Island Kitchen’s time is coming to a close!

As we wind down the season, researchers are finishing their projects, writers are adding the final touches to their stories and essays, and Emily, our documentarian, is wrapping up her footage collection.

We’re cleaning our working and living spaces, packing our things, and taking last hikes to our favorite spots on the island and beyond- we have a trip planned to Sheep Island at the 0.0 low tide on Wednesday morning, for example.

The summer has been a fantastic experience of immeasurable worth to all of us, and we’ve had a great time living and working together, even though things weren’t always perfect.

Time, as I’ve said before, moves strangely on Kent Island. For a while it seemed as if the summer would never end, and towards the middle of the season it sometimes felt like we’d been here forever. Afternoons can drag on and weeks can feel like months, but now looking back on the summer it seems like it’s gone by in a flash.

In these last few days (the Bowdoin/Kenyon crew departs on Saturday morning) as we prepare to leave Jesse and Kathryn to their research on the island, I’ll keep taking photos and perhaps I’ll be able to upload a few, if time and internet signal strength allow it. 

I’ve decided that this will be my last season here, so the end of the season marks the end of what feels like something bigger than a summer job to me.

I’ll miss this amazing place and I hope to return someday.

Thanks for reading!

 

 
After our hot breakfast and other attempts at recovering from the trauma to our body heat we had incurred overnight, Emily, Charlotte and I conversed with Elisabeth, who had not returned to Hodgson House in order to avoid one-on-one interactions with our resident ghost while I was still on South Hill, about our plans for the day.

We decided the correct first step was definitely to make coffee, a big pot of coffee.

Charlotte was feeling adventurous and wanted to learn to make coffee, so I showed her the ropes with the Melitta and our efforts were rewarded with a delicious pot of Peet’s deep roast, a West Coast phenomenon I was unfamiliar with before coming to Kent Island.

The Upward Bound students had just departed in the care of Janet, leaving as they had come: on high tide.

Janet and Mark would spend the day shopping for groceries for our last few days on the island and for provisions for the prolonged stay of Jesse and Kathryn on the island.

We spent the morning drinking our coffee and trying to stay warm by working in the lab, where Colin had built a fire in the woodstove.

At lunch, Damon was successfully heeled when Jesse offered him a bowl of food: “do you want this?”
As it seemed the rain wouldn’t pick back up but it was still foggy, we decided that we’d uncover the oven to let it air-dry some more but leave our drying sleeping gear indoors.

Since there were no longer residents in two of the bedrooms we thought the clotheslines upstairs would be less disruptive places to hang things to dry than the living room had been all morning.

Elisabeth and I, still tired from the near-sleepless night, were grateful we’d have a relatively simple meal to prepare.

While she made bread to serve with dinner (Kathryn’s almost-no-knead loaf had come out of the oven with the strangest texture any of us had ever seen, looking somehow deflated) I chopped and toasted croutons from last night’s leftover toast.

While the croutons were in the oven I went to the garden to harvest lettuce for a salad. It’s amazing how much better fresh lettuce from the garden is than even the freshest lettuce one can buy at the supermarket.

Salad and bread taken care of, I started on pasta sauce while Elisabeth moved on to dessert, a batch of the extra-lemony lemon squares that are so popular here.

We jammed to Ray Charles as we worked, and during the in-between periods when things were simmering we did the pilates exercises we had skipped earlier in the day when we felt too exhausted for exercise.

Our pasta sauce came out perfect (despite there not being any wine), and dinner conversation was a blend of reflection on our time with the Upward Bound students and planning for the few remaining days we have on the island.

After dishes were taken care of, Mark asked us all for some help moving the old asphalt shingles from the recently redone roof of the caretaker’s cottage and bringing the groceries up from the wharf (he and Janet had arrived at low tide so everything was out on Ernest Joy).

