Forbidden Island an Island Called Sapelo

by Tom Poland

  “Goodnight, Slater, and thanks for taking me with you.”

  ***

  I checked the campsite and walked the perimeter double-checking the line. I zipped the canvas bag holding the water jugs shut. The dog was lying there, front paws extended watching the dying fire. Everything seemed good.

  Heat lightning flashed to the west, over the mainland. I looked around our encampment. The seaoats and palmettos, having given their original colors to the flames, flickered red. The sky was black, punctuated with cold points of light, the sand streaked with orange. Tyler’s small lantern threw alluring shadows that danced against blue tent walls. As she pulled her clothes away, the shadow of a woman moved over the fabric. I had not seen a woman undress in five years and her shadows—phantoms of desire—stopped me cold. She seemed ageless, unearthly beautiful. I turned away from the shadows to shove a log deeper into the fire. The fire blazed up and a whorl of sparks soared toward the stars.

  The soft, inviting shadows resurrected recollections of Spain and Italy. Ann and I went abroad the summer before her death. Brit stayed with relatives in the Georgia countryside. Ann’s shadows played against the silk curtain of our bath in a hotel on Via Veneto overlooking Rome. Memories of Europe washed over me … ancient Rome, its tawny and white walls, red bricks, green cedars, and gray Coliseum … the Grand Canal, glittering lights and gondolas, bridges, frescoes, Alicante and its nude beaches.

  Anything, a drift of perfume, a marble column, bread dipped in olive oil, anything brought a tide of European memories rushing in. Remembrances of Europe—our only time there—haunted me.

  We had become separated at a crowded train station in Valencia, Spain. She had stepped into a shop, and I had asked about a schedule and tried to call our daughter back in the states. None of the phones worked, and I kept going from one phone to the next.

  Somehow, we lost each other. For more than two hours we couldn’t find one another. I had read a true story once of an American, who, while shopping in a Middle Eastern market, turned for a second. When he looked back his blonde wife was gone, stolen for the sex trade. He never saw her again.

  Overpowered by a nauseous feeling of surrender, I took a taxi to the hotel where we had reservations, and she was there showering, her shadows playing against a pale blue curtain. Having been unable to find me, she did the sensible thing: check into our room. We vowed nothing would separate us again, and nothing did until my fateful cell call a year later.

  So many memories … a train trip through Spanish olive groves silver as eucalyptus and dark green vineyards, Ann asleep, her head upon my shoulders. Melancholia swept over me, a bittersweet ache for a woman I loved but would never see again.

  I settled onto my sleeping bag—it was too hot to get into—and felt my entire body sink into the sand, the grainy remnants of ancient mountains. The tent billowed, the trees clattered, and the wind and waves were lulling me to sleep. From far off, the call of a whippoorwill floated over the dunes. My mind drifted to Oakland Cemetery, Brit and the hospital, Molly Augustine, and the daughter who had no mother anymore and the old peach farmer who had made his final harvest.

  From somewhere, the call of a whippoorwill floated over the dunes. I thought again of Oakland Cemetery and Brit and the daughter who had no mother anymore. There was so much sadness on the mainland.

  MIRACLES

  Daylight exploded on Sapelo. The sun burst over the dunes, setting my tent aglow like a lantern, and Voodoo barked nonstop. At 6:40, there was nothing to do but give in to the noise and light and get up. An equatorial fireball, the sun blazed in with a fury unknown in Atlanta where buildings and shuttered windows kept it at bay.

  I stirred up some live coals from the night’s fire to brew coffee and a flurry of ashes rose and fell onto the sand like black snow. I was looking forward to coffee with Tyler, our first breakfast together, and a chance to go over the day’s plan of attack.

  Voodoo barked and pulled at his strap, eager to run loose. I set him free and he headed toward the pass. Coffee perked and the smell was pleasing, something about how it mixed with the salt air, but no Tyler. A sleepyhead, and she had made such a big deal out of making use of every minute.

