Islandology

A man comes to town, a man leaves town. Or a man leaves and is gone a long while and comes back. Old haunts along the ancestral storyline. A conceit to hang your hat on. 

This is about one who stayed put, who wasn’t tempted to leave. Who had been born in a place so never had to arrive first as a visitor, then as one who settles down, content, a new addition to the population. Most of the scribes who composed the ancestral storyline, despite their fascination with adventurers and mysterious strangers, did the same. 

An island a quarter of a mile from the northern coast, not much around it but evergreens. A road passed by on its wandering up the shoreline, with very few cars to travel along it. It could be said the road is the man—it comes to town then soon as it arrives, it leaves. A small gravel lot opens along the edge of the road, where a gate barrier and, beyond it, a paved bridge waits. It rains seven out of every ten days in this part of the country, and the remaining three are usually thick and downy with ground mist. Semis frequent the road and can be heard long before they’re seen; there are cities north and south of this lot and bridge and island, and in a haze of spray the trucks carry freight towards them. No lights mark the length of the bridge, but on the other side of it, the island side, isolate windows glow at staggered heights. Most days the sky is dark and the air also and so the windows mark the weather by how visible they are from the road. The turn is easy to miss; drivers from the south come upon it at the dying end of a sharp swerve inland; drivers from the north are blinded by a choppy run of firs and boulders and underbrush. In a flick of a second the gravel lot and gate barrier and bridge and island and its many windows appear, then flash back to road-memory, forest on both sides foggy. 

There’s a bridge leading to the island but it’s unclear if there’s anything on the island that wants to leave. So much about the place goes unnoticed. The nearest town is forty miles away. Fishing boats frequent the waters in the channel and their pilots have become so accustomed to the sight of it—island crammed with tall houses built side-to-side at varied heights—several generations have used it as a landmark, a make-shift lighthouse to guide them safely through the channels on days of low visibility. None yet had the presumption to dock on its rocky shore and climb toward the nearest of the houses, take to its front step to knock on the door. It was in the character of locals about the area to honor what wasn’t willingly presented them to know; a modesty, maybe, or a respect for the privacy of others. There were SUVs and cars parked in the gravel lot on the island side; on rare mornings when the clouds broke, they would catch sight of brilliances of wet-light shining off their windshields and hoods. There was what looked like a large garden on the channel side, and the glossy sheen of a greenhouse. People could be seen stepping along the outer rocks or bending to pull weeds from the garden. If a hand was raised from a passing boat, hands from the island would wave back. 

These were outwardly ways of approach, surface methods of inquiry. From inside the houses and within the bounds of the island, the view outwards towards channel and land differed greatly than from the views from them. The houses were warm and dry and generous with rooms and people. There were twelve of them, some three stories high, some two or four. Zigzagging staircases ascended to their front stoops from different directions but were joined mid-step occasionally by footpaths worn along the ground circling the boulder-slopes. The island was covered in short, tough, hearty grasses and in the springtime was littered with tiny white and yellow flowers. There were picnic tables on the grassy levels that served as the island’s terraced lawns. An exact count of them was only possible for one looking down from one of the high windows on the island: there were four. Each served as a community lawn for an assigned group of three houses; but for the longest time common practice on the island had been to share them. There was a small aluminum dock on the northwest corner of shore-side, and two motorized fishing boats tied there. If inhabitants left the island to drive their boats to fish in the channel or follow the channel to the sea, where northwards the nearest town and its own docks could be found, they went unnoticed; and among the sparse water-traffickers, unmarked as inhabitants of that specific neighborhood island. There was fishing to be done from the shore-boulders and the dock alone, and surely from a boat idling on the cove where the island hid. Rain was constant for the green things growing in its gardens and inland quiet was plentiful for hunting. 

“Spare not words for what you are. But say nothing.” If ever the island was in need of a motto, this would be available. But it was in the nature of this island to not want one. 

Anywhere between thirty to forty-eight people lived on the island at any one time, but it was the island’s wish to not divulge too much about them. As far as the island was concerned, this was its responsibility, the role it had been chosen to serve. To protect the anonymity of its inhabitants, even to the point of protecting the exact number of its inhabitants on any day in question. Among all other islands that could have been chosen for this task and privileged duty, this had been judged the most amenable, the most capable. It did not take lightly the trust invested in it. It was less than a quarter square mile in size but fortified by being stranded far from the common cares of the world. Or at least the cares of most people. 

