The Island
In the river by my parents’ house in Maryland there is an island. It’s not big, only about fifteen hundred feet long and a couple hundred feet wide at its widest point. But it’s dramatic: on its south side, sandy cliffs rise out of the water. It’s topped with tall, twisted loblolly pines and tangles of climbing vegetation. On the north side, there’s a long, sandy beach where the water deepens gradually, a perfect swimming spot.
Growing up, I knew this island as a wild place. My parents would take me and my brothers there and beach the boat, and when each of us got old enough, we were allowed to wander around the island on our own. There was only one way up off the beach to the island’s raised interior: a scramble up a steep, sandy, eroding hill. Once I was up there, I felt as if I’d left the world I knew behind and stepped into a much more expansive one. This could be what it looked like just after the dinosaurs went extinct: golden light slanting through pines, cicadas buzzing in the jungly vines, and ospreys calling — which basically sound like longing made audible. I spent hours up there, standing just far enough back from/close enough to the cliff that I felt the exact right amount of danger, or following the trail (there was only one trail, really, on such a narrow island) until I lost it in the vines.
And then a group of other people in bathing suits and flip-flops would tromp past, the adults talking loud and the kids sticky-mouthed, and for a minute it would break my illusion of being the only person for a hundred miles.
Despite feeling so primeval while I was up there, this island, Dobbins Island, was and is totally enmeshed in our human times. It’s been a party spot for well over a century, since the time when the sandbar was still close enough to the river’s surface to drive a horse-drawn carriage from the mainland to the island at low tide. At one point, someone had built a stone house on the island, which lasted for a while and then crumbled away. (One summer, in the most viney part of the island, a friend and I found a round stone cistern set into the ground, with some scummy green water at the bottom, and part of what could be a foundation. We could never find it again.) Just a little before my childhood, the island was apparently an exchange point for cocaine smugglers: the cargo was landed in float planes and transferred to waiting boats. And since my childhood, summer weekends mean that the island’s shallow anchorage is full of boats. People everywhere, with pool floats and super-soakers and coolers full of soda and beer. Sandwiches, boomboxes, cigarettes, sunscreen.
When I was growing up, I understood that the island was owned by a family who had held it for a few generations. There was some kind of complicated legal structure involved, and family members who did not get along. They could, if they wanted to, put up “No Trespassing” signs, or a fence, or houses, at any moment. The only reason I was able to enjoy this place was because the owners lacked the motivation or unity of will to kick people, the public, off of it. By the time I was in middle school, I was aware that the island as I knew it might not last forever.
It lasted through my high school years, and my brothers’. But in the early 2000s it was sold, and soon after, the new owner put up the “No Trespassing” signs. It was rumored that he wanted to build a house.
Each step of the process was marked by some kind of controversy or resistance: people called for the county/the state/a local conservation group to buy it and make it into a park, or better yet, just keep it as it was. At one point, a fence went up to keep boaters off; there was a legal dispute, and the fence was removed.
In most states, including Maryland, the rule is that the public has a right to be on any beach or shoreline as long as they stay below the mean high tide line. Below that line, landowners have no legal right to bar people from beaching a boat, building a sandcastle, or sitting in a chair with their feet in the water. Even if there just so happen to be a few dozen people, or a few dozen boats full of people, or, as reported in 2011, over 800 boats full of people at the annual “bumper bash” party.
About a decade ago, the island’s new owners finally built the house and a long pier. Fortunately and unlike what happened in the case of a smaller island nearby, the owners at least obeyed zoning and environmental restrictions, so from the water, aside from the pier, the island hasn’t changed too much. In the summer, the trees mostly screen the house from view.
I paddled around the island a few weeks ago in a friend’s kayak. Four or five ospreys circled or roosted in the trees, and kingfishers — a beautiful bird I never saw on the river growing up — have dug holes in the cliff to nest in. It’s still beautiful, and there’s still a sense of wildness about it, and also a sense of accessibility — at least below the mean high tide line. It could still be a magical place for a kid, or an adult.
But of course I felt a sense of loss. Without access to the island’s interior — the scramble up the steep hill that marked one’s palms with clay, the breeze coming up from the river — I can’t get inside that wildness, either, not as fully as I once could.
And the time I’ve spent in the west recently heightens that contrast. This spring, I spent a little time in Utah and more time in Colorado, with a trip to Death Valley and Canyonlands national parks in there as well, and these are all places where the dynamics of wild places and public land are very different. There’s public land in the county where I grew up, and some of it is still just trees with crisscrossing trails, but they’re smallish pockets of land, relatively, and the gates close at dark. There’s noplace within a two-hour drive where you could walk for a day without coming to the end of the trail, and of course there’s no public land where I can park my van and stay for free.
I was recently talking to a friend about the difference between wilderness and wildness. Wilderness is pristine, preserved; wildness just hasn’t been touched for a while. It could be an old clear-cut where the trees are growing back — not the irreplaceable old growth, but whatever species are up for the task — or an island with vines growing over the foundations of an old house. Maybe wildness could even be a very overgrown backyard, or any other space where human attention is mostly turned the other way and natural forces are dominant.
Wilderness — like Colorado’s 44 designated wilderness areas that I’m trying to hike — is something I only encountered as an adult. And I love it, obviously. But wildness is what I grew up with. Like the island, or like the woods next to my parents’ house. (This woods, too, is now fenced off and built up with boring and oversized houses, but before that, it was glorious.) These kinds of wild places — the marsh by the road,the yard where saplings grow around the wrecks of old boats and cars — feel charged with a unique kind of energy. They’re scrappy, the natural order fighting hard to stay or to make a comeback. As long as those places last, it feels like they’re getting away with something.
Another thing about wildness: it can be anywhere. Vacant lots, slips of suburbia too boggy or difficult to build on, or next to Cherry Creek in Denver where herons pluck fish out of the water in the shade of an overpass. When I took a train through Eastern Europe in 2006 I saw people picnicking on the slope above the train tracks, and I bet they were there for the wildness.
Right now I’m in Maryland, and to be honest, I’d rather not be. But I need foot surgery — nothing as big as the one I had in 2017, which involved two incisions, four cuts through the bone, four titanium screws, and a bunch of toe ligaments cut and then sewn back together — but still significant enough that I’ll need to stay in a normal house, not a van, for a few weeks. (I was trying to make this surgery happen in Colorado: I talked to a couple of surgeons there, who gave me two different surgical plans and I felt uncomfortable with both. But the surgeon here in Maryland who did my other foot five years ago came up with a plan I feel pretty good about.)
I’m not excited about having foot surgery. I’m not excited about going for the whole summer without hiking or stand-up paddleboarding, and I’m not excited about being unable to do normal life things, like lugging a forty-pound jug of water from the spigot to the van or even taking a shower, without caution and deliberate thought. I’m not excited about all the rehab I’ll have to do on my foot, because that involves a lot of stretching and stretching is boring and I hate it. I’m not excited about being unable to exercise like I’m used to and losing whatever fitness I’ve gained in the last year. But all of this had to happen sometime, and now’s the time.
So I’m looking for the silver linings. For one, I’m grateful that I have option of being able to stay in my parents’ nice guest room while I recuperate, with my mom to make sure I take the appropriate dose of painkillers and bring me food and water. For another, I’ve been able to see some friends and family members in person for the first time since before the pandemic. And though this part of Maryland lacks mountains, it makes up for it with water, and I’ve been able to paddle and swim. I’ve spotted horseshoe crabs from my parents’ pier, a deer eating the old lettuce my mom threw out, a bluebird feeding its baby with a seed from the bird feeder. So right now I miss being in the wilderness — but I have wildness.