They come increasingly from all over the world for a brief taste of Maine island summer. Well, maybe not China and Japan so much, but certainly from all over this hemisphere and Western Europe. The days when Northeast Harbor was known as Philadelphia on the Rocks or Boston Brahmins recycled remnants of 19- Century fishing villages into sylvan Acadian landscapes for their circle of friends are distant memories.

Our children, for one thing, have made us more cosmopolitan. There are fewer and fewer college students these days — and even high school students — who do not take advantage of the opportunity to study abroad. Our own five representatives of this trend studied in Japan, Sweden, India, Italy, France and Czech Republic. And when they returned, they invited some new friends back to Maine. A taxi cab driver, a single mother, who picked me up at the ferry terminal last week, proudly told me about her high school daughter who had just returned to Owls Head after a year in Croatia, now incidentally more grateful for the privileges of her American life. One son has recently been offered a job in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which gives his parents pause.

So perhaps it should not have been surprising to find such a cosmopolitan crowd gathered at the Islesford Dock Restaurant last week for music night. The Dock Restaurant’s owner/entrepreneur, Dan Lief, who retired early from an overseas career with Goldman Sachs, came up with the idea of music night when he recognized that he had been paying a lot of overtime and exhausting his island staff while trying to offer a full menu seven nights a week. So he thought why not offer a limited menu one night a week, the chef’s night off, and then spice up the ambience with some live music from local artists. Thus necessity was born to the mother(s) of invention….

We were cautioned to come early because when the doors open at 6 in the evening seating and eating is first come, first served, especially if you want to get a seat with a view of the musicians who set up at the inboard end of dock restaurant next to an artist’s gallery displaying paintings from local artists. Boats came in from all over for the evening—from Bar Harbor, Southwest and Northeast harbors and Sutton Island, rafting up at the floats out front where necessary. Grizzled lobstermen lined up next to society matrons; grandparents with their grandchildren and young couples with small children in tow all chatted amiably on the deck as the sun slowly sunk in the sky and heavily laden lobster boats unloaded next door at the co-op.

In the event, the musicians began promptly after a brief but delicious dinner hour. The jazz sextet of very hip 30-something musicians, mostly from Maine and Brooklyn (not Brooklin) were a fine complement in and of themselves, but also a good reason to sample some local oysters and island beers and pretend we were as cosmopolitan as the rest of the assembled.

The highlight of the evening was watching Islesford’s great gift to the universe, the 90-year-old artist, Ashley Bryan, rhythmically moving his head and shoulders to the intricate counterpoint beats of the sextet while simultaneously sketching furiously in his artist’s pad, inking out one drawing after another while be bopping to the music. And then a wide-eyed four-year-old dark-eyed cutie pie who had also been bouncing to the music wandered over to Ashley’s table as he bent over his pad and stared at him at eye level. He bopped and sketched as she swayed and stared. Then Ashley gave her a pencil and she started sketching on his pad with him to the beat of the music too. Readymade art.

All good.

A few nights later back on the big island we had dinner with friends who brought along a pair of visiting Austrian neighbors from Vienna. The husband is the head of communications and marketing for Vienna’s Kunst Historisches Museum, which is like our National Gallery, and his wife, Karen, is a journalist with an abiding interest in islands and marine life. Karen mentioned that she and her husband, Florian, used go to a little archipelago of islands, called the Aeolian Islands, off the southwest coast of Italy. But the Mediterranean is now so devoid of fish life, especially Bluefin tuna which feed on the larvae of jellyfish that they can no longer swim from the Aeolian beaches without getting stung.

Karen said that her next assignment is a trip to the Russian town of Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea and then up the Volga River for a story on the fate of sturgeon and their famed black caviar, once the pride of czars. The production of caviar in Astrakhan has dropped precipitously, beginning with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the frenzy of overfishing when the government could no longer control the harvest. Sadly, she said, there has been little recovery, even though government fish farms now are trying to raise sturgeon in captivity. The huge Stalinist hydroelectric dams on the Volga River have not helped these huge prehistoric-looking fish either as they migrate upstream to their spawning grounds.

Our guests wanted to know whether the lobsters they had eyed hungrily along the Carver’s Harbor waterfront were sustainably harvested and whether the salmon they were offered was organically raised – thankfully it was.  They could not believe there were still islands left in the world where there were no high rises hosting tens of thousands of tourists and there were still local fishermen able to make a living from what they catch in the sea.

Sometimes it is helpful to be reminded by others just how unique the way of life is along the Maine archipelago is in the world and the responsibility we all share to keep it that way.

Philip Conkling is the founder of the Island Institute. Additional writings are available at www.conklingassociates.com

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