Places Remote and Islanded

Rootedness and sense of place are two quite different things. Living somewhere for a long time does not automatically produce a consciousness, much less an appreciation, of that place. Indeed, it is people "from away" who have the strongest sense of a place, for, as Yi-Fu Tuan reminds us, "it is distance between self and place that allows the self to appreciate a place."[2] Indeed, distance has become so essential to the contemporary sense of place that the greater the perceived distance the stronger the attraction.

Today, the remote has taken on unprecedentedly positive value. There was a time, not so very long ago, when remoteness, like backwardness, was something to be overcome. And this is still true for a very large part of the world's peoples who do not have the freedom or resources to travel and for whom distance is a curse rather than an attraction. Thus the inflated value of remoteness to the privileged of the developed world reflects the fact that nothing is any longer geographically remote because nothing is physically inaccessible to them. "Distances do not matter any more, while the idea of geographical borders is increasingly difficult to sustain," notes Zygmunt Bauman.[3]

The scarcity of remoteness has driven up its value and encouraged a kind of cultural counterfeiting. Since remoteness is nowhere, it can be anywhere. We have learned to produce what we can no longer find, often quite close to home. While some locations like the Himalayan mountains and the polar regions remain truly distant, most places regarded as remote, including islands, seem much closer to hand. In the case of islands, remoteness and the sense of place they sustain is as much the result of travel through time as travel through space. Today it is time as much as space that creates distance. Remoteness, placeness, and pastness have become inseparable.

Physical distance and temporal depth reinforce one another. Remote places are often associated with a quality of pastness regardless of their actual history. We tend to think of isolated villages and island communities as old regardless of their real age. This association of time with distance, placeness with pastness, is, however, a modern phenomenon. It has been with us only since the nineteenth century, noticeably intensifying in the past couple of decades.

The reasons are not hard to find. As the physical distance between self and location that affords us our sense of place is obliterated by new technologies of communication, we turn increasingly to time as our means of distancing. What we can no longer take for granted, we create for ourselves, through story, image, and, above all, ritual. Remoteness, so requisite to the contemporary sense of place, is now something achieved rather than found.

What is meant by roots today has little to do with physical rootedness. In our mobile society, it is connection to the past rather than to place that is most sought after. People now travel to remote places where they would never think of living in order to seek their roots. They are often confounded by the locals' lack of interest in the past, for the physically rooted are quite content to live in the present, indifferent, even hostile to historical preservation. In most places the recent wave of interest in genealogy and local history is generated largely by people "from away." Their appreciation of place is constituted through a temporal distance, making them oblivious to the presentist concerns of the locals.

Rootedness and sense of place are also at odds in other ways. Visitors are first amused, then frustrated, by the locals' incuriosity about the world at large. Because they are so firmly rooted, the locals lack the fascination with the remote that has brought strangers to their locality. For many locals, remoteness, like pastness, is something to overcome rather than cherish. Distance means to them inconvenience, even danger. Locals resist the very thing that makes their place so attractive to others.

I

 
The appeal of islands seems directly proportional to their perceived remoteness. This is not just a matter of physical distance, for remoteness is not something measured in miles or kilometers. No island is too near or too far to seem remote, for remoteness is in the eye of the beholder. Toronto Island, almost within the shadow of the Canadian city's skyscrapers, is a world apart. Fishers Island is another example of a place, within the orbit of metropolitan New York, that seems far away. Most locations which now qualify as remote exist within a certain zone of accessibility, within reach of modern transportation and communications but beyond the range of the easy commute. Places that are inaccessible are disqualified, but so too are those reached too quickly and easily. In this modern age, remoteness is constituted of just the right mixture of time and space. While Fisher Island is only twelve miles off Long Island, the trip requires a change of ferries and four hours each way, enough to sustain its remoteness.

