The Island

I'm writing this the day before classes start. People on campus make the day a weirdly mournful celebration, hosting barbecues and staging massive Nerf battles while all the time muttering about how scared they are about classes. It seems like having your favorite food at a funeral. I shouldn’t be so hard on them, traditions crop up at times of transition, that’s just the way it works. But, even though I’ve operated on the academic calendar for as long as I can remember, the start of school never seemed like an especially important event for me. Maybe that’s because my year has always started and ended with my family’s one week summer vacation to The Island*.

The Island is up in the boundary waters between Ontario and Minnesota, technically on the Canadian side but so close that my mom swims to the U.S. and back every year. My family has been visiting the area since my dad was a kid. When I first visited it at age six I assumed that it was a sovereign nation and we were its royal family. Really, that might as well be the truth. It's a scrap of rock in the middle of nowhere. No one would mind if we raised an Osler family flag on the dock and formed our own congress, and my cousins would probably go for it.

I have so much trouble describing what it’s like up there that sometimes it feels like I’m one of those early European explorers to the Americas who were so overwhelmed by how alien it all was that they inevitably fell back on biblical allusions and words like “awe” and “wonder” when writing about it. It’s a forest, but with no soil. Even at the center of the island there isn’t more than a few inches of moss and pine needles and maybe a little bit of dirt before you hit the jumble of boulders that make up the bedrock. And somehow pines twist their roots through that and get all of the sustenance they need to grow thirty feet tall. Can you picture that? I don’t think I could, if I hadn’t seen it.

Even the simpler aspects of The Island don’t fit into familiar ideas of what a trip to the wilderness should be like. There’s no WiFi or electricity and we have to maintain our own pump system to get water, but we’re not roughing it; we have a propane stove and enough dedicated cooks that we usually eat better there than we do at home. It seems like an archetypically outdoorsy place, but sometimes I spend almost the whole day in the cabin, reading and hanging out with the family. The routine up there isn’t hard to get used to, but it always feels like a jump to a different dimension when we return to the world of paved roads and lights after sunset. I've never been anywhere like it, and I don't think I ever will. It’s a clean break from the rest of the world.

That’s why it’s my designated place to reset at the end of each year. The same way sleep separates one day from another, a trip to The Island cuts off one year and signals the beginning of the next. And the same way the rest of your life drains away as you get lost in the world of your dreams, at The Island it seems like I’ve had an entire separate life up there, one that’s only lasted a couple weeks so far. With the real world a half-hour boat ride away, it begins to feel like the rocks and trees and cabin and lake are all that has ever existed. The evening eight years ago that I paced on the rocks by the shore for an hour, wondering what my new life in Minnesota would be like might have only happened two months ago, and the trip to our new house never came. 

Every year since I was six I had this fantasy that a war broke out while we were up at The Island and I’d have to live up there full time to avoid the draft. I even wrote a terrible novel around that premise to convince myself it wouldn’t be so great, but not even my own heavy-handed writing could puncture my idealized escape from the world. Right now, with about a hundred pounds of books I’ll have to read for the upcoming semester looming on the shelf above me, a permanent return to The Island doesn’t sound so bad.

It sure would be boring, though. That’s what I think I missed in my novel** and fantasies. I might daydream about all the things I wouldn’t have to do if I went to live up there, but what would I have to do? Find a consistent source of food, avoid bear attacks, and survive the winter, probably.

Still, I think that having a quick little exile from the real world is a good thing, and I’m glad to have that privilege. At college it always feels like everything is going a mile a minute, and if life continues  at this rate, I’ll be out of school and in a job and deep into middle age before I can catch my breath. So a little arrested development is nice. As long as our family stays the part-time tyrants of the tiny pile of rocks in the boundary waters, I’ll always have that place where it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference whether I’m six or twenty one.

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* Sorry if the capitalization bugs you, but I’ve always considered The Island a proper noun and typing it all lowercase seems like an insult to the place.

** And it’s a good thing I did, because that would have somehow been an even worse story.