ISLES OF SHOALS (continued)

DAY TWO

Star Island is gone. In fact, by mid morning Malaga too, just 100 yards away, is lost inside the pea soup fog. I've heard stories of rowers getting disoriented in the mist -- attempting the simple 15-minute trip across the Harbor -- but heading out to sea instead. Next stop, the British Isles.

Although we are up at dawn, breakfast and clean-up takes four hours. The gas canister that heats the water and cooks the eggs on the makeshift stove is empty. We have a fresh tank, but how to install it? When we finally find a pipe wrench, it is rusted closed. We soak it in DW-40 and bang it on a rock. It's hot, but there are no rays to heat up the solar shower, an overlarge plastic Baggie that, in theory, warms in the sun. Then you hold it over your head with a Y-shaped stick and wash in a dribbling tepid gallon. Washing dishes is accomplished by squatting over a plastic tub in the back yard. I call it "indoor tenting." Even the tiniest chores seem to take forever. We grow crabby. Our brains are adjusting to "island time" again, an alternate clock that says things will get done when they get done, and not before. This is why they call Prudy Randall's home on nearby Lunging Island, the "Honeymoon Cottage." Couples who can survive a week there amid the inconveniences of island life, legend says, can survive anything.

I decide to grille breakfast instead, but cannot find the grille, then I discover it over by the outhouse, but no charcoal. We learn that the lyme, used to tame the scent of the "facilities" has all blown away in a previous storm. We substitute seaweed. It is so damp in the house that I have to light a fire in the wood stove to dry our clothes, despite the warm morning. I need more wood. I search for the saw. I'm beginning to understand why my ancestors didn't have time to keep diaries.

We become fixated on our foodstuffs. There seems not to be enough of anything to last the week. We have forgotten lamp oil, tea, milk, charcoal, beer and mayonnaise. We've eaten half of our one loaf of bread already and I am numbering and dividing up the juice boxes, assigning drinks to upcoming meals and days like the captain on a lifeboat. We could find no block ice for the cooler, and the ice cubes we brought are already melting away. One of Maryellen's 10 brothers is due on the noon ferry with his two children. We call him on the cell phone with our shopping list as he is driving up from Connecticut. If only Maren Hontvet had had a cell phone to call for help, I am thinking, there would have been no Smuttynose ax murders here back in 1873 when her two companions were killed. In this fog, killer Louis Wagner would never have found the island rowing out from Portsmouth. Anita Shreve would then never have written Weight of Water, her bestseller about the murders, and the tourists would not all ask me - Where did those two girls get killed?

Torrential rain. It is impossible to get to the cove, never mind row to the ferry dock to meet Tommy and the boys, and we cannot raise them on the phone. The Shoals has its own private weather. An early 1850s travel article for the Mid Ocean House promised Smuttynose visitors temperatures 20 degrees cooler than on the mainland. If so, Portsmouth must be a terrarium. We argue about whether to brave the weather and, as the battle rages, the rain stops. We rush happily to the cove to find the rowboat hanging on the rocks six feet above and 20 feet away from the receding water. It is still just 11 am.

CONTINUE with Smuttynose Island Diary