by Daniel Hays
On Whale Island
Notes from a Place I Never Meant to Leave
by Daniel Hays
ALGONQUIN BOOKS
OF CHAPEL HILL
2002
for
WENDY
my joy forever
Contents
PROLOGUE
1. The Journey
2. Moving In
3. Building Our Nest
4. Island Life
5. Acorns and Visitors
6. Married Life
7. Boys
8. Our World
9. Winter
10. Trouble in Paradise
11. Ashore
12. The Insanity of an Anatomy
13. Angst
14. Storms
15. On My Own
16. Ships at Sea
17. A Place I Never Meant to Leave
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Prologue
Anomie: a state of society in which normative standards of conduct and belief are weak or lacking; lawless; also: a similar condition in an individual, commonly characterized by disorientation, anxiety, and isolation
—WEBSTER’S
I GREW UP in New York City and took taxis to Bloomingdale’s, four blocks away. I was always in trouble at school, a condition that these days would be labeled with all sorts of letters. At the time, however, I was just a teacher’s bad dream. By sixth grade, the worst year of my life, I was so anxious about whether I’d be accepted that I would regularly throw up on the way to school. I carried a dangerous-looking knife, which I would accidentally drop in front of the girls so they could see how tough I was. I pretended to be hung over.
When I was fourteen I went to a boarding school in Vermont, where I did drugs and anything that would make grown-ups angry. By college I’d already done most of what a kid could do. I watched classmates discover drugs and sex and alcohol. I found three good teachers and took all their classes. I got chased by the campus cops driving my sister’s Honda Civic through courtyards—and once into and out the other end of a building.
After I graduated, my dad and I built and then sailed a small boat around South America. The adventure took a year, and we wrote a book about it. At sea I thought about the future and somehow decided to become a doctor. I figured it was a respectable enough career, that I would never have to prove myself once I had the degree. I saw it as a license for not having to question myself. I went back to college to take the science classes I needed, and after one and a half years of struggling, I gave up. I lost more points on one organic chemistry quiz than my lab partner lost during the whole year.
At sea I’d learned that my need to escape from civilization had become as essential as water itself, for I’d realized that I am easily lost. I wanted a wild place where I could hide myself, recharge my vital being and, in so doing, be found. I wanted an island. I wanted a moat of my own, a moat fraught with enough danger to ensure my isolation. With the money my grandmother had given me for medical school, I bought a fifty-acre wilderness island off the coast of Nova Scotia. A car could not come closer than seven miles. The moat was unsheltered Atlantic Ocean.
In the summers I would visit my island. My father and I restored an old shack. I bought an old motorboat, which I kept at a “neighbor’s” boathouse for the eleven months of each year that I was away.
Then I went back to school, this time for a master’s degree in environmental science. Maybe that would give me enough credentials to quell my self-doubt. During my final internship I drove to Idaho to apprentice as a wilderness guide for troubled teenagers. For the last few hundred miles of the drive, I couldn’t help but notice that whenever I pulled off the road to rest, every car that drove past would slow down to see if I was all right. Was I having car trouble? Idaho. I fell in love. People were naturally amiable, and what I had considered normal, having grown up on the East Coast, was actually an unnatural aspect of being human, a muscle that developed under stress.
The job was heaven. I spent weeks dancing through the desert with kids that were too full of life to function in the “real world.” We lived under ponchos, drank from streams, and grazed on wild edibles. We ate mice, rats, porcupines, marmots, snakes, crawdads, and anything else we could find. There were natural consequences to being lazy, to feeling victimized, angry, hopeless, or to whatever other flavor of behavioral dysfunction perfected by these teenagers, and those consequences were swift: cold, hunger, and discomfort. Nature did not care about the style of their particular manipulative behavior. When they became aware of the uselessness of proving that they were helpless, stupid, a failure, or innocent of responsibility, growth and change became possible. No longer being successful at controlling the world opens a wonderful door of opportunity.
I was present for hundreds of awakenings. I nudged souls, I got to blow on the coals of simmering fires and be there as they burst into flame, awake with potential and the ability to be themselves. I was a missionary for epiphany, the best job I could ever want.
In Idaho I also met Wendy, blue-eyed and full of life. Being together was simple, effortless, and natural. After the initial lust wore off, we still liked each other. We even became friends. Then we got married.
Wendy came with a son, Stephan. He was nine and had a big laugh like his mom. He was as good a kid as any to become an instant parent to. I’d grown up watching The Brady Bunch, and I thought I knew all about parenthood. But there was, as I came to realize, much more that I didn’t know. Ugly scenes dealing with the ex for example, a problem I thought happened only to the parents I counseled at work.
