On Whale Island

by Daniel Hays

  Stephan

  I had to carry boxes, sacks, books, food, pillows, and a mattress.

  Enough about the bad stuff—let’s talk about the good stuff. The moon is beautiful tonight; when it came up its light on the water made it look like there was a yellow road from here to the moon.

  Wendy

  We are on Whale Island!

  I am a little nervous about being here, so far out of my element. I am going to miss baths terribly. There is a beautiful full moon tonight reflecting off the water—it’s just incredible. I am exhausted. There’s going to be a lot of hard work this year.

  2. Moving In

  I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

  —THOREAU

  DAY 2

  Our house rests on a hill roughly forty feet above high tide. It is the highest point on the island and two hundred feet inland. The first floor is almost completely wrapped in dense trees, and it is cozily dark. The second floor is level with the treetops. Sitting on the roof puts you at about sixty-five feet above sea level. Facing south and east we look out over the Atlantic, nothing but ocean between us and Africa. Facing north we overlook our island, and then the mainland wilderness, only a few football fields from one of the island’s peninsulas. It is a magnificent green of rolling hills and rocky outcrops. Dropped by receding glaciers, huge boulders are strewn about the low hills.

  By its very nature this rugged, windswept, wild, and even dangerous landscape demands the same attention and awe as the sea. It must be respected and even loved. To want to “challenge” and “conquer” this landscape is missing the beauty and heart of it. Stupid too.

  Our home is made of tongue-and-groove pine planking, cedar shingles, and lots of glass. The footprint of the ground floor is fourteen by sixteen feet, with the top floor about half a foot more cozy on all sides because the walls lean in. The house resembles a Dutch windmill without the vanes. If not for the thick trees, Don Quixote would love it. (Junior says, “By Jeezus, the farther away you get, the better it looks.”) The upstairs is mostly windows, and the only section of wall that is not thick glass has an old porthole in it, bought at a salvage yard. (I often wonder what sights and impressions have passed through its portal.) At our elevation above the ocean of around fifty-five feet, on a clear day the horizon is nine miles away. Using a calculator and that funny pi button, I figure that we overlook one hundred and thirty square miles of waves and uninterrupted magnificence.

  The inside of the house is still pretty bare. On the ground floor there is a bunk bed my father started to build before we left last summer. This will be for Stephan. As soon as he can tack up a blanket so as to make it into a dark cave he’ll be happy. There is a small bathroom next to the woodstove, its door stained glass that brings a sense of colorful magic into the room. Otherwise the downstairs is empty, and although there are three windows and a porthole like the one upstairs, the room is pretty dark. You can hear the trees rubbing on the walls when the wind blows.

  A steep-enough-to-hurt-you-if-you-slip staircase leads up to what will become the living room, kitchen, bedroom, dining room, library, playroom, and sunroom, all in a space barely big enough to park two old-style VW Bugs. This is how the best sailboats are put together, and my father has an uncanny way of designing small heavens. I have some ideas and sketches we drew up last year. A sperm-whale rib recovered from our shore is our banister. Last year my father and I brought out a handsome wood-burning cookstove, which has been converted to propane. Another whale bone, the inside of the jaw, is our sink. Two director’s chairs face each other. There’s nothing else but the ant piles.

  THE WORD OF THE DAY is bin. We have twelve hundred pounds of “only essential” gear boxed in blue, green, and purple Tupperware-esque bins. A month ago we had a twenty-one-hundred-square-foot home. We downsized to a thirty-by-twelve storage unit. Then a truck and a car. Now it’s thirty-two rubber boxes. We make two trips back to Junior’s dock. He always meets us. Sometimes he helps with all the carrying, and sometimes he just gives advice: “You can park the Subaru in my driveway, but hide that ugly truck in them bushes, there past the dock.”

  I’ve already unpacked my books. They line the floor under the east and south windows. I expect I will have to move them a dozen times before their shelves are built. And that is something I love, to handle books.

