The fact that Virginia Oliver was still actively lobstering from her home port in Rockland at age 101 brought her a lot of attention: a story on National Public Radio, another on CBS News. When a short film about her aired on Maine Public, author Alexandra SD Hinrichs of Bangor decided it was time to tell her story in a children’s book. The result, illustrated by Peaks Island resident Jamie Hogan, is beautiful.
Like another award-winning Maine illustrator, Portland-based Melissa Sweet, Hogan works by hand rather than digitally, with an eye for detail and a reverence for the old way of life. Her pastels are lovingly and expressively rendered, one of which—a full-page sunrise over Virginia’s home island—is something I’d love to hang on my wall. Her characters are expressive and engaging without being overbearing. In a scene where Virginia visits her doctor to get seven stitches after a crab bite, the expressions on the doctor’s and Virginia’s faces as she ponders an answer to his question—”What the hell were you doing out there?”—are priceless.
“The Lobster Lady” – as Virginia is commonly known – recounts a typical day in her life: she gets up before sunrise to eat a chocolate doughnut (which she baked herself the night before), drinks some coffee (in a mug from Moody’s Diner), then puts on lipstick and earrings, fills up the lobster boat with her son Max and heads out to sea. But after the mishap with the crab and the visit to the doctor, his question triggers some memories about how she got to this point.
Oliver grew up on the Neck, a small island off Rockland. Her parents ran a general store and blacksmith shop there, and even built a dance hall. While the images take us through Virginia’s childhood, Hinrich’s prose is just as evocative: “the smell of sawdust, the roar of bellows, the chatter in the shop.” Eventually she had to move to Rockland in the winter to attend school and lived with her grandfather and aunts. Again, Hogan conjures up the details of Rockland in the last century: the Courrier Gazette at breakfast, Virginia’s old library card, the Maine Maid’s sardine cans, and the imposing stone post office, “which was also built from the island granite she carried within her.”
She is outspoken and fearless (“afraid of nothing!”) and does indeed seem to have an iron will. At eight, she piloted her first lobster boat – “on an ocean full of boats full of boys.” After marrying a lobsterman, she works in a sardine factory and then a printing works – until one day she doesn’t. Her husband comes home to find her there: she has quit her job, she says, and wants to go lobster fishing with him instead. She insists, and he agrees.
When the doctor asked her what she was doing on a lobster boat in her old age, she simply replied, “I wanted to go. So I did.” And she’s still doing it, at the age of 104 – surely the oldest lobsterman in Maine and perhaps even the world: “a fiercely independent, loving lobsterman.”
Amy MacDonald is a children’s author and freelance writer. She lives in Portland and Vinalhaven and can be reached at [email protected].
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