The book I wrote with my dad became a best-seller. I got my fifteen minutes of fame, along with a bunch of money. We bought a big house in a resort town. We lived a normal life for two years, and then I got lost somewhere between my twenty-horsepower fuel-injected four-wheel-drive weed whacker and the thirteen separate sprinkler zones surrounding my “estate.” I worried a lot about Zone 6. I came to prefer the sprinkler’s fwap fwap fwap to the rain. I was lost.
I thought of Coleridge: “Will no one hear these stifled groans and wake me?”
• • •
THAT FALL I called my publisher to inquire about my next royalty check. It had been so long since I’d worried about the numbers to the right of the comma that the answer from New York—$5,200—was stunning. That was almost, but not quite, what I needed for just two months of mortgage payments. It seemed my fifteen minutes of fame and riches were over, and I had spent all my riches. I was holding a bottle of Southern Comfort before the phone was hung up.
You probably won’t find Southern Comfort in your liquor cabinet, and there is a good reason for this. As a teenager you got just a little too much one time, and the smell or the thought of it triggers something deep in your belly.
The first, second, and third shots burned like a damp cannon fuse in my gut.
I’d been letting a friend keep her horse in our pasture. I hadn’t really met Lacy yet; I knew just that she was something called a paint. Feeling quite splashed at the moment, I found this appealing. Her nose was softer than any part of Wendy I’d yet found, so I quickly bonded with her. Although she would not drink from the now half bottle offered, I knew she liked me. In fact, I knew she loved me, and I distinctly remember yelling, “I love you too, Wendy” as Lacy walked away with me lying on her back, Wendy upside down. With my head resting on Lacy’s fine and musty-smelling rump, I was happy.
There is a little Ahab in us all, not content with any old whale but in search of the big one. Rather than a comfortable walk on an old horse, I had to gallop! I’d seen enough TV in my life to know what that looked like, so I sat up and told Lacy that I loved her very much and would she please “giddyap” for me.
It’s not so much that I flew over her head and landed like a fillet of seal blubber that upsets me still. It’s that Lacy broke my splashy trust in her by stopping on a dime, which was suddenly several feet behind me. I flew! I saw my feet silhouetted against clouds, experienced a very abrupt deceleration, and then stared unblinking into a pair of huge horse nostrils. A fly flew out of one.
And that’s about when it occurred to me that maybe this lifestyle was no longer working for me. I needed away, and that meant distance from the known and the comfortable, distance from habit. It was like the opening of Moby-Dick:
Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of any funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
The next day I recited this to Wendy with the passion of a tormented lover. I was prepared to argue, to beg, to fake a breakdown, but before I got there, she said, “So let’s go live on Whale Island for a year.”
From behind an enormous pile of Legos, Stephan cried, “Cool!”
The house was on the market in a week.
What follows is an account of our life in the only place I know where I could stay forever found. Thoreau wrote, “It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the trouble to sound it.” I find it remarkable how long people will live by and thus accept the values in our civilization without having sounded themselves first.
1. The Journey
Everything can be found at sea according to the spirit of your quest.
—CONRAD
JULY 1998
We’ve been driving for 3,260 miles, two weeks through twelve states. Summer-hot blacktop, the whining of my off-road tires louder than my radio. I like to think that for the whole trip I’ve been dragging this enormous eraser behind my truck and it has eradicated all of my past, nothing but dust bunnies in my wake. Receding farther and farther in the distance is a twelve-by-thirty-foot storage garage, the tightly packed, stacked, and compressed mass of stuff I’ve been calling my life for too many years. I secretly pray for a fire.
Wendy and Stephan follow in her new Subaru. I’m driving my beat-up Toyota truck (third engine, mismatched body parts, and 4 percent structural duct tape). I have our two dogs, who pant and drool on me. I find the need for toilets on long drives ridiculous, but breaking a new wife into the enlightened mind-set of squatting is a fearsome task.
“There’s a nice tree, honey,” I say at a dog break.
“You’re taking me to the next gas station, and I want a nice one!” she says. Stephan and I sigh.
WE’VE BEEN CAMPING out every other night, and tonight we stop at a hotel for showers and clean sheets. I’ve heard that being a parent is like thinking you can catch a landing airplane in a baseball mitt. Perhaps add that it is night and the plane has no landing lights, nor any desire to land. So what do I say to my eleven-year-old boy when he starts masturbating right after the lights go out and he’s in a bed just three feet from me and his mother? I pause and pray for just a little divine intervention.
This whole dad thing is new to me. When I got married, I figured that taking on a nine-year-old son would probably be a little harder than getting a puppy—after all, I got my dog Bear when he was only twelve days old, so I knew all about bottle-feeding and cleaning up poop. How much harder could a kid be?
So lying there in a hotel room at this obviously pivotal moment in Stephan’s life, remembering all I could from Freud, Dr. Spock, Laura Schlessinger, and Kurt Vonnegut, I spoke these words of infinite wisdom: “Hey, stop that.”
