glowing in the dark! It's like if you accidently break a glowstick and get the juice inside all over your hands. Cool beans!

So then it was bedtime. The girls were very good about going right to bed and being very quiet. The boys, meanwhile, needed multiple reminders. We were so quiet that we could hear everything the boys did, including this conversation:

"Um, Mr. Stevens?"
"What now?"
"I forgot to spit out my gum."
"How could you forget to do that?"
"Could I get it up and spit it out?"
"No. Go to sleep."
"But I need to spit it out!"
"Can't you just forget about it?"
"No. What am I going to do with it?"
"Grr. Um-- just stick it on the bedpost!"

--at which ALL of us on the girls' side burst out laughing! All eighteen of us. It was great.

So finally everyone fell asleep, except for me... I just drifted for a while. I felt like I was waiting for something-- I don't know what. I'm not a light sleeper but I know I was this night-- every time anyone rolled over or coughed I was wide awake again. I almost felt anxious, like something was supposed to happen. Finally, in the middle of the night (probably at precisely 2:00), I heard this sudden downpour... and then I heard it:

...

tooooooooooooooot

tooooooooooooooot

...

tooooooooooooooot

tooooooooooooooot

...

That's what I was waiting for. After that I was out like a light. It's funny how that sound is part of my subconscious, the background sounds of the ocean that I miss so very much. I am not meant to live so far inland that I can't hear the foghorn at night!