Seeking Solitude? Read An Island to Oneself

My recent thoughts on quiet and solitude have more than a little to do with this book I finished recently, An Island to Oneself. It looks like there are still a few copies available on Amazon--mostly used. I bought one for my mother to read last winter in while she was stuck on a boat in Florida. Apparently it was passed around the docks and read three or four times that season. I got my shot at it just recently and have since given it back, so I can't quote it as extensively as I'd have liked. But I found it's the sort of book that sticks with you, and I can understand why it's developed such a cult following.

This Tom Neale fellow, he spent 16 years of his life as the only man on an isolated atoll of the Cook Islands, over 200 miles from the nearest human beings. Years would go by between visitors. And he chose this life. When a couple of Navy helicopters landed there as part of a training exercise, the pilots were shocked to see him. "Thank goodness we found you. Now we can take you home."

But Neale said, "I live here!"

Neale's stamina and resourcefulness are just as impressive as his desire for solitude. He was in his 50s when he spent his first stint on the island, and he set about repairing and lashing down a WWII lookout shed, patching a boat, transplanting topsoil to grow a garden, slaying wild pigs, penning and breeding chickens--not to mention spear-fishing and harvesting coconuts every day to sustain himself.

This book covers his first two stays on the island, totaling six years. Wikipedia tells me that, thanks to the proceeds from this book, he went back for another ten, returning to civilization only at the age of 75 when he fell ill with stomach cancer.

I wonder if a man could do such a thing today. Neale certainly didn't own the island, but as it was well outside the boundaries of any shipping lanes, nobody came around to stop him. There is no discussion in the book about titles or deeds or property rights, and the only money he spent was what he paid a captain to drop him off there.

When he wanted to return for his second trip, the government of the Cook Islands was certainly not going to help him.  They didn't want to be responsible for retrieving him if he fell ill--or more likely responsible for retrieving his body, since with no way to communicate with the outside world any illness or injury could prove fatal.

But nobody stopped him when a friend offered to ferry him and his supplies back over. (They brought him and his supplies in a 30' sailing vessel. I can't help but reflect that this is the length of my sailboat.) There is something touching about his government's concern and the way they handled it: worried enough to officially register displeasure, but taking no action to stop him.

Reading the book, it's easy to see how a year could turn into 16. How, in fact, one could spend an entire season of one's life fishing and building and watching the sunsets, and have it all pass in a sort of dream. The hard work, the daily rituals, the satisfaction of addressing life-or-death challenges and working out solutions with your hands, and with the tools you had the foresight to bring with you. His island was a fragile place and dangerous enough, but it was bountiful and somewhat forgiving. The weather (aside from the storms) was mild, and the scenery stunning. Who needs the noise of the world when they have all this?

The book is not a great book. It's not deep, philosophical, or challenging. It's not even that much of an adventure yarn, come to think of it. It's more of a travelogue, building on the practical, almost mundane details of how one man was able to survive, and thrive, on a desert island by himself. And I think it's the mundane nature of these details that makes this so compelling. Here are the tools he brought. Here is how he transported his topsoil. Here is how he pollinated his vegetables. Here is how he baked uto out of fermented coconuts. From such small tasks was built a life of his own choosing--even if it took him fifty years to figure out how to get there.  

By the end of this book I found that a surprising stretch of my mental landscape had been set aside for this atoll, and I find myself wondering what I'm going to do to reach my own, and how I'm going to survive once I get there.

There are significant details in Tom Neale's life which the book omits. I found these on-line after reading the book, and so will put them below a hash mark in case you feel they may impact your own experience of reading the book first. (Or scroll to the very bottom for a link to read the whole thing on-line.)

#

The book makes no mention of the wife or the two children he fathered between his first and second visits. (Today his son is actually a coach for the Cook Islands Olympic sailing team.) It passes over this period with a chapter discussing the drudgery of "Six Frustrating Years" of working and scheming to get back to his island again. How his family factored into his adventures I don't know. I wonder what his children thought of their absent, eccentric father. There are pictures of them on the island on-line. (I can't seem to find them again now, sorry.) Maybe they spent part of his last stay there with him.