The inhabitants were in need of what the island offered them. They were thirty to forty-eight people at any one time, but taken in the singular each was grateful to be an islander. None had been born on the island, though perhaps a few, since houses had been built and island established, had died of natural or unnatural causes, buried elsewhere near the place, where no one but an islander could find them. They hadn’t fled from places to come here so much as they had answered a welcome call for sanctuary. Theirs was an emancipation colony. Not a leper colony or a penal colony, nor an abbey for sullen monks. It was a place where explanations were unnecessary, since each who had come there had arrived by invitation. They were men and women and all kind of person between. They were young and old and piecemeal. Not intentionally an “intentional community”, though from the perspective of those looking from shore or channel toward the island and its people, this would seem accurate. They were joined by sight; their infirmities were subtle; they were different in a quiet way that, cast out into the societies of cities and their suburbs, would demand of them frequent self-descriptions and apologies. They were, in the language of those places, imperfect, defective, neurodivergent. They lived on the label-end of a shared diagnosis that inspired curiosity and intrusive questions: prosopagnosia. Face-blindness. Face blind to themselves and others. Possessing perfectly functioning short-term and long-term memory, through misfirings among the esoteric wetwiring of cerebral information processing, they did not feel recognition when they gazed upon a familiar face, and so were left to scan the voice of the person talking, to aid identification. 

The island did not allow visitors, protected their privacy. Winters snow would descend in fleets of soft accumulation, build across the duration of a week barriers to intrusion that could hold for months. The weather of the place was a close partner to the island and seemed to answer to its requests. Its inhabitants wanted to be left alone, to tend their minor patch of property without taxation by unwanted conversation. While they welcomed greetings from passersby on boats, they loathed the approach of cars. Rain and snow were called on; occasional sleet or hail. Fog was the island’s most steadfast protector, exhaling from the ground and sky to meet in the middle where windows glowed. Though residents of its colony were slow with faces, they quickly became accustomed to the sight of early signs of bad weather. For days they could keep to their houses, waiting out a blizzard or rainstorm. Once inside, they were unknowable to the island. It could not say exactly how they chose to pass their time. In that way the privacy the island offered them was thorough, steadfast, for it excluded the island from full knowledge of who they were and what they might be up to, when doors closed and island was left to be an island. 

Who was the one who stayed put? Who failed to fulfill their own lack of inspiration to leave? Both failed and succeeded in that, so savored the standstill daily after their arrival. There was not one specifically among the four dozen or so; they were each part of the one of the whole; the whole that brought them together and nurtured their comfort and assured them they were not bad citizens to remove themselves from their respective societies. They were not gathered on the island to hide; they were collected by the island and revealed to one another as found. They cut free of their old commitments and travelled here by welcome offer or request delivered by text invitation or formal propositions in chatrooms. It was not a town to leave or a town to travel towards, because it was not a town proper but an island. A hunk of rock parceled from the larger continent where their lives had been shaped until then; by leaving the continent to become islanders they would break the cycle long tended by ancestral storytellers and find a place fit for their differences and their feelings, and remain. 

Is there a plot that can be provided for them? There are words for them common to the place and plentiful as rain. 

It has been said by a man once that a true strategy to gaining a stranger’s interest is to talk quietly and mumblingly to oneself; to not solicit or assert but to invite oneself to be overheard. This man could surely have been an island, for in his comment there’s an understanding of rainy-island-policy regarding the intrusions of foreigners. From here on out the plot will be mumbled rather than discussed loudly within earshot; like the people it aspires to represent and honor, it will do so by preserving them in anonymity and hiding them. 

None of the dozen houses’ windows were protected by blinds or curtains. Day and night lights in their interiors were left on. During daylight hours their lit-ness would be disguised by the general light outdoors; through deepening grades of dark as evening arrived the windows were carved from this general light and revealed. Anything to be seen there in any one of them would have to be seen from a distance, channel or shoreline. There was something about the bridge’s character that discouraged a crossing by foot; the gate barrier was made of iron, not the usual wood, and halted cars by refusing to rise. There was no speaker box available for communication with the island, no button to push to request entry. The bridge oddly looked too small for most vehicles to travel along. Yet there were cars parked at the island end of it, and a mottled dampness along the bridge’s concrete that invited driving. 