Remoteness is inseparable from movement from that place we call home and back again. The remote can never be a final destination, for it is through circular, repetitive journeys that both the contemporary sense of remoteness and the sense of home are created. And in an age when distance is so easily transcended, simply going far is insufficient. It is now necessary to travel through time as well as space, for contemporary remoteness is as much associated with a sense of pastness as with physical distance. It has that quality of being there rather than here, but also of being then rather than now.

Remoteness is the product of the relationship between two places—places that are unequal to one another, however. Today, powerful mainlands bestow remoteness on relatively powerless islands. This imbalance explains the paradox that those who live in places defined as remote feel "open and unprotected," drawn ever closer and more vulnerable to the continental landmasses that now define the terms of distance.[4]

When strangers have the power to impose their image of there and then on a place, the locals' sense of living in the here and now is noticeably heightened. This is what John McPhee experienced during his sojourn on the small Scottish island of Colonsay, where the visitors dressed in store-bought tartans and were full of book-learned lore.[5] For the islanders, however, it was not the past but the future that carried the greater weight. The mainland was forever on their minds, and they talked constantly of other islands that had lost population and had eventually been evacuated entirely. They imagined Colonsay not as a place of eternal return, but as somewhere at the end of time, living its last days.

II

 
Neither physical distance nor natural features automatically bestow remoteness. Instead, it is the product of social processes, of autobiography and history, of economics and politics as well as sociology, of which islands are a prime illustration. As Epile Hau'ofa reminds us, the notion of the remote was something Europeans and North Americans brought with them to the Pacific in the nineteenth century. Before the colonizing moment island peoples were in close touch with one another, trading and migrating as if the sea and not the land were their home. Colonialism drew boundaries and confined people to particular archipelagoes, thus installing remoteness in the Pacific for the first time. "There is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as 'islands in a far sea' and as 'a sea of islands,'" Hau'ofa writes.[6] Today, Pacific islanders find themselves promoting the image of remoteness as vital to the tourist trade, while struggling against the notions of backwardness and inferiority that this image brings with it.

The same historical processes can be seen operating in the Atlantic world in roughly the same period. In the eighteenth century, it was not islands but continents that were perceived as remote. Communications among Atlantic islands were more intense than those among different parts of the mainlands at a time when remoteness was more likely to be associated with forests and mountains than with islands. This situation continued as long as the Atlantic remained a "sea of islands," trading with one another and exchanging populations. Everything changed, however, from the middle of the nineteenth century onward when islands began to lose their economic functions and the conquest of the continents erased the sense of remoteness which for centuries attached to the interiors of large land masses. In this century, islands have become, for better or worse, the prime location of remoteness, a reflection of global economic, political, and cultural processes that often seem beyond their control. They have become satellites of the continents, defined, like their Pacific counterparts, as "islands in a far sea."

It is one of the great paradoxes of our times that remoteness increases even as modern communications make all parts of the world more accessible. Pockets of remoteness are appearing everywhere in and outside the western world, some quite close to major urban centers where the greatest demand for remoteness is generated. Though peninsular Brittany is only a couple of hours from Paris and Vermont is within reach of New York, they are now regarded as almost as remote as the Hebrides or the islands of Down East Maine. The remote has drawn ever closer, with the result that its value, as measured in property sales and in the profits made by the tourist industry, has increased multifold. The price of country cottages has shot up, and the value of island real estate has not been far behind. Both have outpaced the rise in prices of most city properties over the past twenty years. Remoteness sells, as Gunnar Hansen found out when he visited the Sea Islands on the Carolina coast and spotted a sign reading "Lost Island. Residential lots for sale."[7]

Populations are everywhere encroaching on coasts. When bridges are built, a human tsunami surges over the coastal islands, driving up land prices and displacing long-time islanders, most of whom are poor and, in the case of the Sea Islands, people of color. Although the general trend has been toward the depopulation of islands, those that are most accessible to urban areas are now more densely populated than at any time in their history. The resort island of Hilton Head has become like Manhattan, so accessible that it loses all semblance of both remoteness and islandness. As Hansen observes: "This island was hardly an island anymore, but rather an extension of some middle American fantasy."[8]