I suspect he was not entirely the sort of good-natured character he portrays himself to be in his pages. and apparently some of the Rarotongans who knew him claimed he was so cantankerous that a desert island was the only place that would put up with him. There is also speculation that the book was ghost written.

But who cares? Here is someone who lived a a great portion of his life on his own terms.

#

Here is the Wikipedia page on Tom Neale.

And one on Suwarrow Atoll.

And gosh, it looks like you can read the whole darn thing on-line. If reading a book-in-browser isn't your thing, at least you can give it a start to see if you like it before tracking down one of those lovely hard-to-find hardcovers from Ox Bow Press (1990).

Then The Rains Came

I was gonna wash the car.

I was gonna water the garden.

[1995 Honda Accord behind 2012 Corn and Cucumbers.]

Then the rains came.

Let’s hear it for procrastination!

Return From A Voyage

 

Stones mark the way down.

Climbing in to the clouds.

We could see our house from here! The town of Bar Harbor, and Bar Island, which is only accessible at low tide.

Sister and I at the Summit

Post Hurricane Risk Management

Any day you get to use a chainsaw while standing at the top of a ladder--without hurting yourself--has to be a pretty good day, right?

I'm Ready for Florida

Egad, this last winter was hard. And cold. And long. The old house is drafty and the snows far too regular. The tires are bald and the shovel is rusty. Getting out of bed in the morning was an adventure in endurance, and getting to work felt like the voyage of the Endurance.

And now we're hammered with this heat wave. 101+ degrees today and enough humidity to sweat the paint off the car. I step outside and think, this feels freaking great!


The Wife wanted me to take a swim with her, but I couldn't. The water in the pool, which she insisted was comfortable, was just too bloody cold.

I just needed to hang out in the yard and be comfortable for a while.

The Quiet of the Future

[Note: the grandchildren referenced in the following story are unlikely to be mine. Perhaps they will be yours?]

Grandchildren, clamoring for a story? How strange. I would that we had clamored for the same. The advice we got from our grandparents might have been better than anything I can provide for you.

Still. I think I'll begin with the roaring in the ears. With the sound that was everywhere, inescapable, whether you had asked to hear it, or not.

Just another one of those things which are kind of amazing to think about, now.

Sure, many of us chose to listen to music. Or noise. Video games, movies. We had speakers in our homes, our cars, our businesses, and our pockets. If what we were listening to was not what our neighbors or roommates wanted to listen to, we had headphones--personalized speakers that we strapped on to the sides of our heads. And then later on, these were not loud enough for us. If we turned them up loud enough to satisfy, the people around us could still hear.

We were always trying to get away from each other, those days.

So we made the speakers smaller and stuffed them up into our ear-canals, so we could have it roaring loud and personal, just for ourselves. And these little ear-canal speakers were cheap. We could buy a pair for around ten dollars, which most of us could earn in an hour or two, working even the most menial of jobs.

But putting the music aside for a second, consider what the rest of the world sounded like, in America, at the turn of the century. We had a little house that had stood for 300 years. It was built along a main highway, in its day. Its timbers were hewn and raised to the sound of foot-falls and horse-hooves. But when it finally crumbled it was to the whisper of electric cars, the constant rumble of gas burning engines, the throaty growl of diesel trucks. It was a loud place to live. When the traffic backed up out front, it was like a pride of lions purring, all at once. When the traffic flowed smoothly, conversations would have to stop and resume to the whim of the vehicles flying past, vehicles that moved more miles in an hour than you or I could ride in a single day.

Most of us didn't live so close to major roads, of course. But the highways were everywhere. The most remote and isolated of us would still hear them, like a constant, distant sigh. I remember hiking in the mountains, once, and descending after a long day's walk into the crater occupied by an alpine lake. I think the hours we sat there were the only hours in my life where I could not hear any traffic. A single jet passed overhead, trailing it's contrail, too high up even to be heard.

That kind of silence was a treat, a symphony. I remember thinking, a person could become a connoisseur of such silences. The silence of the mountains, the silence of the desert, the silence of the forest. That kind of silence was precious and rare.