We were able to get the work done quickly with our many hands, and soon everything was put in its place- the shingles are being stored in one of the big insulated plastic bins Grand Manan fishermen use to transport their catch to market, which we had all been joking about filling with water and superheated rocks to make a wonderful steaming hot tub.

When our work for the day was done (Janet and I reorganized the freezer, finding all sorts of interesting items and Kathryn made a wonderful batch of granola with coconut) we all turned in early, seeking recovery from our sleepless night on the hill in the rain, or in the case of Christine and Haley, an adventure to the cabin on Sheep Island. 

 


If summer hadn’t come to Kent Island earlier in the season, it certainly had today.

There was no wind, and what felt like a new kind of heat lay in the still air.

The Upward Bound students went for a walk with Damon to the southern end of the island to collect snails for their experiments.

When they returned with snails they began measuring and weighing them, and needed to boil the periwinkles to make extracting them from their shells a more manageable task.

This meant I needed to move my toast-making operation over to another burner on the stove, which was quite all right. 

The toasters are the camping-friendly sort that have four wire sides for toast, and ours seem always to be folding down when that’s the least desirable thing they could do, such as when there is toast on them. 

Janet engineered an ingenious solution to the problem and wired the four sides to one another so they would support the weight of a standard slice of bread and I could make 30 slices of toast in a timely manner.

We were preparing breakfast for dinner, so this was something we wanted to do.

I cooked honey-garlic sausage and extra-thick bacon for the omnivores while Janet made a beautiful salad to accompany all our heavy fatty foods.

The Upward Bound students were placed in charge for dessert, and made a white cake with vanilla buttercream frosting with rainbow sprinkles.

There were some really incredible smells happening in the kitchen while this was underway.

 The main course was frittatas with onions, green peppers black olives, and cheddar cheese, which came out perfectly puffy baked in cast iron skillets. 

Janet prepared her trademark baked oatmeal, which has become a favorite of everyone on the island. Both pans of it quickly disappeared. (Recipe)

After dinner dishes were cleared away Jesse led us on the first real old-fashioned bird walk of the season, taking Nat’s old route down the L-Transect and Eagle’s Nest Trail (where we did see an actual bald eagle) and back.

Emily chatted with a common yellowthroat, which then, having befriended her, followed us along the trail as we went.

The woods were unusually quiet for evening but the walk was lovely.

After we returned (along with those who had gone out in the skiff with Damon for some water sampling) and the Upward Bound students returned to the lab to further analyze their samples, Elisabeth, Emily, Charlotte, and I began preparations for a journey to South Hill.

Aidan decided to join us just as we were leaving, and we were glad for the company.

Emily packed up her camera equipment- she had planned to film both the sunset and the following sunrise but because we were getting such a late start it was clear we would miss the sunset altogether and that the sky would darken during our 30-minute walk.

 Despite it seeming very unlikely that any rain would fall overnight, we decided to cover the oven with a tarp to minimize the slowing effects of the dew on the mud-drying process.

This turned out to be a much smarter choice than we imagined it could have been, as we learned when it began to rain around 2 a.m.

Up to then the evening had been mediocre, with no stargazing, but not made less comfortable by pesky insects or gusting winds. 

This was the turning point.

Aidan and Elisabeth immediately jumped ship, not being the type to be any more uncomfortable than they need to be and not terribly eager to sleep outside in the rain.

It was only drizzling, and it seemed like it must be a passing shower, so the rest of us stayed, still intent on capturing the sunrise on film as planned.

The rain stopped soon after those who had chosen to walk two treacherous miles in the dark departed, and we went back to sleep.

We were awakened again around 4, when it began to pour. 

The deluge continued until 5:30, by which time our sleeping bags, pillows, and clothing (especially hats) were absolutely soaked, and I mean drenched.

Our clothes clung to our bodies and there were literally several inches of water under me on the tarp. I thought I might float away.

We decided this was no longer desirable and that our chances of ruining the camera with rainwater were greater than those of capturing it on film, and we headed back downtown.

