No Exit
The Chateau d’If is an abandoned fortress that occupies the entire land surface of the smallest island in the Frioul archipelago. It houses the cell of the Count of Monte Cristo, where the fictional hero plotted escape and ultimate revenge, but it was also the real prison of men like Jean-Baptiste Chataud, accused of introducing the plague to France, and Philippe, Chevalier of Lorraine, lover of Philippe, Duc d’Orleans. People were exiled to Chateau d’If as though contagions of illness and desire could be contained – within sight of Marseilles, but far enough away to be isolated from it. The cell of Edmond Dantès can be observed, even if he didn’t actually exist, and you can see the hole he dug in order to slip away. The carceral island is like a desert of stone, and though you can visit, no one lives there.
Traveling Islands
Robert Smithson’s Floating Island didn’t pass through the Coney Island Channel; nevertheless, it would have been something to see from the aerial view of the Cyclone or the Wonder Wheel. While it only existed for only nine days, what if it had been maintained and still circled, a place one person could live on? Smithson planned his Floating Island in 1970: a barge layered with dirt and rocks, then planted with native trees and other vegetation. He died before boats could be hired, earth moved, and trees rooted, but the project was finally constructed in 2005. A tugboat pulled the thirty-by-ninety-foot island around the city via the Hudson, then up the East River, for a little over a week before it was, of necessity, disassembled and gone. Considered a manmade park, mobile and temporary, though not accessible in the way parks are meant to be, it was more like a remote wilderness – even though, if you were in the right place at the right time, you could see the silhouettes of its trees from the edges of the city. If one person could live on it for a while, to be within view of the city, yet in isolation from it, the Floating Island would have had a use: micro-utilitarian, no housing shortage ameliorated but a way to offer a temporary shelter, to look out at the spectacle of the city but not necessarily take part.
The only other known moving islands are the Farallon of San Francisco Bay, moving northward Fata Morgana style towards Alaska at a rate of one mile per 40,000 years. Used for rum running during prohibition, a radio intercept site during World War 2, and a dumping ground for radioactive waste, now overrun by mice and surrounded by sharks, the islands are a wildlife refuge, but uninhabited and too dangerous to visit.
Off Limits
Part 1
Travel to Mau Mau, formerly White Island, is forbidden, but you can see its reedy outlines from the shores of the Marine Park Salt Marsh Nature Trail off Avenue U in Brooklyn. The paths of the salt marsh are usually fairly empty. On certain holidays, small groups of young Orthodox Jews gather along the water’s edge, and a sunset could be a backdrop for a wedding photo or a couple walking their cats in a stroller. If you’re lucky, once a year, in the distance you might see people dressed as Neptune, cowboy Vikings, pizza slices, and yeti strip off their fur suits and jump into the water beside boats made of consumer detritus. What you would be observing is the Naval Battle For Mau Mau Island, which pits teams of do-it-yourself practitioners of boat craft against one another for supremacy in pillaging, boat jousting, and the Davie Jones Award for Worst Boat, and other categories. There could be dhows made of empty green soda bottles lashed together, vaporetti made of metal beer kegs and picnic tables, flotillas constructed from bathtubs, and pool inflatables that were never meant for sea travel. It’s more like a midsummer party than marine warfare, and in the history of the event there are no known fatalities.
Mau Mau Island itself is man-made from trash and sand from Belt Parkway construction. The island is little more than one hundred years old and lies so far out on an edge of the city that whatever might be considered urban has already petered out, and the geography is no longer recognized as a city at all. So if you’re on that isolated bit of trail and see aluminum-tubed canoes or traffic cone rafts whose captains and crews look like they escaped from a costume museum storage unit, it’s not that much of a leap to imagine them as new discoverers of the revised new world, in a post-apocalyptic format, piloting their ships made in a futurist Frankenstein style of our own discardables and has-beens.
Imagine There’s No People
The islands of Lake George in northeastern New York remind me of the habitats visited by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, where characters stood on planets or asteroids made up of enough dry land for just one resident and not much else, and the primary activity of those solitary citizens seemed to be not a good deal more than their professions: king, businessman, geographer, lamplighter illuminating what amounted to a microdot quark in infinite space.