Remoteness is imploding as well as exploding. Beyond the zone of the suburbs there now exists the densely populated territory of second or weekend homes, in the zone of the semi-remote. Indeed, as work consumes more and more time, this zone moves ever closer to urban centers. It now encompasses places that only a couple of decades ago would have been classified as nearby. And while the semi-remote seems to satisfy the immediate needs of an affluent urban segment for a short break from the demands of urban life, it cannot satisfy the need for true remoteness, which itself demands a journey taking more time than a weekend provides.

III

 
It is important to remember that the association of islands with remoteness is a quite recent phenonenon, one that Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) witnessed, with ambivalent feelings. While she herself was one of the principal inventors of the sense of the East" that was to have such vast appeal to urban tourists in the later nineteenth century, she knew the costs to the islanders themselves. In TheCountry of thePointed Firs old Captain Littlepage speaks about the decline of the lumbering, quarrying, and shipbuilding industries that from the 1870s onwards depopulated the islands of Maine while at the same time opening them up to visitors like Jewett:

In the early nineteenth century, the people of the Down East coast and islands were America's cosmopolitans. They were more closely connected with Europe, the West Indies, and the Far East than were Philadelphians and New Yorkers. Wives and children were often aboard the Maine vessels involved in coastal and intercontinental trade.

This dimension of the region's past was soon to be obscured, however, when in the 1840s and 1850s artists from New York discovered another Maine and its islands, casting them into the role of the eastern United States' wilderness preserve. The paintings of Thomas Cole and Frederic Church of the rugged features of Mount Desert Island created a mythic place and made it one of the first great tourist destinations. The fact that the journey took considerable time and effort heightened the experience of both wilderness and remoteness. Toward the end of the century, when Mount Desert itself became ever more accessible by steamboat and rail, these same qualities were bestowed on a succession of other islands—Monhegan, Isle of Shoals, Deer Isle—with the result that, despite rapidly improving communications, the sense of distance was greatly enhanced rather than lessened. Later, when the motor car brought Down East within ever easier reach of urban populations, the islands of Maine were enveloped in an ever greater sense of distance.

From the beginning the journey to Maine's islands was described as a "pilgrimage," but one that involved travel in time as well as distance, a return to the past. By the 1880s a powerful impulse to historic preservation and nature conservation was evident among visitors intent on holding back the very forces of progress that they themselves had brought Down East. The locals who had always viewed the land and sea from a utilitarian perspective found metropolitan enthusiasms for pristine scenery and simple living odd, even bizarre. "Yes, I know it's what them artist men come here fur," one older resident told a reporter, "But what it amount ter, after all their squattin' and fussin', I don't know."[10]

Summer visitors to Mount Desert were in the vanguard of the effort to ban automobiles from the island. The Rockefellers used a fortune built on oil and gas to build carriage trails, while other sophisticated rusticators indulged in a fantasy of returning to the simple life in the bosom of nature, insisting on calling their coastal mansions "cottages." In pursuit of their preservationist/conservationist agenda, the leaders of the summer community systematically ignored the island's recent industrial history of quarrying, lumbering, and shipbuilding in favor of a much more distant past focused on the heroic age of exploration, on prehistory and natural history. Charles W. Eliot's 1904 development plan declared "the greater part of the island has never been inhabited or cultivated."[11]

The orgy of renaming that followed reflected the visitors' desire to live in a natural, archaic environment. The town of East Eden was changed to Bar Harbor and prosaic Green Mountain became majestic Mount Cadillac. Naming the national park Acadia in 1929 completed the process of temporal displacement which effectively severed the island's connection to its own history while associating it with a mythic past. In the competition to attract a generation of tourists more interested in nature than in presidential history, the little port of McKinley changed its name back to Bass Harbor in 1966. Maine now promotes itself as "Vacationland," a place remote and islanded, carefully nurturing a sense of temporal and geographical distance that becomes more difficult to sustain with each passing year.