  When I think of what living here will be like, I think of the stories in these already damp books. What do I need from our culture that I do not already have the best of before me? Farley Mowat, Kazuo Ishiguro, Brontë, Mark Twain, Vonnegut, David Duncan, Dumas, Jane Goodall, Ayn Rand, Rudyard Kipling, John Irving, Voltaire, Annie Proulx, James Clavell, D. H. Lawrence, Douglas Adams, Tom Robbins, Gabriel Garciá Márquez, Defoe, and Kierkegaard. These are my roommates, these are the friends I will drink coffee with. I have little use for the McWorld. I have a seven-mile driveway, which I pray will shield me. Leave me with my friends!

  DAY 3

  Waking up on Whale Island is like being led by a tipsy angel from one world to another. I finish all my dreams here. The angel playfully tugs on my soul, using the glow from the sunrise, a seagull’s squawk, or maybe the rumble from a big wave—she gently lays me back into my body. I always have the time to take two or three deep breaths before opening my eyes, testing the equipment, stretching.

  When I sit up I am greeted by the world. Level with the treetops I look down on sparrows swooping in and out of the branches. The tide, the new rising moon, the clouds, the wind—these greet me. These are my allies. The whole planet is laid out before me and available for whatever adventure the day will take me on.

  By comparison, living in society seems to require an alarm clock. Primarily assembled from angst and fish anuses, these contraptions, regardless of your soul’s whereabouts, will slap and assault you into a pitiful state of what passes for consciousness. Your first sight is the Time, an arrangement of molecules on the clock’s face to whom you will be enslaved for the rest of the day. You may as well call him “master.” Next, a pile of dirty clothes on the floor, a knocked-over glass of water, and so forth, until you are so overwhelmed with despair that to prevent hurling yourself through the window, you must ignore your personal bill of rights, put on an acceptable frown, and go about your business, disregarding the pleas from your increasingly timid soul.

  TODAY IT RAINED from the east like it really wanted us to get wet. The house leaked in fifty-seven places, fifty-four of them over Stephan’s bunk. Wendy and I don’t have a bed yet. We’re just sleeping on the floor. I’m not sure where to put a bed without taking up most of our living room.

  Wendy and Stephan heroically transported the last of our supplies from the harbor, trekking the narrow path to the house another ten times each. I built shelves, and Wendy tried to organize the growing plethora of boxes and bags.

  After some peanut-butter sandwiches we all walk around the island and are wide-eyed at the beauty, even forgetting to name everything we see. As humans we tend to conceptualize rather than experience, and forgetting to put labels on things is a good indication that we are truly alive.

  Despite whatever hardships Stephan has suffered without much of a father, he has clearly survived, pure kid. Living for right now, he runs from the rocks to the water to the trees to the moss, from anywhere to everywhere. He is so happy that he could be the third dog.

  “Look at this! Wow, hey look!” he says, triumphantly squeezing something until goo spurts out.

  “Can we eat this?” he begs.

  For a wonderful moment I transcend myself and view the five of us from above. The dogs running in circles around the humans, the two bigger humans loving the littler one. They are joined together in a moment of bliss, of calm ecstasy.

  I am rudely slapped back into my body as a fingerload of the previously mentioned goo is thrust under my nose.

  “Does it smell okay? Can we eat it for dinner? What is it? Are there any more?”

  I
think to myself that if it stays this easy, I can do it, be a dad. Even if it gets harder, all I will have to do is just remember this moment. He’s a child, he’s new to the world. Love him.

  Back at the house I finish putting in our toilet, a surprisingly important component of “luxury.” Hanging off the back of the house, it sits in a separate room with the stained-glass door. It’s a boat toilet: the waste gurgles down a three-foot straight pipe into a thirty-five-gallon drum buried in the soil. I shot holes in the drum before burying it, so that it drains into the earth. It’s a great thing to know exactly where our wastes go; on an island there is no real concept of “away” or “that’s somebody else’s problem.”

