When I travel to remote villages in the New England countryside, I find no distinct boundary between people and the surrounding forest. There are always a few houses or farms sprinkled about. Drive a few miles, and you'll find another. But islanders live with different boundaries. Their world ends at shoreline. They can fish and sail the waters, but they know how unpredictable, how destructive those waters can be. Islanders own the rocks and the houses they build upon those rocks, but the waters belong to Nature. I have photographed Monhegan, Vinalhaven, the Casco Bay Islands, Campobello, Block Island, and Cuttyhunk. But until a few years ago I had never been to the Thimble Islands just off the Connecticut shore. On that occasion I had rented a helicopter to shoot the elegant town green of Guilford. When I finished, I said to the pilot, "Let's pass over the Thimbles," knowing one day the film would be needed. From above I could see what the Mattabesec Indians meant long ago when they named these tiny islands, "the beautiful sea rocks." They are beautiful, and in some cases they are really only rocks protruding above the waves. Some of the islands are so small that a single cottage covers their surfaces, as if the islands were no more than houseboats at their moorings. A few islands are larger, with a dozen or so houses snuggled together. They seem like suburban neighborhoods, but without roads. I saw only water and rock and island homes. I shot my pictures, and we had turned toward shore when the helicopter sputtered. A fuel line problem sent us spinning into Long Island Sound. We clung to an inflatable raft and kicked our way to one of the innumerable rocks that make navigating among the islands a challenge for the unwary boater. The sea claimed my film that day, and ever since, I have wanted to return, to see these islands close up, at eye level. I returned to the Thimbles in summer, a kayak strapped to my car, prepared to be patient. I knew that the islanders held tightly to their privacy. Depending on whom you ask, or what you read, the Thimbles (named for a thimble-shaped berry) number from 100 to 365. It all depends, apparently, on how you classify an island. My interest, however, centered on the two dozen or so inhabited islands. "They have been the scene of no great events or the home of no great men," wrote Archibald Hanna in his Brief History of the Thimble Islands in Branford, Connecticut, "but they have played a part in human life and have been loved and cherished by those who dwelt on them." Kids dive off Money Island for an audience of passing tourists. Anyone willing to board one of the three tour or ferry boats out of Stony Creek can steal a glimpse of Thimble Island life. All day long the boat captains spin fact and lore about Captain Kidd's hidden treasure on Money Island and General Tom Thumb's courtship of a diminutive lady on Cut-in-Two Island, and the tragedy of the 1938 hurricane that washed seven islanders to their deaths. Most of the islanders have long since made their peace with the curious tension between privacy and the daily routine of boatloads of strangers gazing at their homes and tossing coins to their children diving from rocks, as if they were touring an exotic watery zoo. Though boat captains do their best to guard the privacy of the islanders (it took me ten days to discover where Jane Pauley and "Doonesbury" cartoonist Garry Trudeau live on Governor Island), at times the precarious navigation among the rocks forces them to come skintight to some homes, close enough to hear people conversing. Suzanne Fleisher, whose family has owned Wheelers Island since 1885, was the first to invite me to her home. She spent all her childhood summers here. She remembers that after dinner the women dispersed into the kitchen while she sat at the table, soaking up the good-natured stories of the men. Island nights, deprived of television and other modern diversions, had a way of bringing out stories. Gail Ferris of Stony Creek kayaks under a bridge that connects the two halves of High Island. And I met Gail Ferris, who for years was the night caretaker for Rogers Island. She lives in Stony Creek, but mostly she lives in her kayak, and she guided me through the waters for hours. I heard islanders puttering back and forth, heard their hollered greetings to each other. I saw some famous personalities and the more anonymous lawyers, fishermen, carpenters, masons, and retirees who form the nucleus of the Thimbles. I brought back hundreds of photos, but I knew it was the narrowest glimpse into a life only a Thimble Islander really knows. It is a life that for many lies rooted in generations of Thimble memories, a life that welcomes night, when the tour boats grow silent. From Stony Creek the lights of the islands, many of them kerosene lanterns, flicker across the water, close but undeniably separate, like words spoken just beyond our hearing. Dwight Carter, Bob Milne, and Richard Howd combine 43 years' experience on the tour boat, Volsunga III.

Copyright ©1996 Stephen O. Muskie