Nor'Easter

It was my great grandfather, Conley Trevor, who built the original lighthouse on Smallgray Island, back in the 1920s.

Stories passed down in our family claim that he was the first human being to live on the island. The Penobscot people who settled the rest of the bay would go nowhere near Smallgray, and the European settlers who came later followed their lead. That same family lore also claims that he built the lighthouse with his own money and his own hands, after his fishing boat became grounded on a shoal nearby.

It's a nice story, the kind of just-so tale that anyone would tell about a local hero, but any amount of digging puts the lie to it pretty quickly. It was Conley's idea, but the state of Maine funded the construction of the Smallgray Light, and a team of Irish and African American laborers laid the foundation and put brick over brick to build it up. Often for wages too low to survive.

Regardless of the truth of that old story, though, Smallgray remained in our family through the 20th century. In 1957, the state put up a new lighthouse with an automatic signal, but my grandparents stayed nearby in the old keeper's house. They took in rent from the land where a (hopefully better paid) construction crew put up the new beacon, and expanded their halibut fishing business. The 1970s were the highwater mark for the large-scale operation that they started. At one point they had a small fleet of four boats, and an annual take worth eight figures.

The Trevor fishing dynasty died with them, though. My mother had no desire to see it continue. She had gone to medical school and didn't want to give up her private practice in Jersey City, so she sold the relatively small operation to a larger company for a pretty lucrative sum. That company itself became a subsidiary of ConAgra ten years later, and that was that.

I followed in her footsteps, and just like her, I kept the old home as a vacation house. I've come here with my husband and daughter almost every fall to watch the coastal forests turn shades of ochre and bright red. It's a beautiful little slice of New England, one of those rare places that hasn't changed much since the first British colonists arrived in the 17th century. I always hoped it would stay that way, even as more beach houses popped up on the mainland from one autumn to the next.

Indian summer this year ruined the show, although the pale blue sky and sharp lighting made for some beautiful photos for my husband's gallery. I took Lisa out on the sea kayak one evening to follow the coast. She hoped we'd see whales, but we weren't that lucky. Still, it was an experience for her. Probably the best one before the end of fall break.

The weather turned pretty suddenly. I kind of expected a storm, but the one that popped up caught us all off guard. There was no time to get back to the mainland before the swells started to grow. First five, then ten, and finally thirty feet in the bay. Pounding at the cliff on the High End, under the lighthouse. At least we had time to stormproof the house before the clouds and the howling wind swept in, coming southwest from the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

There are so many things that I wish I'd done differently now, but this isn't even a case of hindsight being 20/20. It was safer, by any reasonable estimate, to wait out the storm here than trying to make it back in a six foot boat that isn't even really rated for the ocean. I couldn't have known what would come in with the storm.

The sound comes in through the boarded up windows and doors. Through the walls and the roof. Louder than the wind sometimes, even as the sheets of snow scream by and form tormented vortices in their passing. The hollow war drum of the thunder and the violent crash of the enormous waves can't drown it out.

During the research that I did on the history of Smallgray Island, I discovered something else that went against those old family stories. Apparently, Conley wasn't really the first person to live here anymore than he was a brave hero who built the lighthouse with his own sweat and blood. While the Irishmen dug the foundation, they found the remains of an old whaling station, dating back two centuries. It had been knocked in, and mostly burned to ashes. Along with the whale bones, there were human remains in the rubble. Historians from the University of Maine were called out and found more ruins on the other side of the island. On the Low End, near the future site of the house where we're pinned in now. An old chieftain's house, richly decorated in the Algonquian Style. Inside of it, there were more skeletons. Torn to pieces and marred by deep cuts. Jagged lacerations, like they'd been ripped apart by wolves. More digging found another, Pre-Algonquian site beneath that. There were more skeletons, these charred through to where the marrow was turned to black powder.

It all fit together with reports among early European settlers in the area. Smallgray was regarded by the coastal peoples as a dangerous place, probably because it was so exposed to the surf during severe weather. In legends, though, the storms brought something more than waves. They brought spirits and abominations up from the Underworld. The souls of the lost, along with things too horrible to have names. Beasts that killed anyone on the island and dragged them down to the gloomy abode of the dead.

Now, that's all starting to make sense to me. I and my husband have been pretending that it's just the storm that we hear, but Lisa can't quit crying. To someone who hasn't learned to see the world as rational and ordered yet, the source of the tortured screams and demented chanting is obvious.

We put in a distress call to the Coast Guard an hour ago, but the dispatch said that they can't fly out with the winds gusting to 70 knots. They just told us to shelter in place.

I don't know what's really out there, but I'm afraid we're going to find out very soon.