Dark Harbor

Ved Mehta went to Islesboro, a narrow island about thirteen miles long off the coast of Maine, as a guest, and had no idea how much the trip would change his life. Drawn by the idea of putting down roots in the New World, he ended up buying fifteen acres of rough land at Dark Harbor and deciding to build a house there.

For the design he turned to Edward Larrabee Barnes, the architect behind the IBM Building in New York, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine and several museums, among them the Walker Art Center in Minnesota. What follows is an account of the troubles that come with building on an island so unlike Manhattan, where Mehta lives. In the city, what he calls sound-shadows let him move through the world almost as if he were not blind. On Islesboro, sound vanishes into the brush, the banks and the woods like a stone dropped into the sea. Costs keep climbing, and potato bugs keep returning to the new basement.