Recently on my 60th birthday — OK, it wasn’t that recent — I suggested to a group of friends and family who had gathered for the celebration that we take a boat ride over to Hurricane Island, where most of us had spent some formative years together in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
Back then, we had worked in various capacities with the Outward Bound program that was headquartered there, but we had become a diverse crew in the intervening years. Currently we would identify ourselves as a building contractor, filmmaker, ornithologist and professional skipper; our wives would include a teacher, a graphic designer, a professional consultant and a psychologist, among others. Thirty years ago, however, we were itinerant 20-somethings who created a temporary community on this quarried island—a group of characters, who knew little, teaching character-building lessons to 16-18 year-olds, who knew slightly less.
Arriving at one of Hurricane’s granite wharves, you are immediately reminded that you were not the first to have had big dreams for this island. Everywhere you look you see a landscape of scattered tombstones and plinths now covered by thickets of roses and raspberry bushes. You can still find tools scattered about when you peel back the encroaching forest, and sometimes imagine you hear voices of their owners speaking in the wind.
The Outward Bound community was in some senses the opposite of the community of stonecutters who had preceded them. Outward Bounders did not scale the cliffs to pound stone, but pounded around the island and climbed the main face of the quarry cliffs simply for the experience. They were not immigrants from far-flung nations, but immigrants from a casual American culture in which they had been raised. Unlike the Italian, Finnish and Swedish stonecutters who had a tenuous hold on their new lives, the new Hurricane Islanders possessed the island fully, if only temporarily.
On our return to Hurricane Island, we poked into a little shingle building, called the Bosun’s Locker, at the head of one of the wharves. The mink had been busy since the Outward Bounders had abandoned the island several years earlier. They had torn apart old mattresses and scattered the kapok everywhere and left large piles of scat. It looked like the party scene of feral teenagers who had never read Lord of the Flies, and served as a caution to any of us considering acquiring one of their cunning little relatives, the ferret, from a pet store.
Inside on a little bookshelf in the living quarters were two items that stopped us dead in our tracks: a Ry Cooder record, still in album cover and a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Both were inscribed as belonging to a member of our current boarding party. If you believed in supernal influences, you could have been tempted to conclude that this time capsule had been waiting more than 20 some years to surprise the one of us who had travelled further from that self who had once owned these cultural artifacts.
We began walking along the talus road the stonecutters had built for the wagons known as galamanders that were pulled by teams of horses and oxen to haul the massive blocks to the cutting and polishing sheds at the south end of the island. When we had walked most of the way down the island road, we met Hurricane Island’s long time owner who was making his way toward the main pier in a four-wheel drive conveyance called an Alligator. It was like meeting Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now! We basically all remembered each other, although it had been decades in most cases since we had seen each other.
In my own case, I had edited and published the book, Hurricane Island — The Town That Disappeared by Eleanor Richardson, for which the island’s owner had been grateful. The book described the 44 years that the quarry community had spent on the island and its sudden demise after the long time superintendent of works had died and the company town closed down almost overnight.
The owner invited us back to his house that had been under construction for a decade and a half up on a cliff at the southwest edge of the island. It is a pharaonic structure built of massive blocks the stonecutters had left behind when the island was originally abandoned. The views out over outer Penobscot Bay and stretching from west to east in such a stunning ecliptic, it could have made one feel almost immortal. That was perhaps its architectural rationale. After a mid-morning glass of champagne, we continued on our way.
Up on the cliffs of the main face, the intimations of mortality became even more pervasive. We found a pair of climbing shoes, inscribed by their owner, whom we all knew well. We counted the number of friends from those days who were no longer with us and the list quickly grew to over a score. This is not exactly the leit-motif you expect to strike during a birthday celebration, even if you are about to enter your seventh decade. But we could not help but reflect on the fact that the Outward Bound program had run out of steam here at the outset of the 21st century, just as had the stonecutters had at the beginning of the 20th century. When the Outward Bound program moved ashore to a base on the mainland, where it was more economical to operate, rose and raspberry, spruce and wind had almost immediately begun marching over their traces—the town that disappeared — twice.
Recently, however, a new/old group of immigrants has landed back on Hurricane Island. They call themselves the Hurricane Island Foundation. They have negotiated a 40-year lease with the island’s owner and they propose to offer up this island of memory and dreams as a proscenium on which any of us with an island itch to scratch might project a learning experience.
Some people have asked why try to resurrect an island from its peaceful desuetude when you can teach anyone anything much more efficiently ashore. This is another way of asking, of what use are island communities? If I had more time, I would write a shorter answer. But in the interim, I guess I would say that there are no other landscapes that more powerfully require its citizens to reflect on what it means to live simply; to be reminded of what is essential in life; to leave behind what we can do without; to know on whom you can depend and on whom you cannot; to learn how to live gracefully in a finite world; to develop skills you had no idea you needed; and to experience what it means to have dreams; and perhaps most of all, what to do when dreams die?
You begin again.