Children’s stories set on the coast suggest a wilder way of life. By Anna Holmes  Pole Island, near Vinalhaven, Maine. | Photograph by Donavon Smallwood The ferry ride from Rockland, Maine, to Vinalhaven takes a little more than an hour, and on a clear, bright July day, half of the passengers decide to sit in an interior cabin, away from the rays of the sun. From the deck, you can see the three wind turbines on the northwest part of the island; they sit near what was once the only house that was visible on the shoreline of this part of the island, a three-story cottage, with no electricity or running water, that was once called the Only House and owned by the children’s-book author Margaret Wise Brown. Brown, the author of the classics “Goodnight Moon” and “The Runaway Bunny,” spent summers at the cottage between 1943 and 1952. From her writing desk, on the second floor, she could see a tiny, spruce-topped island. The illustrator Leonard Weisgard, who visited Brown in Vinalhaven numerous times, remembers falling asleep one night in the Only House’s ground-floor workshop, only to be awoken by a loud banging above him. | 
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