  Electricity, cable TV, city water, and a telephone are nonexistent in this, my kingdom. In fact, avoiding TV and what I call unconscious consumption are the most desirable qualities of being here. I don’t want the finer aspects of our culture’s pathology funneled into Stephan’s brain through a television. TV is a clump of perverted perceptions, and most of us arrange our living rooms around it, and worship it. And phones!! I do not want to ever, ever be interrupted by a phone’s ringing when I am on this island in the presence of nature.

  By evening the sky clears for a wonderful sunset and full moonrise. Stephan and I prepare a broccoli-and-cheese soup for dinner, the first real cooking we’ve done in our new kitchen. I open the can, and then Stephan knocks it over. Stephan turns on the gas, and I singe an eyebrow in the ensuing explosion. We are a good team.

  The stove seems so elegant and out of place. I polish the white porcelain knobs as the soup boils over. Stephan asks how long we should let it do that, and I say, “This is our island. We can boil stuff as long as we want to. As long as your mother is downstairs, anyway.”

  “Is that why we’re here, so we can make the rules?”

  “Yes,” I say contentedly.

  The moon climbs higher into the night.

  Stephan

  We really cleaned up the house today. It looks much better. I got a really bad scrape. I love the island, I love it!

  3. Building Our Nest

  The secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves!

  —NIETZSCHE

  DAY 4

  My creative self is fully awake, wonderfully alive in my body. While working on a kitchen shelf, I run down to “Wash-up Point” to find a weather-beaten piece of driftwood. I intuitively know that it will fit, and feel not so much a successful hunter as I do a willing recipient. Back in the house the wood settles into its new home perfectly, as if it had been waiting for me on the beach, which leads me to wonder about the storm that brought it here.

  Sometimes I like to have a drink at night to help settle my soul back into my body. I love to wander about the rocks. Sometimes I fall, missing a step like I was already onto the next, and I land so content that I am cushioned by the rocks, gently brought down and embraced, I feel, by love rather than gravity. I walk a bit more, and then I lie on a mat of moss, where I settle so deeply into its sponginess that when I leave I feel like I’m waking from a lover’s embrace. I want to lie motionless until I am dug up a Bog Man.

  DAY 6

  As I work on the house I discover one of life’s everlasting truths: invention is caused not necessarily by necessity; laziness and stupidity are equally, if not more, important. For example, the construction of a small spice shelf begins with the realization, as I’m sitting on the floor, that the stinging sensation in my thigh is caused by an oddly shaped piece of shingle with a screw in it left over from a small shelf for a candle that I have just completed. I pull the screw out of my leg, angrily looking around for whom or what to blame. I hold the piece firmly—perhaps so that it cannot escape—and I see an area of open wall under a window easily within reach. Because all the beams in the house taper toward the roof, there are always weird angles to wedge bizarre shelves into. I squeeze the shingle enthusiastically into place, and it cracks. Now comes the really stupid part: having forgotten why I am putting an unneeded shelf nowhere useful, I roll over (laziness now dictating that under no circumstances will I actually stand up) and grab another shingle, which is too big. Quickly, perhaps to prevent accidental thought, I split the shingle by smashing it against my forehead. Now it’s a perfect fit! And so, with a little blood dribbling down my face, the job is finished.

  DAY 8

  The bed Wendy and I build is a simple four-by-six-foot piece of plywood supported by a frame of two-by-four-inch planks; i.e., it’s a platform with a futon on it. During the day we hoist it up into the ceiling rafters by two ropes and a creative tangle of pulleys. “Raising the bed” takes two of us and has to be done with some coordination, often lacking before coffee. We then tie the two ropes off on cleats mounted on the wall. Thus every day starts with a little nautical activity, making fast and coiling down, which makes me smile inside. When we lower the bed at night, it rests on two sawhorses (which we put on the bed before we hoist it up in the morning). Our nest settles perfectly at about waist height. Lying down, we are level with the treetops. Moon, sun, stars, planets, birds, clouds, and ocean are the art hung on our walls.

