Floating island...
Way back before most of my readers were born, my grandfather (my mom's father) owned a “camp” on the shore of Long Pond, near North Lincoln, Maine. It wasn't quite a house, but it was a big step up from camping. It had one large room with an open-beam ceiling, a little attached bedroom, a mostly-watertight roof, a screened-in porch facing the lake, a sink, and a wood stove – and most vitally, a big octagonal table where we could play cards (this, along with drinking beer and fishing, being the primary occupation of the adults who weren't my dad). The porch was set back about 25' from the lake's shore, and it had a steep staircase that let you walk down, over a boardwalk, and right onto a dock that floated perhaps 20' into the lake. The smells of fish and beer were always present.
When we first started visiting the camp, the only “facility” there was an old-fashioned outhouse 50' or so inland from the camp. Instead of toilet paper we had pages from some dodgy “detective” magazines that my grandfather liked to read, most of them featuring lurid cartoons of buxom, scantily-clad damsels in desperate need of being rescued. Later some additions were made to the cabin, including a tiny little bathroom scabbed onto the back side.
We spent part of most summers there when I was younger, often several weeks at a stretch. It was the kind of vacation that kids dream about – we had a canoe and a motorboat (with something like an 8 HP motor) at our disposal. We could swim whenever we wanted to. The weather was balmy and clear almost every day. There were fascinating and exotic “Maniac” (native residents of Maine) characters who were constantly stopping by for a chat, a beer, or a card game. There were loons on the lake, and sometimes we could watch them through the mist on the water in the mornings – and of course every night we'd hear their strange and wonderful cries.
And there was the floating island.
I've since discovered that floating islands are actually quite common, especially in certain parts of the world. Minnesota and Wisconsin for example, with climates similar to Maine's, have a particularly rich collection of them. But at the times I write of – late '50s and early '60s – I thought the floating island of Long Pond was something unique and nearly magical.
To get there required a long, slow motorboat trip from our camp, itself a grand adventure when we first made it (at quite a young age – I'm guessing 7 or 8 years old – for me). The embedded map at right shows what I believe is the floating island, the one that I'm writing about. Our camp was almost due west of it, about a mile away, on a stretch of Long Pond's shore that faces NNE.
Somehow my dad knew of the floating island's existence. It's exactly the sort of thing he'd be interested in seeing, for floating islands like that one are made up entirely of buoyant plants – and anything involving plants my dad would like :)
The first time I visited the floating island (I believe with my brother Scott and my sister Holly), my dad had already been there – so he knew exactly where it was, and what to expect when we got there. He tried to describe it to us, but my mental picture of it (based on his description) didn't match the reality at all. I was imagining an island that looked like other islands, with dirt and rocks, trees and shrubs, and maybe a cabin or two. That's not what it was like at all, as we discovered when my dad pulled our little motorboat up alongside it.
The first challenge my dad had was finding something secure to tie the boat to. Virtually everything on the floating island was just an inch or two above the water's surface – the tops of aquatic plants whose roots dangled in the water below and actually supplied the buoyancy that kept the island afloat. Occasionally, though, there were spots on the island where ordinary plants had somehow managed to eke out an existence – a few stunted shrubs showed up here and there. So he had to find a way to get the boat close enough to a shrub so that we could tie it up. We certainly wouldn't want the boat drifting away as we were walking around on that island!
He finally did find a secure mooring for us, and we got out to walk around. What an adventure that was! Even as little kids we weighed enough to make the island sink beneath us. The only reason we could walk around is that the roots of all these plants were thoroughly entangled with each other, making a sort of fabric of the entire island. Right where we were stepping we might sink down six inches or more, but the rest of the island, acting like a piece of stretchy fabric, would keep us from going further. However, once in a while one of us (especially my then much heavier dad) would tear the fabric of the island and one foot would suddenly drop toward the bottom of the lake! I don't remember any of us actually punching through completely, so that fabric must have generally been pretty strong.
My dad was fascinated by the assortment of non-aquatic plants that had managed to survive on the floating island. With basically no soil at all, it was a strange place to find things that ordinarily grew on land. We were all fascinated by the carnivorous aquatic plants (pitcher plants) that grew there – what kid wouldn't love a plant that trapped and ate bugs? As we walked about there, we were completely surrounded by the unusual. Along with the odd plants and strange footing, there were holes in the island through which we could see down into the lake. Occasionally a fish would come up through those holes to catch a bug, sometimes with a satisfyingly large splash. There were chipmunks living on the island; apparently something grew there that they could eat. When another boat passed by, it's wake would cause the entire island to wiggle up and down. In a few places we spotted buoyant flotsam that had been incorporated into the fabric of the island – floats, pieces of lumber, driftwood, pine cones, and even a few beer bottles. I loved that place, and visited it perhaps a half dozen times in later years. I never saw another person there.
Before letting us off the boat to walk on the floating island, my dad told us kids what to do if we should find ourselves in the water – basically, grab onto the island and yell. I remember his face as he was telling us this – he was uncharacteristically serious, and this surprised me, as (to me) it didn't seem like any more dangerous an adventure than any of a bazillion others I'd been on with my dad. My not-necessarily-logical thought process went basically like this: I'm with my dad, so what could go wrong? My dad was a bit more cautious, though in the end, nothing untoward actually happened.
But thinking back on it now, I can easily imagine why he'd have been worried. At the time, the floating island was a long way from any civilization (though the area around it has since been developed). There was nobody around who could help him if something went wrong. There were no cell phones on which he could call for help. The closest telephones were probably a half-hour's boat trip away. In that kind of isolation, he took three little kids out for a jaunt on an island that any one of us could have punched right through. It's the kind of calculated risk that I suspect even back then relatively few parents would have taken, and today, of course, that number would be even smaller.
When I think of all the adventures we had with my dad – many of which involved some (usually quite small) element of risk – I'm overwhelmed with gratitude to him for making those choices. My life is so much richer, with so many more now-cherished experiences and memories, because he judged the value of the experience greater than the risk.
Just once, on our 2005 trip to the San Juan Mountains, I brought this subject up in our conversation. We had just come back to our rental cabin after eating a meal at a restaurant in Ouray, and on the way home we'd seen a family bicycling – all wearing the politically-correct helmets, but riding right in the middle of a busy street. This amused my dad to no end, and he launched into an imaginative speculation about the degree to which the human gene pool would be improved if someone were to squash that family in the street. It seemed like a good moment, so I asked him, then, if he was conscious of balancing the value of an experience against the risk, especially when we were little kids.
It took him a while to cough up the answer, which was something like this: no, he wasn't really conscious of it, because in his mind there never were any noteworthy risks we were taking. If we fell off a cliff, sank under the floating island, or were stomped by an angry moose, then those were either just plain bad luck (which could happen at any time to anybody, no matter how cautious you were) or the result of us doing something stupid (in which case the species' gene pool might well be improved by our removal from it). In no case, he believed, were such concerns a reason to avoid an adventure or experience. He was not an advocate of reckless behavior – far from it, actually – but he also thought a that lot of behavior (like dangling your legs off a cliff top) was misjudged as reckless by the timid and stupid amongst us.
That's an uncommonly rational view of risk. I didn't recognize it as such until I was an adult myself, but that's exactly what it was. My dad's rational view of risk, combined with his love of experience and adventure, enriched my childhood beyond measure. They also had a huge impact on my developing personality and character as a young man. There have been many, many times when I've asked myself “What would my dad do?” – or, more often, “What decision would my dad most respect?”
My dad is gone now, and I won't be able to share any more adventures with him. But I have the memories of many adventures we did share, and his guiding voice still lives within me...