These islands, too, appear as if complete universes: a couple of trees, enough wildlife to qualify (maybe a squirrel or racer snake family), and varied geography despite their size, with a hill there and a depression or call it a mini-valley there. You can imagine an isolated but sustainable life on one of these islands, though food and medicine would require trips to the mainland and electricity and Wi-Fi might be out of the question. Still, you could reclusitate on one of these, at least during warmer months. There are more than 170 islands in the lake, liminal and mysterious, appearing like separate nation states, easily ignored by the world at large.
George isn’t Great Lakes size, it’s long and tapered, a little over 32 miles north to south, one to three miles in width, and 187 feet at its greatest depth. Its width is certainly navigable, but the surrounding mountains once created hazards for the Mohawk and Mahican tribes who lived on either side of it. Strong and unpredictable winds, sudden storms, fog, and shoals of underwater rocks dropped by glacial moraines all prevented easy travel from shore to shore, and there wasn’t then, nor is there now any bridges spanning even its narrowest points. In the summer the lake remains very cold, so if your canoe capsizes somewhere in the middle, you risk hypothermia. Swimming to one of the islands could save your life for the moment – then what?
The islands have names like: Dicks, Diamond, Fishook, Goose, Speaker Heck, Rush, Whipple, Little Ivanhoe, Sweetbriar, Little Recluse, Refuge, Iroquois, Perch, Huckleberry, Hens and Chickens Group, Mingoe, Chingachagook, Turtle, Little Turtle, Mohigan, Pleasure, Phantom, Gravelly, Gem, Little Gem, No Name, Hermit, Gourd, Little Gourd, Big Burnt, Black Rock, Fork, Kettle, Arrow, Red Rock, Artist’s Rock, Round Rock, Chastine, Hazel, east of Hazel, Little As-You-Were, Dollar Group, Three Sirens.
When my family made car trips to Lake George or drove along it to points farther north, to Montreal or Quebec, I would look as closely as possible at the passing pine and fir trees, believing if I focused, even given the variable speed of the car, I could detect evidence of Viking explorers, mappers of Vinlanda Insula, or signs of mythic woodland or mountain civilizations that only appeared at night or were otherwise impossible to see during the day unless you knew what to look for and were very quick. The southern end of the lake was home to local amusement parks, now long gone: Storytown USA, Gaslight Village, Magic Forest, Frontier Town, and The House of Frankenstein’s Wax Museum. The ruins of these locales, sites of Atomic Age American vacation with children culture, have been bulldozed over and become Holiday Inns and the Six Flags Great Escape. The fiberglass and plaster behemoths of John Bunyan, elephants, dinosaurs, and castles have been dismantled, sold at auction, and disappeared, but perhaps some of their magic drifted north in a Twin Peaksian manner that leaves you free to imagine what you’re witnessing is preternatural and has its own logic.
The lake is oligotrophic, low on algae, so that the water is very clear, and it’s easy to envision the landscape suspended in a pre-Columbian or even prelapsarian state. The water is drinkable, unlike some of the other lakes and rivers you can also see out the car window which, by the time you’re an adult, have suffered from eutrophication, the premature aging that comes from climate change and pollution in the form of too much phosphorus and nitrogen and not enough oxygen. Invasive plants take over, water bodies turned to marsh and swamp. Timber rattlers return, mountain lions and bears in greater numbers encroach on campsites and parking lot dumpsters. What was once marsh is now solid ground, hard baked and toxic in patches.
Seeing the islands of Lake George now from the deck of a steamboat like Lac du Saint Sacrement or the Mohican is an exercise in revisiting childhood escape stories invented during car trips: tales from the kingdom of independence, a diminutive survivalist leaving family and school behind, figuring things out on their own.
Islands can be places of refuge but also of isolation (desired sequestration or involuntary). People can be imprisoned or hide out on them (Prospero, the Robinsons, Dr. Moreau, Napoleon, Dreyfus, part of Shackleton’s Antarctic crew, Japanese soldiers after the end of World War 2). Treasure can be buried somewhere on them, off shore repositories or underground safe deposit boxes, is itself a story that is hard to give up, that the island conceals rare species that evolved in isolation, secret tribes, steamer trunks full of gold and diamonds. Treasure Island was based on Isla de Pino off the coast of Cuba, a known pirate hangout, a history that signals the potential of islands to be praeter legem, outside the law, so no calling the coast guard, you’re on your own.