IV

 
"Space is given by the ability to move . . . ," Tuan tells us, "We acquire the feel of distance by the effort of moving from one place to another."[12] But a sense of remoteness is the product of a certain mode of movement. Any place, however far, that is arrived at too quickly is automatically disqualified. Travel to the remote is invariably ritualized, a series of passages, each stretching the sense of temporal and spatial distance between the place of origin and the place of destination. Starting, stopping, and waiting are all part of the construction of remoteness. Getting there must be something of an adventure, a test, amounting often to a trial, that transports the traveler mentally as well as physically.

Transportation that is too direct erases remoteness. The road must not be too straight or the journey uninterrupted. The feeling of remoteness is enhanced when the journey is compounded of several different modes of transportation: a plane ride, then a bus or a boat, and the last bit on foot, pushing a heavily laden wheelbarrow. Attaining remoteness must involve effort and the investment of time, though not measured only in hours or minutes. The kind of time required to reach a remote place differs not so much in quantity as in quality. The time to a nonremote place is, like the route that takes us there, direct and linear. The time to a remote place is full of starts and stops, looping back on itself through a series of repetitions.

The more and longer the waits, the more frequent the returns, the remoter a destination feels whatever the actual distance traversed. Climbing mountains and crossing waters virtually guarantees remoteness, but this is as much the product of the uncertainty and degree of difficulty as of physical distance. The rites of passage involved in our constructions of remoteness vary from place to place, from island to island, and are passed on, like an old family recipe, from generation to generation, becoming so habitual that it is easy to forget that they are a product of history rather than geography.

Islands have become the contemporary world's favorite location for remoteness not so much because of distances involved as because they facilitate the cultural practices that constitute it. Most densely populated areas of Europe and North America have islands within easy reach. They are more accessible than mountains, but, in contrast to parks or rural villages, the journey there is never direct or easy. It is not so much the landform itself as the water that gives islands the desired qualities of remoteness. The remoteness of islands fluctuates with the tides. A place like Mont St. Michel becomes remote only at high tide, when the road connecting it to the mainland is inundated. At low tide, it loses its islandness completely.

Those who value insularity must constantly be on guard against bridge and tunnel builders who would connect islands with mainlands. In recent years, intense conflicts have developed, not just between islanders and mainlanders, but between factions of islanders. Those who object to bridging and tunneling are usually newcomers who have come seeking remoteness. The proponents are likely to be the locals, who regard direct transportation and communications as highly desirable. In the case of the newcomers, water provides a valuable barrier, but for the locals it is a reminder of what lies beyond. While those "from away" glory in being cut off, the locals become increasingly anxious about their isolation. It is they who demand better roads, more telephone lines, and regular ferry service.

If the absence of marked roads and straight paths is a sure sign of remoteness, the lack of wires is another. Remoteness requires that communications be not too easy or too direct, for the remote must be one step behind technologically. Remote islands have long had postal but rarely telegraph or telephone services. Today, some summer people have civilian band radios, but cell phones are still a rarity. Where simplicity still trumps convenience, instant communication is regarded as a threat to the treasured sense of remoteness.

To the locals remoteness is like a one-way street. It allows the outside world to flood in but does not allow access to what that world takes for granted. It heightens their sense of backwardness, and they overcompensate by acquiring the modern conveniences that the newcomers are trying to escape from. This was already true in the late nineteenth century, when it was noted how desperate the natives of the Hebridean isle of Iona were to appear thoroughly up to date. The Oban Times reported in 1889 that "many strangers visiting the island during the summer months are surprised to find it a nineteenth-century place," an observation that tells us at least as much about the visitors as it does the islanders.[13] Today it is still true that the locals have the faster boats and bigger cars, as well as all the modern conveniences money will buy, including the latest communications technology. It is the locals, not the strangers, who watch television and use cell phones.

