The Lessons of Merton Long

Mert!” The elderly woman’s demanding voice filtered down to the cellar, where my 86-year-old boatbuilding mentor was showing me the finer points of designing a catboat.

“Yessss…?” replied Mert, a bit sheepishly.

“Mert! Have you done anything towards making dinner?”

“Shuuuure” came the answer.

“What?”

“Nothin’...,” allowed Mert, with a twinkle in his eye. It was 1973, and I was 18 years old and continually amused by Mert’s Downeast humor. His wife, Dot, was not. My education in catboat design would have to continue some other day.

Born in 1885, Merton Long had moved to Bourne, Massachusetts, as a young man in 1907 after growing up on Roque Island in eastern Maine. Located a few miles offshore from Roque Bluffs, near Machias, the 1,200-acre island was then, and still is, under the stewardship of the Boston-based Gardner family. The Gardners only came to the island for vacations, and had brought in Mert’s parents as caretakers in 1881. In return for the use of a 15-room house and the land for farming, the Longs paid the property taxes and supplied room and board to the Gardners, for which they received $1 per day per boarder. In addition, Mert’s father, Herbert, was paid $2 per day for maintenance work on the island. The rest of their living had to be eked out by farming—raising sheep, cows, chickens, and potatoes for cash—and growing their own food as well. Twice a year a coasting sloop brought shipments of essential supplies such as kerosene for lamps, cloth for clothing, molasses, and flour.

By the time he was 10, Mert was working as hard as the hired men, caring for the animals, planting, hoeing and digging potatoes, clearing roads and paths, and helping to cut and split by hand the 20 cords of firewood consumed each year by the drafty farmhouse.