It was rare for a figure to appear at a window, day or night. But if so, night-figures were more readily visible. Standing as silhouettes they would survey the darkness beyond the island and it was unknowable to island and window alike what they might be thinking. An arm would lift; a nose could be scratched; a cupped hand would be coughed into. Then they would step away into the interiors of the light, leaving the window to regain its original profile as a brilliance of square or rectangle. 

What the island had learned of them, it had learned through their wanderings and conversations. They spoke of where they had come from, how glad they were to join the houses, grateful to contribute to the benefits of the colony. They would not recognize each other upon first sight but would announce themselves by any name they chose to go by, according to the whims of the moment. They had given up their names, of a need for them, upon their arrival. It was the founding principle of the island’s charter, upheld and celebrated daily. Names were expendable, were to be freed from a person through the cast of a hand, like seeds. Where they fell and what grew from where they fell was incidental to their being there. Home required no fidelity to the surface trappings of an identity. These would change from conversation to conversation, and through their collaboration with the perceptual innocence afforded them by their affliction, they would multiply the resident population through mutual guesswork, play-acting, invention. This expanded the dimensions of island gossip, exploded the exploits of its inhabitants into multiverses of speculation. Each could be new each time they opened their mouth and raised a hand to greet their fellow islanders, walking onto a lawn, casting a line to water, or fertilizing a row of tomatoes, squash or zucchini. 

This was how they passed their days and, ostensibly, their house-hidden nights. The island thought it a curious feature of their affliction that, while it denied them instant recognition of a face, it allowed them unfaltering memory of which specific house they lived in. After a shared gathering around a campfire or sightseeings of fireflies, they would cleave from the group and intuitively return to the house where their bed and belongings could be found; these they also recognized without struggle for recall. From the island’s view this suggested a comfort on their part with the disjunction between the claims a person's belongings placed on them, and a person’s will to remain at play and un-claimable. 

What did they talk about? How did they search through their conversations to find each other? Well, the truth was that there was no searching, no interest in returning to old identities. There seemed a refreshing openness to how they greeted one another and, sitting on lawn chairs or across from one another on one of the island’s three or four picnic tables, they cultivated like the gardeners they were the most exotic, exploratory species of small talk. Overheard by the island one early fall afternoon was a discussion between three women about a man standing on the other side of one of the island’s lawns. The man was talking with another man, gesticulating lazily in the direction of where, in a few hours, the sunset would redden over the channel’s water. Had they heard? One of the other house-women had mentioned they’d spoken with the man earlier that morning, sitting crosslegged on the grass of the lawn forking a wedge of spinach-and-bacon quiche on a paper plate; chewing mouthfuls of this generous breakfast gift the woman had brought him. Having spied him from her kitchen window sitting alone among the mist and dew and moved by curiosity and boredom, she had carved a sample of her dish to bring to him. Who was he? He was nameless friend of the island, as they all were. They entered their conversation the way food entered a person’s gastrointestinal system: first by way of the opened mouth, then the closed, then the open; chewing; then a swallow, and down into the tight, damp, dark places; enzymatically disassembled within a stomach, before wormed through intestines small and large, to deposit thoroughly extracted of nutrients in the colon. This is what he told her: that he had once been a nervous person for no reason, nervous about everything, even breathing, because if he was breathing with ease, as soon as he considered the ease with which he breathed, the more conscious he became of it, therefore the more difficult it was for him to accomplish even that one effortless thing: an inhale, an exhale. He had lived like this most of his life and he had seen professionals who he had thought might help him; but none did. The medications they promised would still his nerves only seemed to dull them, then inflame them. In desperation, in a final bid to heal himself, he collapsed into his aversions and committed himself to confronting his fears wherever and whenever they appeared; moreover, he decided, out of disgust with his own cripplingly fearful self, he would venture to create more fears in his fear-arsenal. He would create and shape phobias whole-cloth where previously there had been none. He christened himself a fear sculptor and practiced his craft with ardency and discipline, selecting a new thing to cultivate fears from, then fixate upon it, envision harm in its presence, then repeat, repeat. Soon a rich and varied body of work amassed within him and around him: he was surrounded by things worth fearing, so there was no escaping through avoidance. Stones, pine needles, fog, windows, picnic tables, gloves, shovel handles; algae, moss, paper plates, photographs of flowers, flowers; the island was populated with phobias, because he’d been chased there by the larger world not-an-island, which was for dint of its size more overrun with phobias. The fear he was currently conjuring, developing, that morning, sitting in the grass among the dew, was a terror of snowflakes in the singular. Not snow in the plural, as a storm. No, the single snowflake trailing in seesaw fashion through a long fall down from a cloud-not-yet-feared above. Chionophobia, it was called. See? Fancy that, there was a name for everything; except, by their choice, for colonists blessed as they were, granted welcome on such an island. This is what the man had told the woman. Hearing all this, she had nodded; then when it was polite to do so and their breakfasts had been finished, had gathered their forks and plates and carried them back to the house she had come from. Now she was standing here on the lawn among her fellow women, though none she could swear she had met before, informing them with lowered voice this piece of gossip. The man on the other side of the lawn, catching sight of their looking his way, paused conversation with his own new friend, to wave. Who were those women, he surely wondered. Had he met them before? They didn’t look familiar. 