Our gear was at least doubled in weight by the water it had absorbed, and Emily’s and Charlotte’s boots were full of water up to calf depth.

I was characteristically barefoot.

We stopped periodically so the others could empty their boots, which kept refilling.

Water was literally pouring out of our backpacks as we walked.

When we reached the portion of the trail where the grass is literally taller than we are, we made the best of that as we had been doing with the rest of our tribulations (we had been laughing constantly since we started folding up the tarp-perhaps an adaptive response to stress?), telling ourselves that on top of the free bath we had gotten laying in frigid puddles earlier we were now going through a car wash free of charge as well.

We’d been feeling ambivalent about the tarp- Emily: “I’m not sure if I feel indebted to it or angry at it.”

When we arrived back at the dorm, dripping and desolate, we began devising clotheslines to string across the library, as quietly as we could so as not to wake all the sleeping people in the dorm and with considerable difficulty considering our only materials were cheap acrylic yarn and packing tape.

What we needed most, of course, was a good hot breakfast.

While Emily and Charlotte finished hanging our dripping outerwear and bedding over all the furniture we were able to commandeer from other areas of the dorm I scrambled some eggs and made tea and toast.

This helped improve our condition of misery, but one is never really so warm or dry on Kent Island as one might hope to be, and things will always be that way, it seems.  
 
Hello! This is Sara Hamilton writing to you from the Kent Island Scientific Station. I am a rising sophomore at Bowdoin College, and this summer I am working on a research project investigating the accumulation of red tide toxins in intertidal organisms. As we near the end of our summer on the Island, all of us are reflecting on the experiences we have gained here, and I’ve come to some important conclusions, including:

Favorite Moment: The first time I walked to South Hill by myself. I was so isolated from anything familiar, surrounded by the mighty Bay of Fundy on 3 sides. The only sounds were gull cries, water crashing and the sound of my own heartbeat. I played in and amongst the deep cliffs there and it truly felt like I was stranded on a deserted island, eons away from any of humanity. It was such a surreal moment.

Favorite Kent Island Bird: Petrels. They are such unique birds, from their gentle purring to their subterranean burrows to their faithful monogamy.

Best new skill: Learning the Canadian anthem

Thing I miss most about home: Thunderstorms. We get fog and bright sun here, but not much else. I miss the dramatic summer storms we get back home in Virginia.

Thing I will miss about the island most: Living in the present. Our lives back home are hectic (and that’s putting it lightly), running around from one meeting to the next, worrying about term papers, trying to figure out how to apply for study abroad. On the island though, we have so few distractions. Your life settles into an easy pace set by the routine of the sun and the tides, and you find yourself spending much of your time contemplating the feeling of the soft grass beneath your feet.

Biggest Revelation: I think I’m falling in love with field biology. Between drinking in golden sunshine all day, being surrounded by curious and adventurous people, and traveling to awe-inspiring places, this summer has really cemented in my mind that ecological research is the place for me.

Cailey’s Most Delicious Dessert: Lemon squares….although the cardamom coffee cake was out of this world.

My project is coming to an end, we are beginning to say goodbye to new friends and I’m taking as many pictures as possible to try to keep all these amazing adventures fresh in my mind forever.

Prey for Fog,

Sara

 
The weather was still summery, but the hot still air that had hung over us on Tuesday (Janet: “This is like living inside someone’s mouth.”) had been replaced by strong gusty winds.

It became more and more blustery outside as the day progressed.

In the morning, Emily and I put the second-to-last layer on the oven: one of pure mud over our mud-and-alfalfa insulation layer.

We decided that allowing it the whole day to dry would certainly be sufficient and that we would be able to apply the finish plaster and dig out the sand by evening.

The Upward Bound students, overseen by Janet, made six beautiful loaves of Angie’s fluffy white bread.

The first loaf disappeared within a few minutes of coming out of the pan it had been baked in.

Charlotte was my sous chef for a day of Indian-style food. 