  While coffee brewed, I circled the camp, dropping the monofilament to the ground. In one place, near the dune passage, the line seemed out of place. Something or someone had moved it. Then I saw the footprints. They led from Tyler’s tent. She was gone, something Voodoo had tried to tell me all along. Her footprints headed toward the channel.

  The night before, around midnight, the tide had been high, but now it was going out. The sediments had swirled and dried in places as if some god had pressed his thumbprint into the sand. Voodoo sloshed through the channel, then stopped. The dog circled then slanted across the channel toward the sea and came out forty yards away where Tyler had careened across the channel toward the beach’s hard-packed sand where walking was easier.

  For an hour, we tracked her. Now and then, she would stray into soft sand where the walking was harder, then she would veer to the hard-packed sand leaving nothing but heel depressions. Her tracks stopped at a tidal pool where shells shimmered as if someone had spilled a chest of jewels into the water. She had knelt here to scoop up a few shells, her knees having left twin ponds in the sand. Fine silt was still settling.

  I rounded a spit of land to face a long crescent of beach and saw her seventy yards away. She was wearing blue shorts and a white blouse and had her basket heading north. Voodoo ran to her, barking. She looked back, but walked no farther. She widened her stance and crossed her arms.

  In her basket were two water bottles, some crackers, and several seashells.

  “Here I am back at camp making coffee, and you’re nowhere to be found. We were supposed to search according to our plan, but, no, you sneak off on your own.”

  “I didn’t want to awaken you. You had to be tired. So I left for the village.”

  “Didn’t you hear Jackson? Go in alone and they’ll kill you.”

  “I don’t buy that. Besides, I don’t have any time to waste.”

  “I can’t even start my first day off with a cup of coffee. A fresh cup sure would be nice.”

  “I’m sorry, really I am, but you can make another pot.”

  “Oh, sure I can, and when the coffee runs out, I’ll just buy some more at the Publix over those dunes there.”

  “You don’t have to be a smart ass. I said I’m sorry.”

  “I wake up and you’re gone. What am I to do? Maybe you’ll come back, maybe you won’t. And if you don’t come back by dark, then what? Don’t make me think bringing you here was a mistake.”

  I turned back to camp. She had nothing to say that I wanted to hear. She had done a foolish thing. Everyone had warned me about the dangers here and she’d been warned too.

  Voodoo loped by and I heard her running up behind me. She tugged my sleeve. “I’ve made you mad. I’m sorry,” she said, breathing hard.

  “Let’s just go our separate ways. I can stretch my food out. I didn’t plan to have a roommate to feed, you know.”

  She made a semicircle in the sand with her left foot and looked me in the eye.

  “Let’s don’t. The sun came in so strong I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I decided to see if I could find the fellow who told Jackson he had seen a white woman. That’s the truth. I wasn’t sneaking off. If I were I would have covered my tracks and—”

  “—and what? Leave me at camp all day to wonder if you’re okay?”

  Silence.

  “Listen,” I said, “we work as a team, or we split up today.”

  “Let’s go back and make a fresh start.”

  “All right,” I said, “but consider today a test. We have to find a way to pull together, not just be two people who bumped into each other on the way to an island. When I tell you I hope you find your daughter, I mean it. You don’t know, in fact, how much I mean it. I doubt we ever see each other again once you leave. Let’s help each
other so when we look back on our time here, we have something to hold on to.”

  We walked back to camp, and my icy mood began to thaw.

  “You can’t stay mad at me for long can you?”

  “Long enough to make my point,” I said, though she was right.

  While Tyler packed for the day’s hike, I fashioned walking sticks from driftwood limbs with my hatchet and knife. I carved our names on them and on Tyler’s etched “Finding Lorie, One Step At A Time.”

  “I’d like to give you this staff as a peace offering,” I said.

  She read the inscription and hugged me. “You’re too sweet. You won’t have to worry about me not being a team player again.”

  I believed her. The inscription had made contact with her. That’s how it happens, some unexpected small thing bonds people. The inscription had been an impulse, but it had opened some small, special door.

  The plan was to head west until we came out on the island’s marshy side. We would then go north before heading back to camp. If all went well, we’d cover two search zones and return with a good supply of pond water.

