One family has delivered the mail by boat for 115 years. Is this the last?

In blinding fog, an aging boat called the TM 2 zigzagged through the Cricket Hole, a shallow reef in Maine’s Penobscot Bay. The ocean’s calm surface concealed a maze of unseen ledges, around which the TM 2’s captain, Karl Osterby, cut a tight course. The boat soon approached an aluminum dock on Great Spruce Head Island, where a man in shorts and rubber boots awaited.

“Another busy day?” the man said, his sarcasm as evident — this being Maine — as the invisible bottom of the Cricket Hole. Osterby said nothing and held out an all but empty canvas bag of US mail with one hand, as the TM 2 glided past the dock without stopping. There was a single passenger aboard (me). In the state that calls itself Vacationland, high season had just begun.

Normally, by July, the mail boat that serves six of the small and rugged islands of northern Penobscot Bay — Barred, Butter, Eagle, Bear, Scrag and Great Spruce Head — would be weighed down with letters and packages, plus a dozen or so passengers at $25 per ride. Some riders would have been sightseers scanning the reef-laden harbours for porpoises and harbour seals, and some would have been seasonal residents of the islands. Many in the latter group would be stranded without the mail boat — a lifeline delivering essentials like prescriptions, groceries and, this year, ballots.

Operating the route has been the responsibility of one family since 1905 — and this year is likely to be the last because of the hardships imposed by COVID-19.

After departing Great Spruce Head, the TM 2 motored 3 miles to Eagle Island, where a member of that family, Treena Quinn, stood waiting on a 160-year-old wharf. A single mother and “sixth-generation island girl,” Quinn, 50, is the first woman in her family to run the mail boat. Her great-grandfather captained the route aboard a vessel known as the Merry Widow. Then a great-uncle took over, followed by her grandfather, then an “umpteenth cousin” and finally her father. Two relatives drowned delivering mail in the waters off Eagle, where the Quinn family has lived, at times alone, on a saltwater farm since approximately 1815.

At the Eagle Island dock, Quinn helped Osterby reload the TM 2, then watched as it vanished into the fog. “Poor Karl,” she said. “I haven’t been able to pay him all summer.”

Maine has the sixth-most tourism-dependent economy in the US, with nearly $6.5 billion in revenue from vacationers, and unlike other states relying on hospitality, such as Florida and Nevada, nearly everyone comes between June and September. Moreover, as those familiar with the state’s charms can attest, an outsized portion of Maine’s tourism industry is made up of small businesses.

The postal shack on Eagle Island, as The Katherine arrives with the day’s mail, in Maine, Aug, 21, 2020. Tristan Spinski/The New York Times

However, Maine also has the oldest population in the country, with a median age of 45, and in April its governor, Janet Mills, issued some of the most rigorous travel restrictions in the United States, including a 14-day quarantine of visitors. On July 4, the unofficial start of tourist season, as the schooners sat in their docks and the seafood shacks did not run out of fried scallops before sunset, many worried that Maine was facing a particularly acute form of the economic catastrophe afflicting the rest of the country.

I was one of those worriers. My family has vacationed on Eagle Island since the 1970s, and this summer I contacted Quinn, who warily greets attention from the press (“We’re not specimens in a jar,” she told me once) to ask if she would talk to me about the fate of the mail boat. She messaged back a yes, with a caveat: “Sure you’re up for a tale of woe?”

The usual number of passengers on the boat, including visitors to several rental properties the Quinns operate, had fallen by half, she said. In June, she hoped to secure a Paycheck Protection Program loan, but by the time she gathered her paperwork, filled out applications (“It takes forever to do anything on an island”) and made the two-hour voyage to the mainland, she was out of luck.

The coronavirus also forced a change to the mail boat itself. The regular vessel, a 42-year-old “gill netter” known as the Katherine, was sitting under a tarp on North Haven, a neighbouring island that because of the virus had barred nonresidents. Quinn, unable to prepare the Katherine for the start of the season, was forced to borrow the TM 2 — her father’s spartan but seaworthy lobster boat. Pressing it into service would mean that his traps would sit on land, unused.

“I’m terrified,” Quinn wrote me. The mail route, during its service of 115 years, had survived hurricanes, a fire, gales, winters in which the bay iced over, the loss of three vessels. “COVID is probably going to kill it,” she said.

