When I was a graduate student in 1975, more than anything else, I wanted to work in the North Maine woods, where the last unsettled acreages in the Eastern United States seemed to invite individual exploration and adventure. But that was during a serious housing recession at the time, so the big forest landowners were not hiring graduate foresters as they usually did each summer. Instead I got a job collecting baseline ecological data on 12 Maine islands and that particular accident of history changed the course of my life.
During that first island summer, in addition to compiling the ecological inventories, I was also supposed to pay particular attention to five of the islands that were used by the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School, which to some people had a cult-like reputation. Hurricane Island students, I was told, were dropped on uninhabited islands without food and with minimal equipment and were supposed to eat their way across the island during their ensuing three-day solos. I began trading my time as a natural history instructor for boat support that ultimately took me to several hundred islands along Maine’s infinitely interesting archipelago during the succeeding five years. Often, I joined an island expedition on short notice, for boats were always coming and going from Hurricane Island. The one principle I adhered to that summer and ever since was “Never Say No to an Island.”
One of the important life lessons I learned on Hurricane Island is that there was always other people who knew more about each island that I visited than I did, but ultimately what most people wanted to understand is how a particular island, or a particular resource fit into a larger context-into an interconnected system of islands-into an ecosystem, in other words. After never saying no to an island expedition, I backed into a position where I could supply that overview.
During those earlier years, I met some really interesting instructors at Hurricane Island, who captained many of the expeditions I was invited to join and a handful became lifelong friends. We settled down together, got married, raised children, worked in our communities, started businesses and buried loved ones. One is a building contractor, one is a yacht captain, one an international business consultant, one runs an HVAC company and one is a filmmaker (and I now run the Island Institute). Fifteen years ago, six of us started to run together each weekend, although lately our routes have gotten shorter, our waistlines larger and our times longer.
When one of this group of runners approached his 60th birthday, he made the rest of us a proposition: he would charter a heavy weather sailing vessel if we would join him for a voyage to thread our way through the islands of Tierra del Fuego and sail around Cape Horn. In the actual event five of the six of us were able to board a plane bound for Ushuaia, Argentina and spend two weeks on one of life’s great adventures.
We spent the first four days on the 54-foot cutter rigged sloop, Pelagic, failing at our first attempt to round the Horn with three reefs in the main tacking against 45-knot winds on the bow with a nasty lee shore off to port. We turned back, holed up in a little Chilean port and waited for the winds to abate. When they slackened that evening, we cast off for a night sail 70 miles to the south for another attempt to round the Horn. We stood watches on deck, watched the Southern Cross rise overhead while upside down Orion plunged headfirst below the southern horizon and dolphins, trailing streaks of phosphorescence, played in our bow waves.
By daybreak, the winds of the Southern Ocean quickly freshened as the Horn came dimly into view beneath the scudding gray and lowering skies. Soon it was blowing a spanking 30-35 knots. You don’t want to round the Horn in flat seas and sunny skies-or if you do, you don’t want to have to admit to rounding this magnificent emotionally laden promontory under those kinds of conditions. We had just enough of our share of being hard on the wind to keep the leeward rail down and our course far enough off this most famous of lee shores before we rounded the Cape just before noon. We then enjoyed an eight-hour downwind romp back to the Beagle Channel.
We spent the next ten days in the glacier-choked fjords that run to the north and south along the 130-mile narrow Beagle Channel that connects the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. Because this passage is lined with peaks that rise to 7,000 feet, the winds are mercurial and unpredictable. In our case, one violent wind gust knocked Pelagic down and causing us to broach. Our first mate down below, making a potato dish for lunch, watched as the gimbaled stove went upside down, hurling open the oven door and giving the pan of potatoes enough angular momentum to land right side up on the cabin sole.
We did three mountain ascents-nothing technical, but got up to the snowfields-watched tidewater glaciers calve streams of ice into the sea, tied off the vessel against vertical sides of rock-walled anchorages, saw, albatross, giant petrels, guanacos and Andean condors. But mostly we just laughed and laughed and laughed at the good fortune of being able still to scramble shore from a dinghy on steep side rocky shores of islands and share a grand adventure as we did 30 years ago.
Never say no to an island-or to a whole archipelago.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.