Those who seek out remote places make a great effort to distance themselves temporally as well as spatially. They insist on keeping modernity at bay, roughing it or living in ways they imagine earlier generations to have done. Not suprisingly, they tend to be preservationists, restorers, and reenactors. Newcomers to remote areas are often the ones to resurrect the old crafts and folk arts long after the locals have abandoned them. On the Hebridean island of Harris, small farming known locally as crofting must be kept alive by subsidies. Much the same is true of Whalsay, a Shetland isle, where crafts have undergone a remarkable revival since the 1970s. On the Swedish island of Gotland, the revival of home-brewing has given the place a distinctive identity, but the initiative came not from the oldtimers but from a younger generation; and it was not farm women, who had traditionally done the brewing, but urban males who have led the revitalization.

V

 
The construction of a place remote and islanded is not the product of some abstract process but of many small, very personal acts that, in sum, create a sense of distance and thus that precious sense of place that those "from away" are seeking. Great Gott Island is not very remote as far as physical distance is concerned. It is about a mile off Mount Desert Island (its mainland) within sight and sound of the Bass Harbor Head lighthouse but much closer at the lowest tides, when a hidden bar brings it within a few hundred yards. In severe winters an ice bridge has been known to form between Gotts and the Head, but on a foggy day the island seems wholly cut off from its archipelago and from the world itself.

Our family has been going to Great Gott Island for more than a third of a century, always in the summer, never more than once a year, slavishly following the same route and schedule to get there. In the early years, the journey was en famille in a Volkswagen bus with just enough space for my wife and myself, two boys, a dog, an occasional passenger, luggage, and nonperishable supplies. Today, a midsize sedan is sufficient to get two of us to Maine, yet the trip still follows the same pattern, taking the same highways, making the same stops, a ritual as strictly observed as that of any pilgrimage. It is perfectly possible to fly to Maine and to reach the island comfortably and speedily in a few hours, yet the process of getting there has meaning inseparable from the destination. To get there in any other way is simply unthinkable.

No matter how much additional time we have promised ourselves, the trip is never without anxiety. We approach the coast with one eye on the clock, the other on the skies. There is always the concern that the boatman has not gotten our message about time of arrival, that the seas will be too rough or the tide which will affect when and where we land on the island will be wrong. The last few miles are always passed in the kind of tense silence that precedes any significant rite of passage. We feel some relief when we are in sight of the town dock and spy the boat waiting on reasonably high tide in a calm sea, but we still know that the most arduous part of passage lies ahead.

Exchanging one form of transportation for another adds nothing to ease the trip but is an essential part of the passage. "Somehow, a ferry crossing is the most thrilling trip, possessing the size and ceremony of a seagoing voyage, but ruthlessly edited so that only the pleasures of embarking and disembarking remain," writes Amy Willard Cross.[14] Taking an unscheduled boat magnifies this effect, focusing one's attention on the process of arrival and departure to the point of virtually erasing the experience of the water itself. There is the ordeal of moving ourselves from car to dock and then to boat, an effort that we know must be repeated at the island itself.

Even then, however, the journey is not complete. The house, closed tight and surrounded by grass grown high by early summer, is still some way from the landing, a distance made greater by the island's old-fashioned modes of transportation. It takes several trips by wheelbarrow and backpack before we are ready to unlock the door and step across the threshold to assess the effects of eleven months of storms, mice, and insects, not to mention the occasional human intruder.

Even if there are no unanticipated problems, it will be another two or three days before we feel fully at home. The water system must be resurrected, refrigerator and stove restarted, the curtains hung and beds made. The grass must be conquered, screens and shutters fitted, the wood supply replenished. And all this is accomplished in the full knowledge that what is done must be undone in a month or so when it is time for the rites of closing and departing to be scrupulously enacted.

