By Sally Baker

The Lobster Chronicles: Life on a Very Small Island Linda Greenlaw '83 Hyperion Books (2002)

Catchiness aside, The Lobster Chronicles is a bit of a misnomer for Linda Greenlaw's second book. Its subtitle, Life on a Very Small Island, hits the nail more squarely. In these essays, grouped temporally around one lobster-fishing season, Greenlaw explores the challenge of living in a tiny and dwindling colony seven miles off the Maine shore.

Greenlaw was made famous by Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm,which called her the best swordboat captain on the Grand Banks. She went on to write her own memoir of life among swordfish, The Hungry Ocean, and several years ago decided to return to her ancestral home, Isle au Haut. Single and childless--and hoping to change her status on both counts--she moved in with her parents and joined an island community of fewer than 50 souls. She bought a lobster boat, hired her father, James Greenlaw '57, as her sternman and began to fish.

Once a thriving community with four school districts, a population that supported several stores and a lobster-canning factory, Isle au Haut now almost literally lives and dies by lobstering, a legendarily taxing and difficult line of work. Greenlaw notes that the place does have its share of people who turn their faces to the salt spray, put their backs into hauling traps and otherwise live up to the myth of the Maine lobsterman. But the world she describes also is rife with gossip and feuds, pettiness, moral weakness, despair, anger and hopelessness.

In short, Greenlaw chronicles a small community like many in Maine--proud of its past, contentious in its present, worried about its future.

Greenlaw uses her own situation as a metaphor for the island's unknowable future. Isle au Haut's survival depends, she says, on being able to hold on to year-'rounders like her--they must make their lives there, have children, protect the rich fishing grounds from encroachment by off-islanders. And yet, at 40, with no eligible men in reach, Greenlaw is thinking about leaving the island again, going back "offshore" to fish. She is building a house--the island will be home--but her dream of saving Isle au Haut probably won't come true.

She seems defiant--in a whistling-around-the-graveyard way--when telling the story of Nicholas Barter, a descendent of the island's first settler. Nicholas started lobstering when he was 6 and, for a time, he could barely be persuaded to leave the water's edge. Now 9, Nicholas hasn't pulled a trap in a year, and he enjoys Harry Potter books, his chemistry set and the Internet. But, Greenlaw says, Nicholas "has no intention" of forsaking his heritage, and he is "the hope for the community's future."

That's a lot of hope for one small boy, or for one grown woman.