  DAY 11

  Today is roof-repair day, and I spill tar all over. Some of it lands where shingles have been blown off, and that’s why I can consider myself doing “repairs,” because I spill strategically. Wendy throws requested tools up to me, and I balance precariously on the edges. I install rain gutters to catch our water, funneling it into hoses, which lead down to the two fifty-five-gallon drums that I bought at the old fish plant in town. They rest under the stairs, and I put a leftover piece of plywood over them to make a workbench.

  Quote of the day, immediately following Stephan’s carrying some of the groceries from the boat to the house. I say: “Stephan, why are all the eggs broken?” He replies, “Because Mom never told me where all the roots were, and I tripped over four of them.”

  The thing is, when he makes these excuses, he completely believes them! Is this a typical twelve-year-old? What’s going on in his head? Where is the instruction book?

  Stephan

  We went into town again today. We left the dogs on the island and I was worried about them. We had fun. Lots of carrying.

  DAY 12

  Abby the “dog” bursts into the house having rolled in last summer’s outhouse pit. Then, standing in the middle of the room as we watch in fear, she vomits eleven crabs. We know it’s eleven because Stephan proudly recounts having fed them to her. I can’t remember if crabs are arthropods or anthropoids, but hell, there were lots of legs (divisible by six, eight, or ten).

  The best thing I can say about Abby right now is that it sure is cool, when it is dark out, to shine a flashlight in her ear and see her eyes light up from the inside as if she is possessed. Given her level of intelligence, I sometimes tell Wendy, any possession would be welcome. I call Abby the “dog” because an Airedale is about as smart as a bag of hammers. Those who disagree with me are a special group of people—Airedale owners—and they will use words like “independent,” “stubborn,” and even “slightly dyslexic” to explain why their dog responds to only about a third of their suggestions.

  Bear is different; he is thoughtful and will watch a sunset. He is a mix of Australian shepherd, border collie, and some blue. He is unfixed and quite alpha, full of primitive wolflike traits that Airedale owners would be shocked to witness. Like shitting on bushes—a scent mark—and kicking up dirt after he pees—an exclamation point. He can raise his hackles really impressively, making himself seem hugely overmuscled. He even pees on top of my pee and will run a quarter mile to do so when he sees me in the early morning peeing off the second-floor porch into the treetops.

  I’ve caught Bear being foolish only a couple of times since he’s grown up. Once he was enjoying a scratching from me so thoroughl
y that he let himself blissfully roll off the bed. He landed in an embarrassed heap and pretended he had done so on purpose by not moving and gently sighing, as if this was simply his new preferred resting spot. Then yesterday I gave him a piece of rawhide to munch on and he was so excited that when he hunkered down to eat it he left his hind legs standing, a right triangle with a wagging tail.

  DAY 13

  Beautiful sunrise and rotten morning of the evil stepfather versus Stephan. Things have not been as rosy as I may have been pretending.

  I stumble downstairs, before coffee, before going to the bathroom, and I trip over a pile of soaking clothes. I crash into the inarguable iron of the woodstove, my shin becoming alive with white pain. The cables that carry this message to my brain overheat, and Stephan is awakened from his sleep by my screaming something like “GODDAMNIT! What the hell, STEPHAN! Get up and go hang your wet clothes up, I can’t believe this! I asked you twice last night to hang this up outside, was that too much for you? Is it un-goddamn-reasonable of me to ask you this? Does your mother have to do everything for you? Hello, does anything I say matter?”

  He screams, “Why don’t you just go away, leave me alone, I hate you!”

  I have a strong urge to explode, just blow up into small and harmless pieces, my consciousness fully dispersed.

  “Living with you is like sharing a cage with a big monkey!” I yell back.

  “Then go away. Leave me alone.”

  Silence.

  Stephan’s face is honest with his emotions, tears spill from his eyes, and a sob escapes. My face, I know, is contorted into some nightmare’s devil. Stephan runs out of the house and slams the door. A pane of glass falls to the floor and breaks.