  “I’d hate to see that tender skin of yours cook like a crab.” Tyler’s skin was flawless, like porcelain, and the sun would eat her up. I gave her a tube of sunscreen and she began spreading lotion across her face, arms, and legs. The air filled with the fragrance of coconut oil, a smell of the beaches.

  We headed out with backpacks, lunches, two water jugs, walking sticks, and Voodoo. “We’ll walk single-file. I’ll beat a path through the brush to make walking easier for you, plus your following me will be an advantage for me.”

  “How’s that?”

  “A rattler strikes the second person through.”

  She halted. “Are you serious?”

  “No, that’s just an old wives’ tail. I’ll thrash the bushes in front of me. The one thing we don’t want to do is to sneak up on a rattler. A diamondback can inject enough venom to kill a quarter horse in four seconds.”

  “Trying to scare me,” she asked.

  “Educate you. When you hear one rattling, freeze. A rattler only kills what he can swallow and then he swallows it whole, headfirst. Don’t worry. I don’t think you’ll be sliding head-first into a giant rattler’s jaws any time soon.”

  “God, what an awful thought.”

  “Watch out for the deadliest snake of all though—the two-legged rattler.”

  “Two-legged rattler?”

  “The deadliest snake of all. Man. We’ve got to watch for him at all times.”

  Tyler gripped her walking stick and hefted its weight as if testing its strength. Beneath the perfect skin and beautiful face lived a killer with beautiful legs. A woman scared of the unknown would not have sneaked off this morning, nor would she have come alone to the island. She would smash a man’s head in if she had to. Of that, I had no doubt.

  We headed west into the island taking in the sights and sounds of a wild island and saw beauty no photographer could capture, not even Cameron. The land was lush with swaying palm trees and flowering bushes. Brilliant green palmetto fans grew in profusion and live oak limbs, draped heavily with moss, flirted with the earth. We faced a near-impervious forest of imperial pines and immense live oaks, and vultures circled over the canopy breaks in a blue sky paling from heat. Indigo buntings flitted across our path and pileated woodpeckers jackhammered trees as grackles jolted the air with electric cries. The air shook with insects, and cicadas rose and fell with a rhythm borne of the wild.

  The luxuriant undergrowth made the going tough, and I hacked away, wondering if finding anyone here was possible. I remembered old jungle movies where explorers hacked away every three or four steps. A thicket of bamboo—a beautiful forest of enormous grass—rose before us and I felt I was on some South Pacific isle.

  The island was beautiful, but beyond everything wild and I feared, murderous. The foliage afforded many places for spying. If someone wanted to hide and shoot me pointblank he could. The vegetation was that thick.

  The island’s beauty had me in its grip. Trapped by tidal marshes, salt-water creeks, and the Atlantic, Sapelo confined us to a place where nature and primitive ways ruled, and we were here to submit to that rule.

  Sapelo was the most beautiful place I’d seen, and at 34 degrees, not that far from the Equator, with a tropical forest reminiscent of Costa Rica’s. It did heat up like a stovetop, and I knew every day would be hazy, hot, and humid. The island had no choice but to steam even when the nearby Gulf Stream, coursing through equatorial waters, would bring storms and their torrential downpours. That majestic river within the sea lay just over the eastern horizon and its warmth flooded the sea and air, Tyler, me, and Voodoo, who panted as if dying. We were exploring an oasis of near eternal summer, an island of shimmering heat waves where mirages crawled over dune ridges like snakes in this land of cicadas, cloudbursts, hazy horizons, clouds of birds, and unquenchable thirst.

  For a long time we made our way through the undergrowth, saying little, watchful. We were heading toward the island’s backside, the oldest side. The ponds we sought had once been the ocean’s edge, but now they held freshwater, an accumulation of rain not yet sapped by the inversion.

  We came upon a clearing where an old hand-operated pump stood, rusting.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. “A well.”

  “An old cistern pump,” said Tyler. “My granddaddy’s farm had one.”

  I worked the handle, which creaked. After several minutes of pumping it stiffened up and water gushed forth. “Water. Not that far from camp either. Here, give it a pump or two.”

