by Steve Dougherty
from The New York Times
page 2
Once such resident is the artist and musician Nancy 3. Hoffman, who legally changed her middle name to a number because, she said, "I always wanted to." A 54-year-old Cleveland native who has lived on Peaks for 21 years, Ms. Hoffman is the leader of the Maine Squeeze, an all-accordion band, and proprietor of the island's most eccentric emporium, the Umbrella Cover Museum. A single room festooned with several dozen "covers that have lost their umbrellas," the museum, she said, "is dedicated to an appreciation of the mundane and to finding wonder and beauty in the simplest of things." (Hours are by appointment until Ms. Hoffman migrates to Key West, Fla., for the winter; a $2 contribution is suggested; 62-B Island Avenue; 207-766-4496.)
As the island has been transformed from impoverished refuge to hip enclave, real estate prices have soared. A modest oceanfront house that sold for $40,000 in 1980 is now considered a relative bargain at $600,000, Mr. Goodhue said. And while a pair of uniquely designed oceanfront homes built atop the remains of abandoned World War II-era military observation and ammunition bunkers were recently put on the market for upward of $1.2 million, even a house that is deprived of a water view in the island's sparsely populated interior will "sell for $250,000, minimum."
Although home construction is no longer confined to a walking-distance radius from the ferry, most of the island's merchants, restaurants and inns do business within a crabshell's throw of one another on the bay-side bluff overlooking the Portland harbor.
Local legend has it that Longfellow was inspired to compose "The Wreck of the Hesperus" after seeing the wreck of the schooner Helen Eliza, which sank off Peaks's backshore in 1869 when "the cruel rocks . . . gored" her. Those same waters hid different dangers in World War II when German U-boats preyed on allied supply convoys that gathered in Casco Bay before sailing under escort to Britain.
The most striking of Peaks's historic sites is the Battery Steele, an artillery bunker where enormous Navarone-size guns capable of heaving one-ton shells at targets 26 miles away once guarded the coastline. The battery was under construction through most of the war, and its two 16-inch battleship guns were never engaged, though locals say that a test firing broke windows in every home on the island.
Ms. Lynch said that most outsiders listen in disbelief when she tells them how much she also enjoys the winters here on a Maine island where the cold winds that buffet the backshore blow across the open Atlantic all the way from Europe. "It's brisk all right," she said with classic Yankee understatement.
But those same winds that whip the island serve as a backshore snow removal service, sweeping it off Seashore Avenue and creating sculpted drifts leeward of the roadway.
The winter wonderland effect is heightened in other ways, Ms. Lynch said. "The ice that forms on the rocks is beautiful and, of course, on a clear night, the stars are just as bright as can be."
And, as a kind of heavenly reward for hardships endured, now and then, the Northern Lights can be seen from the island. "If you've never seen them, well, they're indescribable really," she said.
There is one catch, however. "For them to appear," she added, "it has to be cold, cold, cold."
QUALITY CIRCLE. Cyclists can complete of loop of the island in under an hour.