What a shock it was, then, when the oil ran out and the engines stopped running, and today’s silence descended, gradually, everywhere. What a surprise to hear it every day, and not even have to travel for it. But it was a cruel consolation, given the hardships we faced.

I say gradual, of course, because the gunfire went on for a bit after the cars stopped. But that was sporadic and eventually it, too, would cease—to make room for quieter violence.

How strange this must sound to you, with your carefully preserved, hand-cranked record players, as you dance at the hall to music my grandparents danced to. Anything as loud as a car or a plane is an alarm, a surprise. And music, music is a treat. There are no digital recordings of the best singers to ever sing—or rather there are, but we haven’t the machines to play them. Pianos only as good as the people who play them, guitars only sing at the hands of their players.

For the most part, that’s enough. I understand our county has a symphony again. Over eighty musicians, playing at once, well practiced and in tune. If you can afford to hear them, do. I doubt you will ever forget it.

And to think, for a hundred years there, we could listen to that sound any time we wanted to. We could turn it up and play it again and again, until we went deaf from it. Even now, I wish that I had listened to more.

But you will forgive an old man his regrets, I hope.

Roller-Blading

Dusted off the roller-blades (once we found them, hanging behind the winter coats in the closet) for a skate along the canal. We bought two pair of these things about eight years ago because we were living so close to such a nice, smooth paved trail, and it seemed a shame not to try them out.  I've used mine about a dozen times over the years.  The Wife tried it once or twice and decided it wasn't for her.  

Funny, how life was eight years ago, when we'd invest a few hundred dollars sports equipment just to try something out.  

They demand a vigorous sort of exercise, these rollerblades; it’s not so easy to have a leisurely adventure with them as it is when bicycling or walking. And they limit where you can go. Long, smooth stretches of pavement are best, and the trails had better be isolated from cars, and they’d better not slope more than a degree or two from the horizontal. You have to carry a pair of shoes along with you if you hope to venture far from the path, and this is on top of the helmet and other protective gear you should have on.

It’s a very first-world leisure activity, rollerblading. It requires a great deal of infrastructure.

Still, we had a good time and I got a good workout while we were at it. The Wife stuck with her vintage bike, of course, as it’s got a pair of brand-new whitewall tires on it and they needed breaking in. The sun was out, the air cool, the wind light. We watched a man land a 12 lb. striper and then toss it back into the water. We spent a good 15 minutes sitting on a park bench, watching the passage of a 30’ sailboat and a 60’ fishing vessel. The fishing boat was remarkably loud with its diesel engines. I wonder if those fishermen keep earplugs in all day, and what the world sounds like to them when they get home and go ashore?

On the way back we found we had the breeze in our face and a slight hill to climb, so by the time we got home I was out of breath and happy we hadn’t gone further before turning around. Time was I could skate all the way to the southern mouth of the canal and back with a lit cigar clamped between my teeth. It seems, perhaps, I’ve let myself go a little.

My own freebie bike needs a new tire. Once that’s taken care of I’ll probably favor that over the rollerblades. It’s easier to zip into town and pick up library books and drink a cup of coffee on the bike. But it felt good to get some use out of these silly old shoes with the wheels on them. When I’m in the mood for jogging, and then remember how much jogging hurts my knees, I’ll just might pull them out again.

Spring Smells

The World Outside has gone from grey-brown to green, green, green, and the air is full of the sweet-grape scent of the locust blossoms.  Their flowers which last for three or four days at the most and then scatter tiny petals to the lawn and the gutters.  This is the smell of summer vacation riding in, of knowing you've only got a couple more weeks of walking past the locust trees to the bus stop to endure the too-close crowds of your classmates and the interminable, droning lectures of teachers who don't want to be there any more than you do.  It's a Friday night smell, the smell of something great on the way, all the sweeter for the raw potential before the break really hits and bogs down with all the little details of how you're going to go about enjoying it, when it's 90 degrees and humid and you're just too tired of swimming to spend any more time in the pond, and you know those lawns aren't going to mow themselves while your spending money is waiting on it.