  Tyler worked the handle until water shot out of it and I dipped my hands into the coolness. It smelled brackish—like most coastal water. I drank a few swallows, which tasted sulfurous but otherwise seemed fine.

  “Keep pumping.” I took off my cap and submerged my head beneath the flow, drenching my hair. It was cool and wonderful.

  “Want to try it?”

  Tyler wasted no time drinking. Then she bent over to let the water flow through her hair. Water ran over her head in smooth sheets. I kept pumping and she cupped her hands to splash water over her face. Beads of water sparkled as they fell from her hair and face.

  “God that feels awesome,” she said.

  “This place is about an hour from camp. Let’s hide our water jugs in the brush and fill them up on the way back. I’d also like to cut some of that bamboo for your latrine. We’ll have to change our plans for going back north of here but it’s worth it to have fresh water.”

  “No complaints from me,” said Tyler who trickled water into Voodoo’s mouth from her cupped hands.

  We noted on our maps where we judged the cistern to be and stashed our jugs beneath some myrtles. Just beyond the shrubs and undergrowth where we hid our cans, old boards and bricks lay scattered about.

  “An old home place,” I said. “No telling what we might find around here. We’ll check it out when we have some time.”

  “Hold on a minute,” said Tyler. “There’s an old chicken coop.”

  Back in the shadows beneath a massive oak stood an old chicken pen and a fence overgrown with vines and weeds. The coop had outlasted the house that most likely a hurricane or natives had destroyed.

  We left discussing what might have happened to the old home place and ten minutes later merged onto a deer path filled with the unmistakable hoof prints of deer. The image of an antlered buck swimming beneath the moonlight came to me.

  According to our Landstat maps, we were getting close to the marsh. We stopped for water and a breather and sat against a massive cypress tree. Tyler pointed to an area where shimmering light flashed and brightened the woods. We had come up on a creek feeding inland from the channel. We followed the creek to where it sprang from the channel. Powdery white, flour-like sand banked the creek’s mouth. To the left, the marsh lay green, stretching.

  We went inland to the path running through jungle-like woods and soon entered a cath
edral of live oaks where massive limbs vaulted green and Spanish moss hung over park-like sweeps of sand. Then we were back in the jungle. I caught the scent of the ponds before I saw them and just as I did, we came upon a dead oak where vultures waited for death to claim something.

  The ponds shone like jewels, round and blue, set into a green rim of vegetation, where mirror images of cypress converged at buttressed trunks. Cypress knees rose as if standing upon the surface. Egrets and herons stalked the shallows where water lilies bloomed, and an anhinga spread his wings in a cypress tree. An alligator drifted, like a half-submerged log, through some water lilies far off.

  “Hang onto Voodoo for a minute. Let’s put the rope back on him while we’re at this pond. We don’t want him wandering off. If he does, we may lose him to a gator.”

  We roped Voodoo up and kept him close by as we edged the pond. Just then we came across the plant science fiction made into a legend in the 1950s.

  “Look at this.”

  She came over.

  “Venus’ flytrap. Hollywood used to fake movies of these plants eating people.”

  We watched as a fly crawled into a plant seeking the elixir that would, instead, marinade it. Trigger hairs sprung the trap, snapping the leaves shut around the fly. No escape.

  We left the land of carnivorous plants, entered woods, then at last came out at the marsh—the island’s other side. Tidal flats of chocolate muck edged the marsh giving the air a smell of life and a smell of death. The Spartina bent beneath a rippling wind. Everything seemed normal, just another marsh. For a long time, we watched the wind ghost over this green prairie. Then a good ways out, a grassy peninsula erupted with light.

  For a long time nothing happened. Then something flashed. And again but this time something held and the flash became a glare. Something gleamed far away in distant grasses, beyond mounds of muck, farther beyond oyster beds glistening with bright sunshine and wetness.

  We walked south about sixty yards to get a better angle. An aluminum canoe sat in a cul-de-sac of Spartina. Its rear, heavy with water, sat in the muck, its nose rose into the grasses. I gauged it to be maybe fifty yards out.