The fact that Virginia Oliver was still actively lobstering from her home base in Rockland when she turned 101 garnered her a fair amount of attention: a story on National Public Radio, another on CBS News. When a short film on her aired on Maine Public, Bangor author Alexandra S. D.
Hinrichs decided it was time to tell her story in a children’s book. The result, illustrated by Peaks Island resident Jamie Hogan, is a thing of beauty. Like another award-winning Maine illustrator, Portland resident Melissa Sweet, Hogan works by hand, instead of digitally, and has an eye for detail and a reverence for the old way of life.
Her pastels are lovingly and richly rendered, one of them – a full-page sunrise over Virginia’s childhood island home – I would gladly hang on my wall. Her characters are expressive and engaging without being cloying. In a scene where Virginia visits her doctor to get seven stitches after a crab bites her, the looks on the doctor’s face and on Virginia’s as she ponders an answer to his question – Just what the dickens were you doing out there? – are priceless.
“The Lobster Lady” By Alexandra S. D. Hinrichs Illustrated by Jamie Hogan Charlesbridge Ages 5-8, 32 pages $17.
99 “The Lobster Lady” – as Virginia is widely known – follows a typical day in her life: rising before dawn to eat a chocolate donut (that she baked herself the night before), drinking some coffee (in a Moody’s Diner mug), then putting on her lipstick and earrings, gassing up the lobster boat with her son Max, and heading out to sea. But after the mishap with the crab, and the visit to the doctor, his question triggers some reminiscences about how she came to this point. Oliver grew up on the Neck, a small island off another island off Rockland.
Her parents ran a general store and a smithy there, and even built a dance hall. As the pictures take us through Virginia’s childhood, Hinrichs’s prose is equally evocative: “the smell of sawdust, the roar of bellows, the chatter in the store.” Eventually she had to move to Rockland over winter to attend school, living with her grandfather and aunts.
Again, Hogan summons the details of last-century Rockland: the Courrier Gazette at breakfast, Virginia’s old library card, Maine Maid sardine cans, and the imposing stone post office, “built with the island granite she had inside her, too.” Outspoken and fearless (“not scared of nothing!”), she does indeed seem to have a granite will. At age eight, she piloted her first lobster boat – “on an ocean full of boats full of boys.
” After marrying a lobsterman, she goes to work in the sardine factory and then a printing press – until one day she doesn’t. Her husband comes home to find her there: she’s quit her job, she says, and wants instead to go lobstering with him. She insists, and he agrees.
So, to answer the doctor’s question about what she was doing on a lobster boat at her advanced age, she says simply, “I wanted to go. So I did.” And she’s still doing it, age now 104 – certainly the oldest person lobstering in Maine, and possibly the world: “a fiercely independent, loving, lobstering woman.
” 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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