An Island is an island is...

“Loneliness lies in the center of the Kara Sea in the northern Arctic Ocean.”

Ah, you with your rich and full and connected life may be thinking: So that’s where loneliness resides.

Actually, this is the first line of the first entry in a book I’ve been reading – Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands, subtitled Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will. And in this case, she’s referring to Lonely Island – a desolate-sounding, cold and barren place trapped in ice pack all winter with summer temperatures sometimes (sometimes!) rising just over freezing, the abandoned buildings of its former polar observatory long ago sunk into snow.  A place that bears no resemblance to Deer Isle (though after this winter, some islanders might argue otherwise) except that it’s, well, an island.

Not that everyone considers Deer Isle a “real island,” given that a suspension bridge links us to the mainland and we don’t have to rely on ferries and mailboats to get us and our belongings between there and here. Charges that most of us are as unified in scoffing at as those quibbling over our “island-ness” seem divided. The U.S. Geological Survey has offered a helpful assist, demanding an island be at least an acre. But that begs the question: What then is measured? And when? Every inlet and outcropping and point? The clam-pocked mudflats exposed only at low tide?

In some ways, it’s a matter of perspective. When writing of her time living on a rugged Irish island, the late Deborah Tall observed that she had the dual sensation of being self-contained and indisputably situated on her island while knowing that she was part of the view, “a shape drifting in and out of focus, admired from the mainland.” As I sometimes do, too, when, from my house and yard, I look across the Bay to distant mainland Camden and become part of what in their view is, bridged or not, an island.

When it comes to perspective, consider far-off Polynesian Easter Island. Though considered one of the worlds’s most isolated inhabited islands, nearly 2,200 miles west of continental Chile and 1,300 miles from Pitcairn Island, its nearest neighbor, Easter Island’s native Rapa Nui population call their homeland Te Pito Te Henua, or “navel of the world.” Thus, proving, notes Schalansky, that any point on an infinite globe of the Earth can become center.

Of course just calling an island an island is not sufficient. For example, Blue Island is a southwest suburb of Chicago that, as part of a glacial moraine at the end of the Ice Age when water covered the entire region, was an island. Later, after subsequent geological upheaval, it became a ridged table of land that to early 19th century settlers resembled an island in a trackless prairie sea. But long since, as a railroad hub some 20 miles from Lake Michigan, anyone looking for vestiges of “island-ness” will likely be very disappointed.

Names do, of course, serve several if not always important purposes. A Chilean island, reports Schalansky, changed its name multiple times to attract tourists. Translated once as “Closer to Land” (and cousin to another in the archipelago called “Further Out”), it was later, in recognition of a stranded Englishman’s solitary experience there and the attraction of his subsequent story, changed again to Robinson Crusoe Island.

Ah, Robinson Crusoe! Now, island-wise, we’re getting somewhere. As we might think when conjuring up Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.  Or when considering mythical Atlantis. So, too, those early explorers’ recountings and Gauguin’s later paintings of South Pacific island gems, any one of which seemed a utopia of innocence and permissiveness, a natural paradise before a fall from grace.

“An Island is Paradise.

So is Hell.”

As declared in the Frontispiece to Schalansky’s Atlas.

Indeed. Black-cliffed St. Helena, island of Napoleon’s exile and death, must’ve seemed to him like something far short of Paradise. Robben Island where Nelson Mandela spent much of his 27-year imprisonment had to have been a pretty bleak place. Though lush and green, Norfolk Island was home to one of Great Britain’s most notorious penal colonies. Closer to home, island-bound Alcatraz, now a popular tourist attraction and just a short boat launch away from San Francisco, was never truly a part of what’s considered our most beautiful and European-like city that for inmates may as well have been located an ocean away.

Though not a prison, Socorro Island, 370 miles off the western coast of Mexico, could’ve been. Sailing the Pacific Ocean in the early 20th century and finding that on islands like Oahu and Tahiti chewing gum wrappers were almost as prevalent as banana husks and wind in the palms, George Hugh Banning harbored an oft-voiced desire to be shipwrecked somewhere, “as long as it was a Godforsaken spot surrounded by water.” He soon thought otherwise, coming upon Socorro and finding there a dry and dreary lava-cliffed, prickly-shrubbed place that he likened to “a half-burned trash pile, quenched by a shower but without even the strength to smolder in a puddle of inky water.” In other words, stop the presses on any tourist brochures.   

Of course, living on an island can simplify things in many ways – and let’s be clear, we’re not talking about the planet’s largest island, Greenland, but one more like, say, a 12-by-6 mile island in the northeast Atlantic. Nothing there is ever too distant to walk or drive to. Someone always knows your name. Get sick and more than a close neighbor will know about it. If you’ve got a story to tell – be it fact or fiction – someone’s usually ready to listen and, like it or not, pass it on. Voice a complaint and someone will grumble along with you – and if it’s about rising property taxes or the machinations of the local school board, you’ll have to give out numbers to those who line up for their own personal and grievous airing. Sure, a measure of your privacy may be sacrificed. Anonymity is only thinly cloaked. It’s harder, too, not to be complicit. Meaning there’s no immunity to its wrongs and it’s harder to look away from poverty or abuse, illness or neglect.

Famously poet John Donne in the 17th century, wrote: “No man is an island entire of itself.” Other writers have since suggested otherwise. John Fowles once observed that an island, in its smallness in a vast universe, in its boundedness and birth – “rising into light and air out of an amniotic sea” – is more closely related to the human body than any other geographical land formation. In his notebooks, Dylan Thomas referred to his body as a “bonebound island.” Geographically speaking, mankind does seem most like an island. And, as a bone-bound physical being, he can, if he chooses, be isolate. If his focus is only inward, he can become islanded.

But Donne’s “no man is an island” is correct in this sense. Living on an island almost always requires an interdependence, and a sometimes surprising interconnectedness. It’s likely that the volunteer driver for the island’s ambulance corps who answers your 911 call is the same fellow who helped repair your storm-damaged roof. You stop to help with a flat tire and meet for the first time the woman over whose property you’ve accessed the clam flats for years. Your mother gets sick and it’s the cashier at the market who arranges a series of potluck suppers. The editor of the local paper runs a free ad for a fund-raising concert to help a boy diagnosed with leukemia who, it turns out, is the son of the electrician who wired your pump. During a brutal snowstorm, a neighbor having a heart attack needs to be transported to the mainland hospital in the middle of the night and it's possible only because islanders quick with trucks and plows precede him to the bridge.

The very bridge that, some would have you believe, makes an island not a “real island.”