The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 71: August 18

Today I rowed back from an island. We’d eaten dinner on this island, my friends and family and I. We’d collectively hauled a thousand pounds of food and gear to this island in order to survive three sunny hours on it. Ours was a motley August crowd — locals with roots that extended back many generations, locals who’d escaped from New York twenty years ago, an editor, an all-but-dissertation philosophy professor, a writer, an artist, two men who run silent meditation retreats in Mallorca and Nepal, three men named Ben, a lot of children. The party extended horizontally along the beach.

The mood was light but also, inevitably, charged. Islands make people competitive, maybe because the subconscious fear of shipwreck and survival permeates even the most casual outing. Who will lead the masses when the weather turns and the food runs out? Who will be sacrificed to feed the starving useful people, the ones who can fish and make fires and sing morale-building sea shanties? I often contemplate my odds of surviving a shipwreck and how to improve them. When I was breast-feeding, I nurtured a lot of shipwreck fantasies. What if I were shipwrecked with my baby and ten adults on an island with a large box of Clark Bars? Wouldn’t it be best if I ate the Clark Bars and breast-fed everyone on the island, because my body would transform the worthless sugar into valuable fat and protein? Wouldn’t that prove to be the wisest survival strategy, and wouldn’t that guarantee I’d never be killed for food?

I was no longer breast-feeding on this particular island trip; I had to prove my indispensability in other ways. So I swam and swam and swam. I could maybe dive for lobsters; I could maybe go for help — that’s what my eternal swimming said to the people sitting on the beach. I swam while others drank beer, and slowly realized that they, too, would have to swim, swim or maybe be killed. My individual survival was clearly essential to the survival of the group. Was theirs?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people swim on an island trip before. The water is probably fifty-three degrees out there. Then, near hypothermic, we ate the food we’d brought, and not each other. We watched the sun set, and quelled our panic that we’d have to spend the night, because the boat wouldn’t start, or possibly it would sink. We loaded the scow with bags and people and transferred them to the lobster boat. I decided to row back to the mainland in a dinghy. I rowed with the artist and his squid-loving son. The son fished and caught a sandbar. His father bit the line loose with his teeth. As the moon rose, and the sun definitively set, and we were in darkness, I told them the true story of Boon Island. Boon Island is a long pile of rocks located six miles off the southern coast of Maine. In December 1710 a ship called the Nottingham Galley ran aground on this rock, which measured then and measures now three hundred by seven hundred feet. The fourteen survivors lasted twenty-four days during the winter. They did eat one another in order to pull off this astonishing feat.

Boon Island, published in 1956, is a thinly fictionalized account of their endeavor written by Kenneth Roberts. Maine children are (or were in the ’80s) assigned to read Boon Island for English class. Should our own personal hardships overwhelm us, well, we should be thankful our feet weren’t turning to translucent sponges in our boots. I guess this was the lesson. Or maybe this is too clichéd an understanding of why we were assigned this book in English class. Buck up, etc. This is so prevalent an attitude in Maine that we didn’t need a formal education to learn it. The takeaway horror of Boon Island was far more existential. Yes, these men were freezing and eating one another, but the cruelest factor of their island internment was this: they could see smoke rising from the house chimneys ashore. As they suffered, they could watch the cheery proof of people warming themselves by fires and cooking food that wasn’t, an hour ago, a friend. That struck me as far worse punishment than simply being shipwrecked on a rock. It seemed an appropriate metaphor for being marooned in Maine as a kid — there was another world out there, you could watch it nightly on TV, but how could you reach it?

On a windless night, without a current, the row from the island back to shore is an easy one. I was no longer proving my indispensability to the group; I simply wanted to take the slow way to shore under the half-moon, because summer is almost over, and these are the quiet, twilight moments that, if properly collected and preserved, help me survive the New York winter. I start amassing these moments during the final weeks of August. I must salt supplies for storage. They must last me until I can return to this place I angled for years to leave.