The lawn here's all mowed, though, and just in time for the afternoon shower to come and apologise to the grass, and pat down all the dust and pollen kicked up by the rattletrap mower my stepfather found at the dump and pieced together and then passed along to us.  Lord, but that machine kicks up the stones and the dirt.  We leave the dogs inside to protect them from stray pebbles and if I didn't wear glasses I'd put on safety goggles.  There was a cloud rising from my metal roar, today.  The station wagon's gone from black to yellow and back to black. 


There's no more summer vacation for us, of course, no matter what it smells like.  At least, no vacation to stretch from June through August.  That's all right, though.  We've still got plenty to look forward to.  There's something to be said for the pleasure of mowing your own lawn after a childhood of cutting grass for others.

Listening

I seek out silences.  I flatter myself that I am the last of my generation who can tolerate them.  I may blog, but I will never tweet.  I rarely receive email.  My cell phone almost never rings--to the point that I am sometimes in trouble at work for forgetting to switch it off when the exception occurs. 

I love music, but I listen to very little.  Driving in silence gives my mind room to wander over spaces it might not otherwise find.  I listen to music in two very distinct ways: with full attention, giving it all the respect it deserves; or with complete disregard, using it as its own kind of silence, masking some more distracting noise, like a conversation at the next table, or a television rattling away.

There are times for the iPods and earbuds.  Riding the subway listening to Phillip Glass, for example, or listening to Bach while you navigate Beacon Hill on foot.  Airplane rides.  Board meetings, perhaps, after the first hour.  At the gym, if you're unfortunate enough to be paying for your exercise.  But I'll never understand the kids who need tunes the second they punch out for a lunch break.  I need some peace and quiet to sit and enjoy my lunch, and perhaps have a conversation with the people around me.

Maybe that's just because I usually have a better lunch packed than they do.

This is all long way round to saying I found a lovely silence this afternoon.  There's a couple inches of crusty snow left from the storm earlier this week, but it's been plowed away from the trail along the canal, leaving pure uninterrupted blanket along each side, even down the rocks to the high-tide line.  Snow is plastered on the north side of every tree and power pole, and clings in intermittent chunks to the power-lines.  The sky is a constant silver gray to match the soft pewter of the water.  A single duck floats along the surface at a magical pace, it's motion the only indication of the violent current beneath the surface.  You can feel the threat of ice in the air, but it's an idle threat, no wind behind it, clear and cold enough to make you thankful for your scarf and gloves.  The traffic on the bridge blends into a steady rumble, a sort of whistle to match the wind the world never knew until 100 years ago.  Louder is the coast guard vessel that comes along, labouring steadily against the current, not quite cutting through the waters but agitating them nonetheless, laborously heaving gentle swells out in its wake. 

I wonder--every time a wave reflects against a surface it is much diminished but still there.  The wake strikes the rocks and heads back to the other side.  Before they make it all the way they are too small to see, lost in the swirl of the current and the silent swell of the tide.  Water is quick to erase evidence of passage, much quicker than the snow that still holds the footprints I made on the way here.  But really, can the waters ever be the same as before that boat laboured through, or that duck?  Boats passed here on cold evenings in 1956, evenings that no doubt held silences very similar to this one, and though their passage is long forgotten, the world was forever changed with every one.

There's really no soundtrack that can improve a walk like this, though the jogger chuffing past with the blue spandex and the clip-on eyepod seems to disagree.

Let him have it, then, because this one is all mine

Bug And Snow

There's just enough snow on the ground to brighten things up around here.  Perfect!

Here's an odd wonder: there's a ladybug crawling up and down my window mullion.  I wonder if she hatched in the spell of warm weather we had last week. 

She is kind of a dusty, dun coloured thing, isn't she?  Is this what winter-hatched ladybugs look like, these days?  Or is this some other kind of beetle, entirely?  Let's go in for a closer look.

Update: snow melting now, ladybug or beetle gone too.  Window mullions still need to be stripped, puttied, and painted.  This is going to be a busy Spring. 

Maybe the bug knew that and decided to wake up early.