As you come into the Big Tree Trading Company the bell over the door rings, as it has since the day the store opened.
What you see first is the table. A long walnut table sits in the middle of the room with its chairs pulled out at odd angles, as though someone just stood up from it — maps still open, someone’s Passbook lying face down at the page they’d gotten to, a mug going cold. This is the Century Table, and it belongs to whoever needs it: to plan a day, to compare a summer, to settle pleasantly which adventure is next. It is furniture built for staying, not for browsing past.
Past the table, the room opens, and there it is — the Adventures Wheel, standing taller than everything around it, exactly where it should be: impossible to miss, impossible not to want to spin. Somebody usually is. And behind the Wheel, the Century Desk, where a stack of Passbooks waits for names that haven’t been written in them yet.
So come in. Let the door bang shut behind you. Sit at the table if you want to, spin the Wheel if you’re tempted, or just buy your paper and go — the store will be glad to have you either way, and the Century will still be here the next time you look up.
Adventure is waiting.
Islesboro is fourteen miles long and three miles across at its widest, a day’s ride from one end to the other by horse and buggy, and for twenty years no automobile was allowed on it. The Penobscot people called it the island that lies between two channels. The Dark Harbor Century is written for the whole island: the water around it, the roads across it, the light at the ferry landing, the library in the old church, the beach named for a tree that is gone.
It is issued in one place, the Big Tree Trading Company on Derby Road, where the Wheel stands, the Keeper works, and the Book of the Centurion is kept. A Passbook is a hundred reasons to come back to the island, and most of them take more than one summer.
49 easy, 38 moderate, 11 difficult. Four carry an anchor: a player who is too young, too old, or unable to do one is signed off without doing it, and it counts.
Any adventure, in any order, or let the Wheel decide. Whoever was there signs the line: a captain, a cousin, the librarian, the neighbor you just met. When a category is complete, bring the book to the Keeper at the store for the stamp. When all hundred are done, the Seal, the coin, and your name in the Book of the Centurion, kept at the Big Tree for as long as the store stands.
The King sets the ninety-ninth adventure for you, in person or through the Century Companion. The hundredth is yours: the one that meant the most, done once more.
The Dark Harbor Passbook is bound in the island’s burnt ochre and issued at the Big Tree Trading Company on Derby Road. The book is the record; the Century Companion on your phone carries the Wheel, the map and your own progress, opened by the number inside the back cover.