‘COVID casts a different kind of rhythm’

Maine’s irregular coastline has over 3,000 islands, only a dozen or so of which are inhabited in winter, with populations varying from one person to a few thousand. On Eagle Island, the number of residents peaked a century ago, when 30 families lived there, and fell off sharply afterwards. But because of its continuous habitation by the Quinns, it has a reputation for preserving “the character and pace of the old life,” as one historian put it.

The island is silent year-round except for the clanging of a bell buoy and the far-off drone of lobster boats. The lone car, a lumbering Suburban, is used to ferry provisions to a few houses. Chanterelles and wild raspberries proliferate in fallow sheep meadows and overgrown spruce woods.

The area is known for its Arcadian beauty. Eliot and Fairfield Porter, artist brothers whose family owns Great Spruce Head Island, learned to photograph and paint during summers in Penobscot Bay. Buckminster Fuller, the midcentury architect who invented the geodesic dome, created some of his earliest structures playing with driftwood along nearby Bear Island.

Yet to anyone uncomfortable with harsh conditions and prolonged isolation, Penobscot Bay’s islands are a challenging place to live year-round. One morning in July, after taking an empty mail boat out to meet Treena Quinn, I found her at her desk nervously looking out a window, as a gathering wind whipped the fog behind her, making it look as if she were on a plane coming in for a difficult landing.

“COVID casts a different kind of rhythm,” she said. “It’s hard to plan.” On Great Spruce Head, the island cancelled its entire summer rental season after the governor’s orders. On Eagle, not one of the beds in the Quinns’ own rentals had been slept in since June. Still, the mail, per the terms of a $24,000 contract with the government, had to be delivered six days a week, incurring fuel costs and overhead. More pressingly for Treena Quinn, to the point of keeping her awake at night, were the isolated residents of the bay who, lacking transportation of their own, depended on the mail boat to return them to civilisation, whether for planned trips or sudden emergencies.

The Quinns have long been caretakers of the community, replacing empty propane tanks, recovering runaway rowboats and setting upright outhouses knocked over by winter storms. Farmers originally, the family managed to stay rooted on a small, rocky island surrounded by stiff currents by branching into lobstering, fishing, boatbuilding and hospitality, depending on the season and shifts in local ecology, from the disappearance of menhaden in the 1870s to the climate change-fueled explosion of the lobster industry. At one point, the family ran a summer hotel with a six-hole golf course, a tennis court and a dance hall. It now serves as a spacious office for the Sunset Bay Co, owned by Treena Quinn.

Karl Osterby, 63, a boat captain, caretaker of the Quinn family property, and sole year-round resident of Eagle Island, Maine, delivers the day's mail by boat to the several islands in Penobscot Bay, Maine, Aug 24, 2020. Tristan Spinski/The New York Times

“The job of a caretaker on a Maine island is a demanding one,” Eliot Porter wrote in 1966, requiring “a love of island life only possible for those who have grown up from childhood on islands.” As a girl Quinn lived in Stonington, a nearby town, during the school year, then moved to Eagle for summers. Her parents transitioned to full-time life on the island when she was in high school, and Quinn later moved to Camden.

“I always wanted to get out,” she said. “I didn’t want to live here.” But at 26, while working as a telemarketer for a credit card company, she became “miserable,” began having migraines and allowed herself to be talked into taking over the family business.

The mail boat is one of 24 water routes, from the Florida Panhandle to Lake Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, funded by the US Postal Service. Over the decades, as the population of smaller islands like Eagle shrank, its winter runs dwindled to once a week. But during the summer, the muttering of a four-stroke engine as it transits the bay is a presence throughout the day.

“It’s vital to this community,” said Peter Offenhartz, a retired chemistry professor who has been summering on Eagle Island since the 1960s. “I don’t know how we would live without it.”

‘She’ll leak for a while'

In the afternoon we left the Sunset Bay Co.’s office and went outside. The fog began to lift, and from it emerged Robert Quinn, the patriarch of the Quinn family, as well as Ian Ludders, the sternman on the TM 2. Also, a recently arrived guest at one of the Quinns’ rental properties, a woman who identified herself as a ghost hunter.