The multi-component meal kept us busy right up to 6 pm, a rarity here.

Charlotte started with a spicy cabbage salad. The two enormous heads of cabbage required a quadruple batch of the dressing recipe in my black book.

I worked on getting the curries underway, first frying the onions and toasting the spices, then adding diced potatoes and carrots, corn, peas, and coconut milk.

The chicken thighs baked slowly in the oven, to later be torn up and stirred into the curry.

While things were simmering away I prepared a triple-batch of naan dough, using all whole-wheat flour instead of my usual half-and-half blend.

I also added fresh garlic in addition to the usual few tablespoons of sage, giving the bread a new flavor dimension.

When it came time to cook the rice noodles we were serving alongside the curry, I discovered that the package instructions were strange, ambiguous, and poorly translated.

It seemed that one could cook these noodles simply by placing them in cool water for two minutes, but because I wanted to serve them hot I boiled water as I would for wheat noodles and stirred until the noodles were tender, which really did only take a few minutes. 

When they were cooked I noticed the noodles had a peculiar aroma, which Charlotte described perfectly: “smells like plants!” 

They tasted, however, as pleasantly bland as all rice noodles do.

For dessert, Charlotte had been wanting to learn to make lattice-top pies.

We mixed the last gallon-size bag of rhubarb from the freezer with strawberry jam and the usual pie spices, which didn’t seem too different from using canned pie filling.

When they first came out of the oven, however, the pies seemed even soupier than I was used to seeing fruit pies come out, despite our incorporation of corn starch into the filling. We tried pouring liquid off but it wouldn’t work, and our turkey baster kept getting clogged with rhubarb.

We were worried that we would have to serve dessert in bowls, but the pie thickened up considerably to normal fruit-pie texture as it cooled. Success!

We had a fun afternoon in the kitchen, too, moving through music ranging from the Grateful Dead to Yonder Mountain String Band to The Black Keys and back. 

After dinner was over we were ready to put the final coat on the oven. 

Everything was going great as we smoothed the finish plaster and began pressing in periwinkle shells and colorful rocks.

I dug out the door and Emily and I took turns digging out the sand form, which came away cleanly from the dome of building mud (our wet-paper release film had worked great).

Suddenly the oven began to slide. The dome held together beautifully, but it had nothing to sit on- we had not built onto the foundation sufficiently, but for the most part simply pressed mud onto sand and mud onto mud.

When it collapsed and split into segments, people seemed to come out of the proverbial woodwork, crowding around, asking questions, offering prescriptions for how to repair it. I became defensive, irritated, then disconsolate.

This is it for the oven; it’s done.

Once everyone who had been uselessly standing around left us alone, Elisabeth, Charlotte, Aidan, Emily and I began to plan. 

We knew the problem was that we had built our sand form too big for our foundation.

We separated all the layers of the dome and put them into the bins we had carried mud and sand up to the building site in.

We used the tarp I had brought up to protect the oven from rain to mix sand and water, and built a smaller form.

The oven being smaller wouldn’t really be a problem at all, especially considering it was mostly for novelty purposes and we didn’t plan to bake any more than a loaf or two of bread at a time in it.

We covered the form with dampened pages from a Rolling Stone magazine.

Then, layer by layer, we rebuilt the entire oven as the sun slowly descended in the sky, ending up right back where we were, ready to dig out the door.

We even decorated with a beautiful spiral of rocks and shells pressed into the plaster.

Knowing it was likely to rain overnight, we carefully covered the oven with a tarp, placing all of the rocks we had left over from building the foundation around the perimeter, along with bins full of extra soil and sand.

Emily, Elisabeth and I took a victory shower, filling buckets from the water heater and dousing our hair and skin with yogurt containers. 

It was refreshing to clean the silt and sand out of our hair and our pores and to stand under the moon with the breeze blowing over our skin. The warm water was so pleasant we didn’t want the experience to end.

