A Separate Peace

"We want to run around outside," Liam said, explaining the obvious. At home, with visions of nuts and creeps, lurking danger and forlorn children on milk cartons -- and remember that lady who left her kids in the car to pick up her dry cleaning and they were carjacked? -- I never let the kids out of my sight. "You must always be able to see me!" I say to them in crowds. Or at every turn in our city life, "Wait for me to cross the street!" To my daughter, who no longer wants to share a bathroom stall at busy movie theaters, airports or rest stops, the command is, "I must be able to see your shoes!"

But on Monhegan, the answer is simple. "Okay. Go."

Out to Sea

We came out on the porch a half-hour later after our peaceful dinner and sat in a couple of the white wooden rocking chairs to finish the wine we'd bought earlier at the North End Market (Monhegan Island restaurants don't serve alcohol, but you can bring your own). Tessa was dancing on a big rock, her "Mermaid Rock," singing and immersed in her own imaginary world. Often as clingy as a barnacle, she didn't notice us.

Liam was running around Monhegan House's grassy lawn that serves almost as the village green, scaring up a game of tag with some other free-flying kids, then racing to climb the tree next to the art studio on top of a nearby knoll.

As the sun began to set, golden and glowing over the harbor, Jim strolled by with his fishing rod. "Hey, can I go down to the dock with Jim?" Liam asked. Again, the answer was easy: "Okay."

We discovered Monhegan Island the year before, traveling by the seat of our pants. We knew we were going to end up on Mount Desert Island in Maine, two-thirds of the way up the coast. We knew it would take a couple of days to drive there. And we had no idea where we would stop along the way. We read about Monhegan Island in a guidebook on I-95 somewhere in Connecticut. "Offshore idyll," the book said. We were game.

The name Monhegan comes from the Maliseet Indian and means the out-to-sea island. The Monhegan Museum, up the steep hill to the lighthouse, displays Native American artifacts dating thousands of years.

A plaque next to the white one-room schoolhouse, where year-round residents send their young children to learn, commemorates the landing of Capt. John Smith in 1614. Smith, one of the founders of the Jamestown settlement in 1607, had been sailing from Nova Scotia to Rhode Island -- an area he dubbed New England -- scouting for ideal places for a new kind of self-reliant colony based on farming, fishing and trading with the Indians, rather than on get-rich-quick and exploitive schemes. He had picked Monhegan Island as a perfect spot -- though storms later wrecked his ships and dashed his plans.

The island has been settled continuously since 1790, primarily by fish and lobstermen. Artists began making their pilgrimages to paint in the clear, northern light in the 1880s. By the 1950s, Theodore Edison, son of the inventor, amassed enough property to keep the island's 130 cottages limited to the sheltered harbor area. The rest of the island is preserved in its "natural, wild beauty" by the Monhegan Associates, a nonprofit corporation he founded. The untouched part of the island is now webbed with 17 miles of footpaths and hiking trails to places such as Christmas Cove, Pebble Beach and Squeaker Cove.

We stayed at Monhegan House, built in the 1870s, and loved it. The rooms feel like ones your grandmother might have made up for you, with wispy white gauzy curtains. The communal bathroom and showers are on the second floor. "It's rather like summer camp, isn't it?" a dapper British painter in his sixties said as we passed each other, toothbrushes in hand.

Evenings we spent out on the front porch, rocking under the splash of stars, listening to the waves, the wind, the murmur of voices and the tink of metal against mast from the boats anchored in the harbor. Or we'd sit in the lobby near the big stone fireplace and read, play Stratego or cards, or build with blocks. Liam and Tom got into a long conversation about Scotland and the legendary rebel William Wallace into the wee hours with Hoy, an artist visiting from there.

Last year, we moved up the road for a few nights at the Trailing Yew, "one of New England's last genuine 19th-century-style summer boarding houses," our guidebook said. Family-style dinner in the main house is included in the room price. Only the main house has electricity. We read "Tom Sawyer" to the kids by kerosene lantern every night.