A place remote and islanded does not come cheaply, in terms of time, effort, or money. Even if the old house was a bargain when we bought it thirty-five years ago, the amount of money spent on keeping it in repair, not to mention major improvements, would have paid for many "carefree" vacations. As the owner of any summer place will testify, it is not a place of leisure but of labor of a physical kind that eleven months of urban and suburban living leave one quite unprepared for. Furthermore, such a remote and islanded place brings one into conflict with nature as well as closer to it. On Gotts there are none of the protections from tempests, fogs, and, in wet summers, mosquitoes that we could safely ignore when at home in the city or suburb.

The appeal of remote and islanded places cannot be explained in terms of efficiency or convenience. "Fundamentally, summering at the cottage is a symbolic act," observes the Canadian Roy Wolfe.[15] To travel so far, using means of transportation that are by contemporary standards slow and uncomfortable, sets the cottager as far apart from the tourist as the pilgrim is from the Sunday worshipper. But it is precisely the ritualized coming and going that differentiates places remote and islanded from the ordinary tourist site.

Like a pilgrimage, an island journey is circular, a cultural practice dependent as much on going as coming, on the possibility of eternal return. The sacredness of the island itself, its perceived distance from the profane everyday world, is a product of what Mircea Eliade calls the "cosmicizing" process, consisting of rites of possession which depend for their power on repetition, on a sense of time as recoverable and repeatable.[16] Remoteness depends as much on leaving as on coming. A summer cottage loses its meaning when it becomes a permanent residence. Indeed, seasonality is fundamental to achieving remoteness. An island occupied the year round loses something of its islandness, for it is in absence rather than in residence that islands evoke "endless regret or secret happiness."

VI

 
Such sentiments are rare among full-time residents. They are often quite forthright about their isolation, boredom, and sense of entrapment. Those who can get away know that they must leave the island in order to gain a measure of that sense of place that is the privilege of summer visitors. "If I was an artist, I'm sure I'd never leave," writes a young Vinalhaven woman eager to move on to college, "The bad point of the island is that being so small it is very restrictive." Another writes: "I yearn to escape my island so that I can escape from the provincialism while expanding my life and my future. Islesboro will always be my home and place that I will love to come home to and visit, but it is time to build some bridges."[17]

Islands are like bipolar magnets, attracting and repelling simultaneously. Even in Iceland, which has a sustainable economy and stable population, it seems to the locals that they have been invaded, especially during tourist season. There, where the annual number of visitors equals that of the resident population, the presence of strangers causes even the very prosperous and cosmopolitan Icelanders to feel themselves marginal and, what is worse, invisible.

Paradoxically, the remoter the place the more visible the strangers. This is not only because of the numbers of people these places attract but because the newcomers are marked as strangers longer. In a city or town, the burden of strangeness is invisibility, but in remote places the opposite is the case. For the incomers, this is a price worth paying for the remoteness they are seeking, but for the locals the strangers in their midst are a constant reminder of the other world that they cannot afford to ignore and which they spend a good deal of time trying to come to grips with. Some turn their backs on the strange, but more often locals try desperately to incorporate it into their own lives and identities. Because of the economic, political, and cultural inequalities that have produced remoteness in the first place, they have no alternative. Unable to shut out the world, they are ultimately forced to join it.

While the strangers turn their backs on the future, the locals face it head on. Here remoteness promotes rather than retards modernization. Icelanders are among the most up-to-date people on the face of the earth in part because of their perceived remoteness. Defined as "far away" by their European neighbors, they feel the same vulnerability as smaller, poorer island peoples. However, Icelanders have managed to counter remoteness with a powerful sense of history which places them at the center of their own world. This is also true of the people of Whalsay, who, like the Icelanders, have the resources to acquire the attributes of modernity without losing touch with their island's past. They have also managed to construct a view of themselves as the center of their own pure, uncorrupted world, capable of holding its own against outsiders. This self-image contributes, however, to the outsiders' perception of both Iceland and Whalsay as remote places where the past is still alive. The natives of both places tolerate and even encourage the nostalgia that draws the tourists, but they do not allow this to erode their own sense of being thoroughly modern.