These and other such things then were what the islanders talked about. None could be sure, sitting to chat with a fellow islander, whether this new acquaintance of theirs had been party to some previous disclosure or guarded speculation. Whatever they discussed was liberated from reference to any life that might have brought them there; and if what they offered so happened to be larded with flecks of actual truth, the truth preserved within the fleckiness served to flavor their fabrications. For the sake of keeping up conversation they believed one another in the moment, without quite needing to trust. They could assume, if they came upon another person, the person was not a willful deceiver so much as an explorer: clearing their throat to speak, they were preparing for another excursion into unknown territory. 

The headcount provided earlier: this was island knowledge. The inhabitants themselves, bereft of island omniscience, were uncertain how many of them lived there. Every few months there was a new arrival; a traveler cashing in on some long-range invitation. Some islanders would gather at the edge of the bridge to greet them, lead them along the shore path to the channel side, to the largest, most central lawn, where the rest of the island’s population would be waiting. The new arrival would be greeted with hugs and handshakes and applause; their belongings would be taken to one of the houses and in their empty hands would be placed a beer and sandwich. So many people out on the lawn, within view then. Temptation to step to high ground and survey their number and begin counting would be understandable, but nigh impossible to satisfy. Since the counter couldn’t remember a face, how could it be ensured that once a person was counted, they wouldn’t be counted again? There was also the added inconvenience that people in a crowd are rarely content to keep still: like viruses among host cells, they tend to mingle. There was also the case that, even if counting the lawn weren’t an issue, there was no way of knowing exactly how many people at any given time were in the houses. Some may be napping or taking a shower. Epistemological information-gathering among the islanders was inherently compromised, a futile prospect. But this looseness of each individual’s awareness played to the benefit of the collective: since such questions could not be verifiably answered, their inability to answer questions put from one to the other were forgivable. The vagueness of their relation to each other was a feature of the freedom afforded to them, as select members of an island colony. None could ever hope to know the other, for their personas were always changing; but this grounded their exchanges in an intimacy of mutual collusion. The island and the channel and the mainland were equally bewildered by their behavior, for each had existed without a personality for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. They may have never had one, so it seemed indulgent and wasteful of the islanders, to plunge so casually but with such commitment into make-believe. They were mortal: hadn’t they heard? Their days were numbered, uncountable because unknowable as of yet. They would come to the end of their count suddenly, even if a long illness brought them there. Then, finalized, a count could be made retroactively. How old had they said they were? What day had been their birthday? Such details had been taken on faith, but surely they would be aware these could have been fabricated. So even then, after the memorial service and scattering of ashes upon the waters, they would have to admit the count of days lived were at best an approximation. They were approximate people in an approximate world, but since they had come here they had been accepted into a serenity about such matters. Islanders were exempted from preoccupations common to mainlanders or channel-goers. They celebrated their comfort with not quite knowing one another, by leaving the point explicitly unmentioned. 

Not to say they were unbound. Not to mean they didn’t rely on larger lands and waters. Windows were lit, as had been mentioned. Houses were kept warm. Theirs was no back-to-the-land community. A quick survey of the house and bridge and gate barrier and road beyond it would show power lines carried from one tall pole to another, dividing into wires that join each house, to brighten and warm and cool them. From open windows in the summertime the flushing of toilets could be heard; so it could be assumed pipes travelled underground to feed them water. From their health and cheerfulness it could be assumed the islanders did not live for want. What was still undetermined was how such a workless life could be sustained. Was the colony pampered by a benefactor? Was it funded by a patron of the face-blind? Whimsical considerations, these, but theirs were lives of luxury and idle gardening; how had they managed where others had so long failed, in gently fanning the embers of utopia? 