Robinson Crusoe reproduced his mainland life on Islas de Juan Fernandes. As a shipwrecked capitalist, he made the first human he encountered into his slave, without reflection or question; it was just what you did.
If you’re swimming in an ocean, sea, or vast lake, even the smallest bit of land is a godsend, but if you’re isolated on a desert island, awaiting rescue like the classic cartoon image, it’s a place you very much want to leave. Amelia Earhart perished on such an island in the Pacific, at least that’s one theory.
Off Limits
Part 2
Ilha da Queimada Granda, also known as Snake Island, is a small bit of land off the coast of Brazil that’s home to an estimated two thousand to four thousand snakes; the exact number is unknown. The most lethal of the population is the golden lancehead, which sounds like a figure from a Persian fairy tale; its venom is so toxic that a bite causes rapid kidney failure, Ebola-level internal bleeding, and tissue necrosis. As far as is known, no humans have ever lived on the island, apart from a long-ago lighthouse keeper and his family who, according to legend (possibly true) were all poisoned by the snakes, so now the lighthouse is automated. The golden lanceheads can’t swim and have been marooned on the island since the Ice Age, evolving to adapt to isolation. There are no predators on the island – good for the snakes – but prey is scarce, so the lanceheads needed a fast-acting toxin that could do its work before their primary food source, the birds, fly away.
Poachers, however, do come and go, plying their trade with canvas bags, snake hooks, and ice chests where the stolen reptiles are kept before being handed off to middlemen. The wildlife black market is a multi-billion dollar industry fueled by promises and rarity. The golden lanceheads join the ranks of animals whose body parts are sold for medicinal purposes: jaguar fangs (marketed as tiger), rhino horns, and pangolin scales, all believed to cure cancer, impotence, joint pain, and other physical or spiritual complaints. The global trade in animal trafficking, both live and for parts, might involve hunters from Poland using automatic weapons made in Izhevsk, hired to hunt in Zimbabwe, where contraband live animals and parts are shipped to China via Java or Sarawak, from which ports they can be additionally dispersed to Sacramento or Newark. If one of the poachers is bitten while on the island, it’s very possible his body will never be found, because retrieval itself is a great risk, and one few are willing to take for little or no compensation.
Off Limits
Part 3
Last winter, an alligator was found in Prospect Park, slow and semi-conscious, eyes open, jaws shut, legs immobile. Had the winter been normal, it would have died. The alligator had no way to adapt to ice, snow, and frigid temperatures, but because of global warming it survived, though barely, and did not reproduce in the temperate north, to go on and hatch a subspecies of sub tundra-adapted reptiles. Burmese pythons released into the Everglades took over their new habitat and transformed it – goodbye birds and small mammals – but this environmental scenario was not possible for the alligator. Nowhere does a polar gator exist. In the middle of our borough, in a park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, it could have drifted perilously close to the Dog Beach, to frisbee and soccer players, to musicians playing drums or bagpipes, to brass quintets. Olmsted felt this was his perfect park because, from much of it, you could see no city buildings poking up along the horizon – though now parts of the park are edged by building cranes and high rises. Nonetheless, the park wasn’t built to be a playground for an alligator, not during the Anthropocene, as far as is known. Maybe in some pre-Ice Age universe, the Eocene, but not now, so after it was captured, it was sent to a zoo. But still, you could wonder about the animals that are capable of surviving. What other animals could be out there, partying in parks and islands frequented by unsuspecting visitors, playing games, having picnics, and then out it comes, T-Rex is back. The alligator became a symbol of the classic cycle: feral animal kept as a pet, then released into the wild for which it’s ill-equipped, so must be captured again. It was apprehended near Duck Island, a bird sanctuary that you can see if you take out a paddle boat; but cormorant and heron sightings are as close as you can get. No one is allowed to step ashore.