Unfortunately, on islands with fewer resources and lower cultural barriers, such as the Caribbean archipelago, it is much more common for islanders to internalize remoteness as a feeling of inferiority and backwardness, ultimately leading the younger generation to migrate. They leave to make a better future for themselves, one of the reasons why remote islands, and remote areas in general, have been losing population. For the landlubber, water creates the delicious illusion of isolation, but it has been no barrier to exodus. In this century islands have seen their year-round populations plummet. The north Atlantic is now dotted with isles that come to life only in the summer, while the Caribbean depends on the earnings of winter tourism.

Seasons are often strongly marked in remote and islanded places, but they also have a way of setting the mental calendars of ex-islanders. Those who have left the Irish and Scottish isles use kin ties to establish "social islands" in mainland neighborhoods, returning in the summer to croft or fish. In a sense they carry their islandness wherever they go. Winter is a meaningless, depressing season for North Sea locals, but for the exiles it is a time when imaginations work overtime and longings for home islands intensify. Exiles return in summer, bearing vital cultural as well as material gifts, without which the islands themselves could not survive.

VII

 
The fact that many islands are visited only periodically enhances their appeal by removing them from the kind of linear time that dominates so many aspects of everyday life. Apart from tourism, islands no longer occupy a place in the here and now of the global economy, but this does not prevent them from being a powerful mental presence even in their physical absence. Today, islands colonize the land- and time-scapes of the modern imagination, free floating objects of dream and memory, more subject to idealization and romanticization than any other contemporary land form.

The conquest of time and space is one of the great triumphs of the modern era, but it has left us with a great longing for that which has been vanquished. Our desire to recover lost time, reflected in the multiple, ingenious ways we seek to preserve the past, and, failing that, to manufacture it, has its spatial counterpart in the contemporary quest for remoteness. In the same way we revere the times we have put behind us but would never wish to return to, we sacralize places that we would never wish to inhabit permanently. To be sure, there are those who come to stay and make a life on islands, even though they are forever marked as "from away." But the greater part of island lovers, including many born there, prefer to visit and would never want to settle.

Today we value what we define as remote not as a place of destination, but as point of return, for increasingly the relationship to particular islands is one not of settlement but of cyclical movement. Those who savor the remote are attached more than ever to their urban and suburban residences, one might even say enslaved to the income, power, and conveniences that these provide. This is true even of those born on islands who now live on mainlands. They remain islanders at heart, but their lives are firmly continental.

Caught up in a capitalist economy which concentrates wealth and power in ever fewer metropolitan centers, both islanders and mainlanders prefer to live by the islands they nourish in their minds and hearts rather than live on the islands themselves. Gunnar Hansen found when he visited the Sea Islands off the coast of the Carolinas that city folk who were purchasing land had no real intention of living there: "They just wanted the idea. They want the word ISLAND emblazoned on their stationery."[18] Even as islands themselves are propelled to the margins of history and geography, islands of the mind push front and center in our consciousness of ourselves and the world around us. The less they are occupied, the more they preoccupy modern consciousness.

VIII

 
Remoteness is to space what nostalgia is to time. Nostalgia is longing for a time out of time, based on some real historical event, but so idealized as to bear none of the scars that history inflicts. The remote is a place out of place, bearing a likeness to real geography but shorn of the less attractive physical particulars. Both nostalgia and remoteness are indigenous to modernity, which has been ruthless in its conquest of both time and space. In a world where the connections between past and present have been radically ruptured, nostalgia in all its forms—historic preservation, heritage, genealogy—is rampant. Similarly, the eradication of boundaries and geographical particularities has led to the contemporary fascination with the remote and islanded, where the appearance if not the reality of boundedness still exists.