Once we were clean to a satisfactory extent we headed inside to heat some water for tea.

We socialized with the others in the dorm, who were waiting for it to be dark enough and late enough for a petrel walk, which isn’t fruitful unless begun after 11 pm or so.

Elisabeth and I were reading in bed by 10:30, and falling asleep to the sound of the petrels that burrow right outside our house by the time the others had set out in search of the birds.

I awoke during the night to the sound of low rumbling thunder and falling rain.

The storm had finally blown in, it seemed. 
 
Hello! I’m Jesse, a graduate student at the University of Guelph working on the long-term Savannah Sparrow project here on Kent Island.  For my MSc, I am studying the effects of acute stress on fitness in the population of Savannah Sparrows breeding on the island. Using a combination of field experiments and observational data, I am examining the relationship between early life stress and subsequent survival during the pre-migratory period, and the effects of stress on migratory behaviour.  Sparrows, like humans, experience stressful events on a daily basis that initiate the release of hormones to cope with acute stressors.  These stress hormones play an important role in determining the survival prospects of individuals by regulating internal processes (i.e. immune function, metabolism, etc.).  To gain a better understanding of how and why stress hormones are so important for birds, we are treating nestlings with either a ‘hormone cocktail’ – a stress hormone (corticosterone) dissolved in peanut oil – or simply peanut oil as a control, while they are still in the nest.  Once the Sparrows fledge, we will then attempt to recapture them before they depart the island for warmer climes to determine how the experimental birds have faired compared to the control individuals.  The remaining Sparrows will then be outfitted with these very stylish ‘backpacks’ (all the rage in the Sparrow world, see pictures below) – called geolocators – to track their migratory movements in autumn and spring, and to figure out where these lucky birds are vacationing for the winter.  What a life…

 
I arose at 6:30 to give myself enough time to condition and knead the sourdough before our 8 am departure for the most exciting event of every Kent Island summer: the whale watch day.

There are quite a few things that make this day so special: it always sneaks up on you, so to speak, in part because time is a strange thing on Kent Island and doesn’t move at the same pace as it does in other places but also because we never nail down a date for it ahead of time because whale watch day has to take place on the best weather day possible; the best weather day is always unfathomably pleasant compared to the more plentiful bad-weather days we have in Kent Island summers; it’s a day off from working on our projects; we get to be out on the water together as a big group; we eat junk food for the only time all summer except Canada Day; we might see some sea life.

Last year the whale watch was an amazing time and we saw a grand total of zero whales.

This year, then, was beyond amazing: we had an hourlong interaction with a humpback whale (named Patchwork by the scientists who decide on these things, we later found out) which stayed within a few feet of our boat for that entire time.

I for one had never seen anything like this.

Even the sounds the whale made were amazing, exhaling and then inhaling through its blowhole.

We saw several other whales “farther” away, which were still much closer to our relatively small and quiet boat than I had ever been to anything nearly so large or so majestic.

Patchwork was a few feet longer than our boat and twice the weight.

When we were done being in absolute awe of this amazing creature, we drifted over to Gannet Rock and Russel prepared lunch.

He cooks burgers, sausages, and even bacon on a charcoal grill- right on the fiberglass deck of the boat.

Transport Canada, he explains, has decided this is safer than a propane barbecue setup.

We feasted on meat (veggie dogs were available, but even the so-called vegetarians ate barbecued bacon- it’s like nothing in this world), potato chips, fudgie-Os (a uniquely Canadian phenomenon, about a million times better than Oreos, and they were double-stuffed to boot), and soda.

When we all felt sufficiently close to bursting or having a heart attack we scoped out the island through binoculars and camera lenses.

To our delight there was a Canadian Coast Guard helicopter on the island. It appeared that its passengers were planning to build something on Gannet Rock as they had survey equipment with them, and they waved to us. 5 of the 6 men seemed to be on their lunch break as they were sitting on folding chairs (“they’re eating some pasta!” Colin announced to the rest of us) and the other continued working.

