When the people who were putting together a video tape about Seguin Island asked Tom Skolfield to talk about growing up there, he told them he couldn't possibly keep his story to an hour.

"If a man is asked to tell about his life, and he can tell it in an hour, he must have had a dull life," Skolfield said.

Skolfield, a part-time lobsterman now retired from his state highway job, does tell about the first 12 years of his life on Seguin in an hour-long video. But he had to leave out a lot, and the filmmakers cut plenty too, he said, shaking his head in disapproval.

Skolfield, and the rest of his family — his father and mother and his 6-year-old sister, Lorraine — moved to Seguin from Harpswell in 1936, when he was 18 months old. It was in the midst of the Depression. Having tried his hand at fishing, seining, lobstering, farming and raising chickens, Skolfield's father, Clarence, landed a job as assistant lighthouse keeper. The civil service job meant a regular income and a house to live in.

Seguin Island stands at the mouth of the Kennebec River, six miles out to sea. The nearest town is Georgetown. At 186 feet above sea level, the 53-foot Seguin Lighthouse is the highest in Maine. It's the second oldest, commissioned by George Washington in 1795. Portland Head Light was the first.

Today Tom Skolfield lives with his wife, Bernice, and their kitten, Rosebud, in a cozy home just a stone's throw away from their neighbors in Cape Elizabeth. His life is not without adventure or without good yarns to spin. There's the tale of Mrs. Alfalfa, their pet duck, half Peking and half Mallard, who died of cancer last year. There's the new boat Skolfield is building in the back yard, the recycling awards Skolfield and his wife have won for recycling everything in sight.

Tom Skolfield has plenty to talk about, but nothing gets him as stirred up as telling about his island adventures.

Skolfield, 64, returned to his boyhood home in 1995 for the first time in 50 years for the 200th anniversary of the lighthouse. He had never stopped telling the stories of his adventures there, but after the visit they took on a vividness that continues to animate him as he tells the tales today.

The first baptism

The adventures started on day one, before young Tom even set foot on the island.

Having accepted the job, Skolfield's father spent a few days on the island before returning on a 31-foot Coast Guard boat for the rest of the family. It was a cold, gray November day. Clarence Skolfield figured the family would be together for Thanksgiving.

"My mother, sister and I were out in the cabin with the door open," Skolfield recalled. "We were getting up into the cove, when a 15-foot wave hit the boat and rolled her right over. She came right back up. She's a self-righting boat."

No one was lost, but everyone was wet and shivering and many of the groceries the family had brought for Thanksgiving were swallowed up by the sea.

"That was my first baptism," Skolfield said.

Like being Tom Sawyer

Until he was 4 years old, Skolfield was the only boy on Seguin, and he had the run of the rock island.

"Well, I tell people it was like being Tom Sawyer," Skolfield said. "I had 68 acres, and I couldn't get lost."

He couldn't get lost, but he could be chased.

The head keeper had a bull and two cows, and he let the bull run loose. Young Tom kept his distance, but the bull would often charge his sister. Skolfield's father confronted the head keeper, who made light of his complaints. So the concerned father decided to confront the bull instead. The next time the beast wandered near the Skolfield home, the father fired his double 10-gauge shotgun in the air. The bull ran off to the north end of the island and never bothered young Tom or his sister again.

"The bull was scared of dad, " said Skolfield. "All he had to do was make one dash toward the bull, and the bull would be scared off."

Death-defying ride

On another occasion when Clarence Skolfield decided again to confront the head keeper, the results were nearly fatal. The keeper had routinely refused Skolfield's requests for leave. So when Skolfield wanted to take leave to attend a family wedding, he bypassed the keeper and wrote to the Coast Guard, which granted him the leave. Skolfield showed the head keeper his leave papers on the morning he was due to go. The island was equipped with a 700-foot tramway on which residents and guests could ride down the steep island in small carts. The car brakes were in a small shack at the bottom, and had to be operated from there.

Angered by Skolfield's insolence, the keeper, who thought Skolfield was on the tramway, decided to not apply the brakes for the ride down. But Skolfield and his wife had decided to walk down the steep rocks, and it was Tom and the keeper's 16-year-old son who were on the tramway. It was only as the cart careened closer to the bottom that the head keeper realized who was in it.

No one was hurt, but the keeper came near to killing 4-year-old Tom and also his own son, "just out of cussedness," Skolfield said.

Baptism No. 2</p>

Four years after the careening ride down the tramway, 8-year-old Tom went out on the boat with his father to set a gillnet. It was a little choppy in the waters off Seguin that day. As they headed out, he heard his father say "hang on."

"The stern went right up and right over," recalled Skolfield. "Dad was swimming. I tried to swim to him. I went down a couple of times. The water was frigid out there."

Because the water was so cold and often rough off Seguin, Tom had never learned to swim. When his father finally reached him and put him down in the boat, Clarence Skolfield had given his son up for dead.

Then Tom spoke. "Jeez that water isn't very cold out there is it?" he asked his father. "That's the first time he knew I was alive," Skolfield said.

His father brought him home. "They rolled me up in hot blankets and gave me hot water and whiskey," Skolfield said.

Duke, the family dog, was not so lucky. He drowned in the incident. The family rolled him up in a rug that Tom's mother had been making and laid him to rest inside a chest that his father had nearly finished making for his mother.

It was the perfect size for Duke, Skolfield said.

"That was the second time I got baptized," he said as he looked over his notes and moved on to the next island story.

'It's the truth'

Ever since he appeared in the video in 1995, Skolfield keeps the notes he made for that occasion nearby. If anyone asks about his life on the island, he won't forget any important event.

Beyond the adventures, there are also the images of daily life to lend color to his tales. There were the 10 or so Coast Guardsmen who every fall would arrive with 80-pound burlap bags filled with coal. They wore dungarees. Their chests bare, and they draped burlap bags across their shoulders so they wouldn't chafe from the bags they carried. They walked up and down the little catwalk until they had delivered 30 tons.

There were the Army men who shot seven-inch projectiles right over the islanders' heads as they target practiced just a few miles off at Fort Baldwin, back in 1941.

There were the shades they put down over the their windows during wartime blackouts even as the light kept beaming 25 miles out to sea.

There were the kites they made from those shades once the shades tore. The high winds off Seguin were prefect for flying kites.

After 1946, Clarence Skolfield moved from Seguin to become keeper of the Perkins Island Light and the later the light at Squirrel Point. Tom went on to other adventures. When Tom was 12, his father built him a boat, and Tom tried his hand at clam digging in summer. When he and his family had lived on Seguin, young Tom and his mother stayed in Harpswell during the school year, and Tom went to school in Brunswick. Now, he traveled to and from school by boat. One time he capsized, then went back home to dry off and change clothes. He missed the school bell by barely a minute, but the teacher wouldn't accept his excuse. Probably didn't believe it, he figures.

"Yeah, it's the truth, it happened," he sometimes adds when he finishes recounting one adventure and prepares to go on to tell another. He's used to people not believing his stories, he said. And, like any man who has led an adventurous life, it takes Tom Skolfield a good deal more than an hour to tell about it.

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