Seven years ago, we moved to an island. You can get on and off it without a boat, but only if you use the bridge. To get to the bridge, you need to drive all the way up to the northern tip of the island on a two-lane highway. You cruise past the navy base, then past the cement works, and two big churches. Crops. Some tumbledown trailers. Then you’re driving in a pine forest past a tiny parking lot and two restrooms.
Then it happens. The land falls away and you do a heart-stopping drive over a high metal marvel to the mainland, the ocean chasming far below and the water churning over big rocks. If you look in the rearview mirror, you’ll notice a tiny beach that you didn’t see until you’d left the island and were hurtling away from it.
Why did we move there?
The island offered us something undefined but promising: escape from a sprawling west coast city; a reasonably priced house that overlooked the water; the chance to meet people who were kind, like country folk were reputed to be. Authentic. Unpretentious. My husband wanted this too. He wanted to live in a small town with people who didn’t ask you how much money you were worth.
Only, it turned out that the island consisted of a string of small coastal towns filled with people who – at their best – didn’t want to know you at all, and – at their worst – were just plain pissed off.
“Walk faster!” a man in a pickup truck yelled at me right after we moved to the island. I was strolling on our country road. This same man did this every time he passed me. He was one of our neighbors. He lived two houses down from us.
“It’s paradise here,” the cashier at the grocery store told us. At the HOA meetings in our neighborhood, everyone used that word a lot. But they’d pronounce “paradise” in a flat voice, with an elegiac emphasis, as though saying it signaled that this Eden was already in the process of being lost.
Now don’t get me wrong, the island people had some good reasons to be pissed off. There was no garbage pickup or recycling for one thing, and for another, the electrical grid didn’t work reliably, so the power went off all the time and sometimes it would stay off for a while. One winter, the electricity went off for four days and the backup water pump failed so there was no fresh water and that was scary. After that, local reps wrote state agencies, but the power grid never improved.
My husband thinks now that we should have done more research before moving.
But when I talked to the few neighbors who would talk to me, they let me know – in their roundabout way – that what made them mad was, not the power failure, but the fact that the agencies started sending actual people out to the island to talk to them. The islanders didn’t want more goods and services, and the man who sheared sheep in his front yard up the road from us said that when someone at the local church suggested that a big box store might not be such a bad idea, the whole congregation yelled at them.
We observed among the neighbors a pride in living like people did “in the olden days.” There was pleasure in being independent even if it meant camping out in winter. During the power outage, our neighbors across the road – the kindest people we met on the island – invited us for a barbecue outside in the snow.
Some hardliners in the neighborhood said we didn’t even need the bridge. They said that they’d just as soon not even have the damned thing, because it brought tourists and outsiders.
Last summer state workers came to fix the bridge, which was rusting in some key spots. The grocery store cashier and the HOA members felt, not gratitude, but rage. The workers made noise. They laughed and talked and played music while machines drilled and roared.
During this same summer, the people who lived next door to us suddenly sold their house and moved to Missouri. We were shocked, until our lovely neighbors across the road let us know, somewhat sheepishly, that we – not the bridge repair workers — were the reason for their departure. Before we built our house, the kind neighbors explained, the Missouri people saw nothing but trees next door. We ruined their view, even though our house was much smaller than their two-story high domicile, which was in fact two houses, joined by a bridge.
We moved back to the mainland this year. Now we think that the island people may not have hated us personally. They hated anyone who violated their intense isolation.
Imagine solitude as the thing devoutly to be wished. This seclusion interrupted only by that necessary trip to the lumberyard, the one grocery store, and – maybe — the drive through coffee kiosk next to the bankrupt bowling alley. Then home. Alone. Or, if you’re married, with that one other person. And maybe a dog. But then the strangers come, dotting the roads with their leisurely walking, devoid of purpose, cutting into your pastoral sight lines. Strangers who, when they see you, insist on saying hello.
You can’t stop them. But you can sure discourage them. You can pull back behind your property line, into your backyard. You can reduce outside influences: read the local paper and make your own repairs. Grow vegetables and fence them to keep out the deer. Kill the deer. Make your own venison.
You don’t even fear the disease that killed so many. You embody social distancing as a practice. You don’t need a vaccine, and you probably won’t ever need a doctor. When you die somebody will find you, or not, and your body will rejoin the elements. Connected to these trees and this earth, and in that sense infinite. It’s paradise or as close as you can come. You don’t need neighbors or a bridge for that.
Now that I live in another west coast city, I think about the island people all the time. I get on the bus and think how they would hate that there is pretty good public transportation here. I walk into a crowded supermarket and think how this amount of people would make them so uncomfortable, they’d run out without buying anything. They’d detest the groups trying to protect the old buildings from demolition here, and they’d be really mad about the numbers of homeless people, although to be honest, there were homeless people on the island too. They lived in the woods, and were therefore less visible.
There’s one thing though, that might interest them, and that’s the creek that runs through the city, just a block away from our apartment. I go there every day to see how the water is flowing. I stand on a tiny wooden bridge that runs right along the creek. One day I saw two teenage boys walking underneath the street along the water’s edge. They found the bridge unnecessary. Maybe it is.
Stephanie Barbé is a seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared in The Bellevue Literary Review, the James Franco Review, and the Chiron Review, among other places. Her most recent novel, JOURNEY TO MERVEILLEUX CITY is a finalist for the Foreword INDIE award.