Robert Quinn, one of the last year-round residents of these islands, returned to mainland life two years ago to care for his ailing wife, Helene. (She died Sept 1.) Sinking into a foldable canvas chair and noticing the face coverings on his guests, he smiled shyly and stroked his beard. “Sorry I don’t have appropriate attire for the masquerade,” he said.

A living link between the 19th century and the present, Quinn was born when Eagle Island still had a lighthouse manned by the Coast Guard and an active one-room schoolhouse. At 82, he continues to fish the bay, eschewing the 625-horsepower engines and braided polypropylene ropes of “scientific fishermen.”

“The mail boat needed to be moderniSed when Treena took over,” Robert Quinn said. He gestured toward his daughter, who stood nearby “finger talking,” as he called it, on her smartphone. He recalled his uncle Jimmy, who piloted the mail boat in the decades before CB radio and never missed a day, “except one summer in the ’50s when there were two or three hurricanes.”

The job then passed to a relative, who was remembered as “competent in handling boats but not a people person.” Other family members took over, followed by a cousin, also named Robert Quinn: “‘I. Robert,’ that’s what he went by. His first name was Iris. ‘I. Robert’ stuck with him quite a while, then ‘Mail Boat Robert.’” Robert Quinn recited a poem by Maine writer Jym St Pierre:

I met a man named Robert Quinn.

Then I turned around and met him again.

Said I to Robert, “There’s some confusion.

Are you one or two; is it fission or fusion?”

The Quinn family property on the north end of Eagle Island, Maine, Aug 24, 2020. Since 1905, four generations of Quinns have delivered letters, packages and passengers to the islands of Penobscot Bay — a lost summer could sink the tradition. Tristan Spinski/The New York Times

The fog had now burned off, and the islands long tended by the Quinns, with names like Hardhead and the Porcupines, came into view. Ludders sat down nearby and plucked at an instrument “made out of some kind of gourd” while the ghost hunter hovered around the Quinn farmhouse, trailed by a teenage boy and a chicken.

Robert Quinn did not actually mind not having use of the TM 2, he said, but he worried about what would happen if they put the Katherine — which had dried out during its protracted stay on land and needed extra repairs — in the water.

“I don’t know how long it’ll take to get her swelled up tight,” he said. “She’ll leak for a while.”

Treena Quinn interrupted with two pieces of news. The boatyard had called to say the Katherine was ready to be picked up. And the ghost hunter, who had headed off toward the Quinn cemetery, where some 60 members of the family are buried, had extended her stay from a week to a month.

A late-season spike

From Bali to Rome, the response to the coronavirus has been to return to old ways. On Eagle Island, this was not an adjustment. Island life tends to freeze the past in place. Technology, with its ever-increasing demands to connect with the outside world, creates as many problems as it solves. One of Treena Quinn’s challenges in filing for a Paycheck Protection Program loan had been getting access to a working printer.

The return of the Katherine was a reassurance, and not just because it allowed her father to get back on the water.

“I’m in love with that boat,” she said, sighing. “She’s slow, wide and heavy, and she’s a wooden boat and they’re so expensive to maintain. People keep urging me to switch her for fibreglass. But you’ve seen her — aren’t her lines beautiful?”

“I don’t know if it makes sense in the real world,” she added, shaking her head.

The real world, of course, is not what people look for when they visit Maine.

As summer has gone on, with COVID outbreaks spreading from state to state, Maine — which has one of the lowest infection rates in the country, perhaps because of its aggressive early measures — has come to seem like a sanctuary. In July, Mills, the governor, exempted residents of all states in the Northeast except Massachusetts from travel restrictions.

Tourism picked up accordingly. Traffic jams returned to the Piscataqua River Bridge dividing New Hampshire and Maine, and the once-empty parking lot at the LL Bean superstore in Freeport was again crowded with Subarus and Priuses. Thanks to COVID, rentals on Eagle Island “spiked,” according to Quinn, when I texted again in mid-August. Was the mail boat faring better, too, I wondered?

“The boat is still sinking,” she wrote. Rental requests remained steady, but “no one calls for riding around anymore.”

“Who wants to sit in close quarters with other people and look at seals?” she added. “Not me.”

© 2020 New York Times News Service