Vance and S.T. On Matinicus, where the lines were drawing tighter, they told Vance Bunker that his son-in-law, a mainlander, was no longer welcome to set his traps.In 2009, Philbrook said, he’d sold more lobster than he’d ever sold before, yet barely covered his costs. She’s a painter, and in the summer also runs a small gallery she calls “The Fisherman’s Wife,” selling art, handcrafts, and notecards to the summer people. They are owned by a bank or a lender who took ownership through foreclosure proceedings. Every boat on the island, and Vance Bunker in his plane, worked the sea for days, while the island’s wives walked the shore in search of clues. Just a few of us set out to put the heart at the north end of the airstrip. But the deeper causes had more to do with other things: pride, greed, progress, family, what it means to claim a place as home.All that was many months ago. Of fires, drownings, lost boats, sea rescues, church suppers, roof raisings, shared food, every neighborly act you could think of. Rockland, Maine is less than 2 hours from Portland on coastal Route One. It’s also the biggest reason why, whenever there’s an event at the school–just about any event at any time of day that involves the five or six kids there–30 people are apt to show up.But lately, since that July morning two years ago, when Vance Bunker shot Chris Young-and the island’s clan-based, sometimes brutish culture was suddenly the stuff of cable-TV news–the islanders’ devotion, while no less total, has stiffened and turned fearful.I asked Philbrook about the “fishhouse meetings” I’d heard about that had been going on the last several years: all the lobstermen on the island, gathering every springtime in the schoolhouse or church basement to set the rules that would govern, among other things, who could lobster and who couldn’t. There was nothing legally binding in anything they decided; a licensed lobsterman, as far as the law is concerned, can set his traps anywhere he chooses.
He says he isn’t angry, but it’s hard to believe him, and his wife says no such thing. “We’ve got no use for police out here; we’re just fine policing ourselves,” one local told me. [Vance Bunker’s wife, Sari] don’t see that, I don’t think. Thirteen years ago, he bought his own. When a moment of violence “crossed a line that had never been crossed before,” the islanders were caught between a precious past and a precarious future. And on this little island, where a brooding sort of silence has settled over things, it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t fear for the future.The shooting happened over lobster traps: who has a right to them, and where. Her devotion to the place seems almost ingrown.There was a time, Philbrook says, when he had thoughts of leaving the island: He went to college, took courses in aerospace engineering (“I thought maybe I wanted to go into space”), switched to biology, then to photography–but nothing clicked.