WE ARRIVE AT the Calais–St. Stephen border, the easternmost crossing into Canada. Having been arrested at this very place five years and thousands of dollars in legal fees ago, I’m a little on edge. As we drive over the bridge, no-man’s-land, the dogs sense my unease and begin yelping.
Three years ago I was single and had just (explosively) quit my job. My first book was about to be on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. I suddenly had way too much money in the bank. I was “doing a Melville,” and as I had been a wilderness-survival instructor for the previous six years, I was packed up to hide on my island until . . . well, I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for, or hiding from, but I was clear nobody would be getting in my way. I hadn’t counted on a perceptive customs agent. It wasn’t that I had that many illegal items with me; it was that the overall picture I painted was—well, an “undesirable” is how one of the many immigration papers described me.
Although this time I am not carrying any trip-wire booby traps, smoke flares, or night-vision goggles, I do have what still might appear to be the supplies for a suspect organization. I’ve packed a set of two-way radios, satellite navigation equipment, 12-volt batteries, a quarter mile of wire, good binoculars, a forty-five-pound box of reconditioned napalm (great for getting wet firewood going), camo clothing, an army first-aid kit (including sutures, pain killers, trauma dressings, and field-surgery tools), two small lasers, and a marine radio with a nine-foot antenna. “You know, just stuff . . .” I hear myself saying defensively to the customs officer.
All goes reasonably well until the officer points and asks me, “What is that for?” Being a teacher at heart I figure a demonstration is in order, so I test my brand-new deluxe imperial fire starter by scraping an impressive shower of sparks in the general direction of this nice uniformed lady. It works better than expected, and although she does not ignite, she does scream.
DAY 1
Another day of driving and we’re finally running out of East. The road signs get smaller, the pavement is gone. Turn left before the big ditch, right at the marsh, down the hill almost into the boat shed, left through the really big perpetual puddle, and then the earth ends and all you see is blue-green Atlantic Ocean.
I see Junior standing by the boat shed with his hands on his hips and his usual “Oh jeez, here come the Americans” look. It is as if he’d been waiting for us and standing exactly where I left him sometime last year. Junior is the patriarch of Kingsland, the town on the shore closest to Whale Island. He grew up on Kingsland Island, son of the lighthouse keeper. Then he was the lighthouse keeper for thirty-two years. He and his wife, Becky, raised their three children on the island. In 1979 the lighthouse was automated and they moved to the mainland. The house he lives in now commands a view of the entire harbor.
I have yet to arrive at Junior’s dock undetected by land or by sea. If I hit a rock on the way in, beyond his view, he knows. If I take a shortcut over a shallow spot, he knows. He and his family are practically the only folks we know here, and they are plenty.
The kids of theirs whom I know are Mike and Peter. Mike is older, in his forties, and looks like Paul Newman. Peter is shy, the youngest, and difficult to engage in conversation. Both their lives revolve around the water. Lobster, mackerel, sea urchins, scallops, and a lot of hard work provide their income. When I met Peter I immediately felt a kindred spirit in his inability to function around others. On land he is like a fish who can’t quite get his gills to work. The third brother—I don’t even know his name—is simply not discussed. I don’t ask anymore.
IN 1988 A real estate agent showed me a Xerox of an aerial photograph of Whale Island. He handed it to me almost embarrassed, because the property was so far away. “It’s damn near impossible to get to,” he said. “There’s nothing on it but rocks and trees, and it’s practically frozen in the ice pack half the year.” Perfect, I thought.
When I was sixteen and in high school, a biology teacher of mine had our class design a garden and wood plot. The assignment was to create an essentially self-sufficient system in which we could live. I remember that fifty forested acres would supply me with seven cords of wood per year forever. That was the wood required to heat a New England farmhouse. I needed to somehow generate electricity; the alternatives were wind, solar, or hydroelectric (best done when a stream or river is nearby, although there are systems that harness tidal energy). I needed a big garden, one hundred feet by fifty feet, if I remember correctly. Since that time it has always been my desire to live that way. It became a place my mind would wander off to. I wanted to live independently from someone else’s electricity, water, and sewer system. I’d know where my food and my heat came from. I read Walden Pond. I wanted “to live deliberately.”
That summer my dad and I built a small house on his island in Connecticut. It was a long and hot summer; we worked hard, and by fall the house was habitable. It was gorgeous, rising over the rocks on steel stilts, overlooking the mouth of the Thames River. It blended in with the rocks, and seemed to have always been there. Unfortunately, it was surrounded by a navy shipyard, a chemical factory, and a small but growing city. Long Island protected us from the raw Atlantic. A nuclear-power plant was also nearby, and although all of its lights sort of looked like Paris at night, it was not what I craved.