Everywhere we see the proliferation of what Antonio Benitez-Rojo has called meta-archipelagos, idealized places whose myth and image is so powerful as to obscure the reality of contemporary island life.[19] "The island seems to have a tenacious hold on the human imagination," writes Yi-Fu Tuan, "But it is in the imagination of the Western world that the island has taken the strongest hold."[20] Indeed, islands have long been a symbolic presence in western culture, closely associated with the sacred in its multiple incarnations as holy isles and earthly paradises. In western religious thought the sacred has usually been conceived of as bounded space, either marked off from the profane world or placed at some distance from it, simultaneously separated but connected. Earthly Paradise, as imagined by medieval Christianity, appeared on the edges of maps either as an inaccessible walled garden or as an island, or both. Later secular utopias were imagined in a similar manner. They too were good to visit but not places to stay.

Mankind might approach Eden, but humanity in its fallen state could never regain access. Other sacred places were more accessible, but they too were strong, overpowering spaces, always to be approached with awe, even dread. The holy isles of the medieval world were reserved for heroes and saints willing to make the sacrifices necessary to reach them. Their journeys were highly ritualized, always with an eye on the return voyage, more like a pilgrimage than an act of discovery and possession. The early utopias, so often imagined as islands, were also placed on the edge, encountered by accident and, once left behind, lost again in the vastness of the uncharted oceans.

Today islands are more likely to be associated with salubrity than with sacrifice, but if we probe beneath the surfaces we find what Eliade would call a "'mythical geography'—the only geography man could never do without," displaying many of the same features of sacredness as the earlier holy and utopian isles.[21] As we have seen, those who seek the remote and islanded are willing to endure discomfort, even tolerate certain risks in order to experience the modern version of the sacred. In doing so, they assert boundaries in the face of the homogenizing, totalizing tendencies of modern space, while simultaneously refusing to yield entirely to the relentless demands of linear time. But they pay the same price as did the religious pilgrim, for keeping something sacred means setting it apart and ultimately leaving it behind, the source of the endless regret that is inseparable from the secret happiness associated with islands in contemporary culture.

NOTES

1. Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 75.

2. Yi-Fu Tuan, "Rootedness versus Sense of Place," Landscape 24, no. 1 (1980), 4.

3. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 12.

4. Edwin Adener, "'Remote Areas:' Some Theoretical Considerations," Anthropologyat Home, ed. Anthony Jackson (London: Tavistock, 1987), 47.

5. John McPhee, The Crofter and the Laird (New York: Noonday Press, 1969), 82, 123, 145.

6. Epile Hau'ofa, "Our Sea of Islands," The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal ofIsland Affairs 6, no. 1 (Spring 1994), 153.

7. Gunnar Hansen, Islands at the Edge of Time: A Journey to America's BarrierIslands (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), 138.

8. Ibid, 142.

9. Jewett, 20-1.

10. Quoted in Pamela J. Berlanger, Inventing Acadia: Artists and Tourists at MountDesert (Rockland: Farnsworth Museum, 1999), 114.

11. Charles W. Eliot, The Right Development of Mount Desert Island (1904), quoted in Berlanger, 123.

12. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 12, 15-16.

13. Mairi E. MacArthur, Iona: The Living Memory of a Crofting Community, 1750-1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), 211.

14. Amy Willard Cross, The Summer House: A Tradition of Leisure (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1992), 203.

15. Roy Wolfe, "About Cottages and Cottagers," Landscape 15, no. 1 (Autumn, 1965), 8.

16. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, translated by Williard Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1959), 29-36, 68-9.

17. Comments by graduating seniors, Working Waterfront / Interisland News (Rockland, Maine, July 1999), 16-7.

18. Hansen, 163.

19. Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Post-Modern Perspective (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 4.

20. Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1974), 118.

21. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Contemporary Religion (New York: New American Library, 1964), 433.

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