Issues → May/June 2009 → Home & Garden →
Isle Au Haut, ME: Linda Greenlaw's Retreat
Author/fisherman Linda Greenlaw's Maine home
by Wayne Curtis
At first approach, Linda Greenlaw's home on Isle au Haut, a brawny island seven miles off the coast of Maine, looks every bit like a classic center-chimney Cape--the sort of place that has offered welcome shelter along the New England shore for centuries.
Step inside, though, and it's as if you've stepped right back out again. The ground floor of her home, which she built in 2000, is open and airy, lined with tall windows and glass doors that frame a virtual microcosm of Maine: spruce-covered hills, a bog dotted with the spiky stems of pitcher plant flowers, a choppy ocean stippled with whitecaps and studded with islands, and, in the distance, the rumpled, bluish Camden Hills. "What I didn't want," Linda says, "was a Cape that was all chopped up into little rooms."
Once you've acclimated to the stunning view, you may notice the two outsized skeletal sculptures by Geoff Herguth. Above the fireplace is a noble swordfish; a lobster sits atop a boulder outside the front door, its claws raised in faint menace. These, in fact, are bookends bracketing the first two volumes of Linda's maritime career.
After growing up in Midcoast Maine and graduating from Colby College in 1983, Linda disappointed her parents by passing up law school to chase fish on the high seas. Starting as an onboard cook, she worked her way up to captaining her own commercial swordboat. In 1997 she found sudden and unsought fame as a key player in the bestseller The Perfect Storm. In part it told her story of being at sea during the infamous October 1991 tempest, which led to the loss of six fishermen on the Andrea Gail out of Gloucester, Massachusetts. "Not only is Greenlaw one of the only women in the business," wrote Sebastian Junger, "she's one of the best captains, period, on the entire East Coast." (In the film version, she was played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.)
In 1997, Linda traded in her tumultuous offshore life for the quieter inshore waters around Isle au Haut, where her parents were living and her father's family has roots running back several generations. She took up lobstering, hiring her dad as sternman, and at the same time set off on a new adventure as a writer of nonfiction, novels, and, with her mother, Martha Greenlaw, a cookbook. Last fall she returned to swordfishing and hopes to make another trip or two this summer, though she plans to continue hauling lobster traps as well.
Linda started her house as almost everyone does: with a compromise. She originally wanted to place it at the water's edge, but building a road was pricier than she thought. When the bulldozers reached a ledgy bluff overlooking the bog and the bay beyond, she thought, "Well, this is a good spot. I like it here!" She designed her house to serve three chief purposes: cooking, entertaining, and writing. The kitchen is set within a large alcove off the bright ground-floor room. It has countertops of Deer Island granite, an antique Glenwood stove, and an oversized soapstone sink that's proven ideal for cleaning the abundance of island shellfish that comes through the front door by the bushel.
Linda's 1926 Glenwood stove performs a neat trick: it makes a room warmer without even being lit. She discovered this funky, restored piece at an antique-stove shop in Littleton, Massachusetts (where she also found her soapstone sink).
She hauled it to the island in pieces on her lobster boat, and assembled it atop a homemade ledge of granite cobblestones, giving the stovetop a few extra inches of height. "Women were a lot shorter back then," says Linda, who's five foot three. "And that's even compared with me."
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