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Island Life
Michael is having a lot of fun with his new digital video camera and editing tools. Catch his latest 'release"
Michael went flying and captured some beautiful photographs of the island. Do you want to buy and island. This beauty could be yours.
On the last day of our first month... exploring the mysteries of island life.
How do you load up the car and leave the Keys after a sunset in the back country? There's nothing like a Key West sunset to remind you how easy it is to catch 'Keys Disease"
It's always a nice surprise when one of the locals joins us for lunch at Geiger Key.
Posted Saturday, September 10, 2005
The miracle of a shower...
Celebrating the simple things.
Life on a true island... a place surrounded by water and not serviced by public utilities... causes you to appreciate and celebrate some mainland activities that usually go virtually unnoticed. Taking a shower is one of those things. Here, on Casco Bay island, taking a shower is really quite miraculous.
WATER... the key ingredient in any quality shower, is such a precious commodity here. Our brackish well water, must be processed with a complicated reverse osmosis system that removes all of the salt and other nasty tastes, producing the most wonderfully sweet water. Of course POWER is the other precious ingredient, since power is required for the R.O. system to work. Casco Bay Island Power Company consists of solar panels on the cabin roof which send power to 24 batteries in the basement supplemented by a propane generator when sunlight alone cannot produce enough power to keep things running. PROPANE, another expensive resource, must come to the island on a truck on a barge from some far away city in New Brunswick and can only arrive at the highest tides, on the driest days, when the heavy truck has some chance of making it up the beach, and onto the island "road", up the hill to the propane tank without getting stuck somewhere in the process.
There's no such thing as a leisurely shower on the island. I always feel that I'm running a race, focused on efficiently washing hair, shaving legs, cleaning body parts.. rinsing all of the above. The goal is to see how quickly the precious water can STOP flowing out of the shower head. If all of that sounds rather breathless it is, but the frenetic pace is softened by the shower environment itself.
The island shower is paneled in wood with one wall a large window filled with trees and passing eagles. It's a cozy place, with an open air feel; inside, yet a feeling of being out there in the trees. So beautiful and relaxing even with the no nonsense pace of the showering process.
Toweling off, the window cracked even though the weather outside is fall crisp and windy, the sounds gulls chattering about some disagreement out on the water filling the room, I find myself almost giddy with the celebration of feeling clean, and fresh in a way I never notice in the land of unlimited power and water.
Just another island miracle that does not go unappreciated.