Catch any one of them by the arm, as they pass, ask them. The squint of eye, tilting of head, like a dog hearing a whistle from a faraway county. They would be thinking then, with an attitude of searchingness hard to fake. They feel that maybe they knew at one time, they’d say. They swear, given more time, they might be able to recall. Their genuine inability to speak to the matter would express more than they might tell, should they eventually remember. Could it be, from playing musical chairs with their supposedly core selves for long as they had, their ability to orient towards the finer details of their condition had atrophied? Like striders they dabbled on the surfaces of things to avoid drowning. It served them well. But along the way perhaps they’d lost clear sense of what waited for them on the other side of their reflections. A text, an email, you might tell them, a prompt to remind them. An invitation to leave behind all mainland concerns and join this community on the island. Same squint-of-eye, same head-tilt. Earlier they had been like a dog and here they were a dog again. Strange they couldn’t recall. But maybe understandable: they’d been here how long. 

A man arrives, a man leaves. Theirs could be the rare exception to the usual choice of plots available. The person who arrives after long travel, stays a good while, then returns to the unknown that’d brought them there. It hardly matters. From improvising endless back stories every time they're met with a hello, their memories were no longer reliable; also unreliable was the conviction they might be otherwise. Scanning their recollections for facts about who they had once been, before they’d arrived and become islanders, while hardly at a loss for sparks of recognition, they knew these were dubious. The eureka of the spark was a charming deceiver. It would make no sense to take it at face value. What came to mind, when they searched themselves for credible proof of identification, were colorful anecdotes, “memorable” details. That they were so memorable was exactly the problem. Was it they were so memorable because they’d been made so, embellished upon until their root relation to the lived experience described had been torn and severed? Like the overground green of a weed ripped from its roots. As gardeners, they were aware: leave the roots and the weed is sure to revive. Dig roots out fully spanning a clump of dirt, the weed would die and, by grace of this very metaphor, so would their minds. Inhabiting the island as long as they had, the neural structures of their brains had grown to conform to the demands of constant impostering. The freedom the island had granted them had reformed their minds. 

This sounds sad. This suggests there has been damage. That the elderly woman wearing green galoshes wades into the shallows beyond the island’s one silt bank nursing a remorse she can feel but can’t identify or describe. Not the case: not just quite, but not at all. She holds a plastic yellow bucket, the color of sunflower petals. She spots something below the water’s surface, stiffly takes a crouch, inserts a hand into the water and appears to feel around. A shell? A minnow caught mid-swim? The island’s view of her is obscured, due to the angle and her back turned. Her hand emerges, drops something into the bucket. In achy stages, pause then slight movement then pause, she uncrouches to stand. There she stands again holding her bucket. What’s in it? There: that’s how to describe it. Not melancholic nor ominous, not wounded or disaffected. An impartiality of regard born from unbridgeable distance, island to bucket, person to person. To ask her what she had dropped into her bucket would violate unwritten codes of conduct. It is her business. Her business to show and to tell. But also hers to disregard or forget. It’s a peaceful place because no one expects otherwise. 

There are other islands, of course. There are coasts elsewhere equally ragged and tree-blind and boulder-infested. There are roads sprouting in every direction from a daydreamer’s head. There is weather willing to collaborate with snatches of land broken free and wading at a short distance from their shores. Rain when rain is appropriate and snow when it is cold. There are unseen expeditions of deer raising their heads and therefore their harvest of antlers to the air, breath-puffs before them; semi trucks growling up a steep grade or cutting groaningly around a tight bend. These are common apparitions to mainland and island-land worlds alike: their singular uniquenesses interchangeable. But there is, far as this one island knows, only one bridge that leaves a gravel lot turning from a road, and only one other bridge that crosses a few hundred feet of cove-water to end at a gravel lot across which bright cast-offs of window-plots lengthen. Standing on that other side, that destination born of a bridge, are a dozen or so houses. Caught in their window-glows like prehistoric insects trapped in tree sap rapidly hardening to amber, are the outlines of certain uncertain people. These are islanders: this much is known. Soon they’ll come out to welcome you. Stand a while and listen to the water around and the quiet it disguises. Beyond the houses is a channel, though too dark yet to mark. The channel wanders in two directions but only one empties into an estuary, which opens onto a wide yet-untraveled sea. Raise a hand. Greet the dark. Perhaps far out on those broad waters there’s someone unseen but equally friendly, eager to wave as you pass.