We then returned to Kent Island, and we were back a little after 2 pm, leaving plenty of time for Elisabeth and me to make dinner.

I discovered that when walking across the basin one is better off barefoot than wearing boots- the water is warm, the mud is squishy, and one can’t fill their boots or get them stuck in the mud when carrying them.

Because we weren’t sure when we’d be back, however, we had set aside and frozen a vegetarian lasagna and a batch of snickerdoodles ahead of time.

As I heated the oven for bread baking and started chopping onions for a pot of real chowder, Elisabeth, who had also burned her hand (on the boat exhaust when we had been sitting on the uppermost deck) so we had blisters to match, hunted for dessert recipes in Marjorie Standish’s classic Cooking Down East.

She made an amazing batch of Cranberry Blondies, which we remember as being a favorite of one of the captains of our Ultimate Frisbee team, and some scratch-baked brownies, using unsweetened baking chocolate, to boot.

It seemed that three desserts would certainly be sufficient.

The chowder came out great: it’s one of the best foods that is even close to as easy to make as it is, and we had four pounds of fresh Pollock Damon had bought at the “extremely well-hidden” fish shop on Grand Manan to go with the canned clams I found upstairs.

Almost equally exciting, the clam cans were exactly the right size for making Boston Brown Bread.

We don’t have any rye flour, though….perhaps I can figure something out with whole-wheat and caraway seeds.

While everything was simmering away and once all the dishes had been cleaned and put away, Elisabeth and I went for a trail run toward the North End of the island.

She described the experience as being like “following a forest nymph because you don’t wear shoes.”

I think I’ll take to carrying fairy dust with me when we go from now on.

We were glad to have the lasagna, as many people were not interested in eating seafood.

The entire pan disappeared quickly, along with both loaves of bread.

After we’d all eaten as much as we could stand to given our experiences earlier in the day, we began the routine of evening recreation.

Emily and I went out to add the insulation (part mud, part alfalfa bale) layer to the oven, assisted by Kathryn and overseen by Elisabeth.

The work went quickly so we migrated back indoors.

Everyone was a bit lethargic, and plans to sleep on South Hill were blown away by the cold wind that came through suddenly around sunset.

I picked up my knitting while others read or worked on crossword puzzles, until Kathryn convinced us all to play a round of Tank, in part to demonstrate the game to the Upward Bound students.

While we were hesitant and tired, we were glad we’d started playing once we’d begun, and we continued for three rounds.

A movie night was considered but no one seemed to have a laptop available for such activities.

Kathryn started a batch of granola, her first, which came out perfectly.

The group settled into the library for a game of Beyond Balderdash, which had us all engaged and amused.

The night’s activities wore on until nearly midnight, when we all abruptly rediscovered how tired we were and meandered to our beds.

 
Hi! My name is Charlotte, and I am working on a writing project here on the island. In the fall I’ll be a sophomore at Bowdoin.

            This summer, I’ve been writing a collection of short stories, inspired by the peculiarities of island life and the fascinating people I’m living with. As a writer, I really value the unique experiences I’ve had here—like watching orange moon-sets on South Hill, holding baby birds, and sleeping in a shack with a meteorologist’s ashes.

Even when what I’m writing is not based directly on the island, it’s a wonderful place to find inspiration, and I often wander the paths when I’m out of ideas. My favorite places to write are on a mossy log on the L-Transect or on a low bough along the Eagle’s Nest trail.

            This is my first attempt at writing full-time, and it’s proven a difficult but rewarding experience. My days are not as structured as the scientists’, and it requires discipline to keep myself producing, especially since my work is what I used to do in my free time. Weekly peer editing with Elisabeth has helped me stay on track. “Hump days,” when I write and write and produce nothing of any value, are discouraging—but when I love what I’m writing then I absolutely love to write it. All in all, summer on Kent Island has been incredible!


 

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