Our Bonebound Island(s)

Last weekend, while sitting on our deck and splitting my time between the book in my lap and the expansive island-pocked view in front of me, I was reminded of what writer John Fowles once observed. An island, he wrote, in its smallness in a vast universe, in its boundedness and birth – rising into light and air out of amniotic sea – is more closely related to the human body than any other geographical land formation. I also recalled how poet Dylan Thomas referred to his body as a “bonebound island.”

Both invited me to look out at the Bay and imagine myself floating there, how I might resemble a little island. Lie there long and still enough and a passing gull, its landing gear lowered, might even be convinced. An outstretched arm might become, say, a slender outcropping, splayed fingers some small pebbled bars exposed only at lowest ebb tide. The feet in their skyward thrust a pair of granite escarpments, the body’s bottom heft a submerged shoal. And the head? The mind inside? Even we armchair swimmers know that while the body-as-island may float somewhere between Bradbury and Pickering islands, the mind, that winged thing, is apt to be up riding the thermals with the osprey, or sitting back on a deck with an open book.

Viewed from atop the Caterpillar Hill turn-out on the mainland, Deer Isle and the other Penobscot Bay islands appear like green jewels strung against blue. At first glance, there’s a perceived similarity of rock and ledge tacked down by dark spruce, white hatchmarks of birch, clapboard houses punched into clearings or hugging the shore. Differences seem merely of size. But each island is separate, distinct. Cross over the bridge and the Little Deer causeway, and slowly, our island reveals itself, its various characteristics and marked individuality.

It’s not unlike us. Sure, I may like to think of myself as islanded, the embodiment of “One Big Me,” but an individual, as we all know, is a stew of related selves. Within me, in co-habitation and often in an uneasy truce, my various selves sense, speak, reason, grieve, argue, remember, imagine. They hunger – for a cheeseburger, a nap, a purpose or a hug. Poet Mary Oliver speaks eloquently of her “intimate interrupter” self who bangs on the door of quiet concentration to demand she answer the phone, buy mustard, phone the dentist. I recognize that self and I know too the attentive social self who doesn’t turn away the uninvited guest from the doorstep. Nor does she fail to send a thank-you note, remember a birthday, cook dinner for friends. The child-at-play self sits cross-legged in  the woods with her grandchildren making gnome homes, plashes in a tidal pool with a pail or, with a primal scream, plunges from a tree-hung rope into Lily Pond. It’s the untethered dreamer self, isn’t it?, who turns her back on her house, her desk, her garden and on a morning ramble is accompanied by a roaming ready-to-be-transported consciousness not a hard-edged analytical mind. And don’t we each have selves outgrown or silenced – the abused or addict or soldier selves – whose histories are kept separate, remote, hidden? 

Our One Big Me is actually a constellation of multiple, embodied selves. The “bonebound island” is in fact an archipelago of many islands – big and small, exposed and hidden, distinct, separate, complexly connected. Islands like those in Penboscot Bay, that in such an ancient, ice-sheet buckled and glacier-scraped landscape are themselves multiple-layered.

Viewed from afar, an island, like the individual, is a contrast of what can be seen at once, and what, beyond visible shores, is hidden. I’m reminded of glaciers, 90 percent of which are beneath the water, out of sight. Or like my young nephew’s rendition of nearby Heart Island. In it, the little island’s mass is heavily colored in dark brown crayon. He’s portrayed it above the sea’s distinctly depicted blue waterline and also below, dark and prominent behind a wavy blue overlay, all the way to the bedrock bottom of the page. Pointing, he explained at the time, “I colored it this way because here’s the part of the island you can’t see. It’s underwater.” As if, at age seven, he was already on his way to grasping, not just geology, but how the geography of an island can resemble those parts of our hidden selves, the unseen niches and crannies where secrets, fears and longings reside. And where, below the swirling, sloshing waterline our dreamer-selves dwell, too.

There are probably few island dwellers more widely known than Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s fictional shipwreck castaway believed to be based on the true story of a Scottish sailor explorer. Home to Crusoe for 28 years was a remote tropical island. With salvaged and made-from-local-wood-and-stone tools, he excavated a cave, kept a calendar, made pottery, raised goats, adopted a parrot. To survive, he had to use skills he may not have known he possessed, ones most of us will likely never need. And yet, I believe a kind of Crusoe resides in each of us. A Crusoe by choice. The explorer-self and so, too, even if in the absence of shipwreck aftermath, the discoverer-self. Maybe it’s partly what draws some of us to islands, including those like this one that is neither remote nor suffers the paucity of civilization confronting poor Crusoe.

On this island, some of us explore what we lack elsewhere. Perhaps we discover what we don’t really need or miss– like shopping malls and traffic and expensive haircuts. At a greater remove from trendiness, our stylish self may, as though in camouflage and if only for a season, re-examine what she satisfies elsewhere, recognizing that were it not for the New York Times ads or the stray chic tourist who probably enroute to Mount Desert Island made a wrong turn, she wouldn’t know nor much care that the “in” shoe this season is a platform open-toe number with calf-killing stiletto heels while at the other extreme, urban walkers are forking over $300 to purchase some odd-looking, thick-soled shoes that promise to emulate the graceful strides of Kenyan Masai herdsmen, who, it should be noted, are usually barefoot. 

Here, through exploration, down island paths we might never have taken elsewhere, we may begin to discover who we really are or want to be, and of what we are capable. Our personal discoveries come through solitude and contemplation sought and chosen, or, like Crusoe after Friday arrived, in the community of others. Exploring, we may come upon the buried treasure chest of a long-hidden talent, the washed up prize of developing a long, meaningful relationship with the least likely person. We may find that our traps, before they’re even heaved over the gunwale, fill. Our hods overflow with a record dig.

“An island gives a vague yet immediate sense of identity,” Fowles also wrote. Immediate, yes, and vague, but only for a time. For as we settle into its rhythms and cycles and come to know it, an island, no matter how remotely we might resemble it, can become part of us, home to our multiple selves.