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Islands hold a special place in the collective memory of mankind. We envision islands as refuges from the din of modern life, paragons of savagery or as secluded paradises replete with wonder. It is not hard to imagine how islands played an important role in mind of man before the inception of civilization: as nomads emboldened with an inexorable sense of wanderlust, our earliest ancestors must have moved across their dangerous landscape from island of resources to island of resources. This wandering spirit remained imprinted on the first humans who tackled daunting journeys to the island-continent of Australia and the islands of the Pacific. From the nascent western cultures that emerged on islands circling the Mediterranean Sea, through the Renaissance seafaring cultures to Darwin’s South American travels which culminated in his visit to the Gal‡pagos Archipelago, it is undeniable that our postmodern fascination surely has its roots in those ancient days when our exploring showed us the mystery, isolation, and wonder of islands.
This year I had the unique opportunity to lift this veil of mystery both in the abstract recesses of my mind and on a scientific level in my visits to Sapelo Island, off the coast of Georgia. Sapelo Island lies in the middle of the chain of Georgia’s Atlantic Ocean barrier islands, and remains the least untouched of the islands due in part to its status as a federal wildlife reserve. With less than 100 human inhabitants on the island – composed of the hammock communities of the descendents of the first African slaves and University of Georgia Marine Institute (UGMI) researchers – the 6000 acres of the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve frames a unique environment that displays nearly every type of island ecosystem, both ancient and modern: vast intertidal flats, rambling berms, ancient and modern sand dunes, maritime forests, salt marshes and upland forests. Famous for the numerous seminal papers on island biogeography and barrier island geology, Sapelo Island’s value extends well beyond the beaches and miles of marshlands – it also represents a refuge for the mind of man.
The voyage to Sapelo Island begins at mainland dock near Darien, on the mainland of the Georgia coast. Unlike most large islands on the eastern seaboard of the United States, Sapelo Island is only accessible by plane or sea. After loading our field gear, food supplies and spirits into the cargo hold of the Sapelo Queen, we sought the vantage point of the top deck. As the ferry crept away from the mainland, we slowly began to immerse ourselves into the elements of the island. The solid earth of the mainland coastal forests crumbled into vast expanses of marshland. The crisp, cleansing salt air of the coast tickled our noses and greeted our faces. The coastal winds flirting with the tops of the marshland moved the Spartina grass in harmony, bidding us farewell from the mainland just as terns and gulls, those oceanic messengers, accosted the ferry, bringing us the first words from Sapelo.
Although the half hour ferry ride transpired across geographic space, the boat ride to Sapelo Island was also a transformative journey of temporal space in the mind. As we increased our distance from the mainland, our minds let go of the trifles of the mainland and embraced the subtle natural cues that brought us into a different tempo of life. The dolphins that breached the water’s surface, the pelicans which violently plunged after their prey and the towering cumulonimbus clouds all acquainted us with a form of time that did not conform to human predilection or whim. We began, in the words of Shakespeare’s Prospero, a mental jaunt “in the dark backward and abysm of time” (The Tempest, I, ii, l. 50). As our minds and bodies glided into the island, time took on new meaning.
Entering Sapelo Island is not a dissimilar experience from walking into a jungle. After lugging our equipment off the Sapelo Queen at the island’s dock, we hopped on the bed of a sputtering UGMI truck that plunged us into the dense thicket of the island. Immediately, we were surrounded by the gnarled arms of thousands of live oaks, veiled in the aged locks of lengthy Spanish moss. A primeval essence pervaded the rhythm of life on the island, as ospreys circled above the canopy, and a myriad of different birds species chirped throughout the trees with cicadas droning in the background. Like the jungles on the forbidden continents and islands where the British imperialists encountered wild beasts red in tooth and claw, Sapelo too has its own dragons and leopards, lions.
While Captain Cook rightfully feared the Komodo dragons of Indonesia, Sapelo’s reptilian counterpart deserves equal attention. At the apex of the island food chain lies Alligator mississippiensis, an organism whose successful evolutionary form has remained unchanged for the past 200 million years. With adults exceeding 2 meters in length, a nighttime nature walk turns into an amble among low-lying dragons. In the darkness of night, the beams of a flashlight occasionally catch an alligator’s eyes, which reflect an eerie white-gold neon color that evokes a deep visceral reaction, surely a relict from our australopithecine days.
Just as leopards haunt the overhanging branches in the African grasslands, we also discovered another marvelous arboreal predator. While walking the transitional zone between the maritime forest and the ancient dune ecosystems, we could hear a ubiquitous clamor bubbling and clicking all around us from the leaf litter of the trails up through the red cedars at our ears. The forest was alive and teeming with Uca – fiddler crabs. Generally remaining denizens of the salt marshes, some Uca species have taken to an arboreal lifestyle among the trees. As we observed these curiously placed crustaceans, some of the males raised their large claw in vain defiance against the odd bipedal primate who looked them eye to eye.
The lions of Sapelo Island roam not the wide open expanses of the salt marshes but the great intertidal flats on Sapelo’s eastern shores. In this ever-changing environment where the water level drops and then rises several meters twice a day, Polinices, the lion of the tidal flats reigns supreme. With a large muscular foot for locomotion and a shell for protection, Polinices feasts on all other gastrapods using its rasping tongue to bore into through the protective shell of its hapless victim. Stalking its prey beneath the sediment-water interface, we observed the long, bilobed trace of Polinices moving just underneath the sand, out on the hunt. The predatorial behavior of boring is ancient tactic – the fossil record shows clear cases several hundred millions years ago. Sapelo was certainly a showcase for the relicts of time.
While walking across the high tide one morning, we happened across a curious sight. Emerging out of the frothy surf were enormous horseshore crabs, the size of a spare tire. While some of them expired in the hot sun before we arrived, baked in the exoskeleton, we discovered one individual moving roundabout in circles, feigning the characteristic death spirals of a horseshoe crab. Closer observation revealed the tragic story of this individual: missing from its 10 limbs were nearly all of its terminal appendages, forcing it move across the wet sand using only worn down stubs. Its cracked carapace was riddled with barnacles and crustaceans – hitchhikers who bespoke of the horseshoe crab’s long oceanic odyssey. I was most moved by the fact that this horseshoe crab meandered about completely blind. Where a proud pair of compound eyes once sat, only pecked out holes remained. We were all amazed by the intrepid, blind and crippled horseshoecrab. After recording our data, we reoriented it towards the sea, perhaps in the vain hope that we ought to rightfully return it to the sea, not considering that perhaps it had already played out its fate. I thought of Loren Eiseley’s description of the beaches of Costabel:
Along the strip of wet sand that marks the ebbing and flowing of the tide death walks hugely and in many formsÉIn the end the sea rejects its offspring. They cannot fight their way home through the surf which cast them repeatedly back upon the shore. (The Star Thrower, 69).
In our brief time with the blind horseshoe crab, I silently felt a bizarre connection to its struggle. In a world of blackness, it kept a singular path towards an alien world. A mysterious robotic drive fueled this organism, compelling it to move across a strange landscape towards an unforeseeable future. Perhaps I wanted to see a lesson in this invertebrate’s lonely and uncertain voyage. Was it a human reaction to anthropomorphize a “lower” organism’s story, or was I reaching for a more obscure meaning? Limulus polyphemus is an old organism – an animal whose form well predates that of the alligator, and most every other terrestrial vertebrate. For over 300 million years, horseshoe crabs have all lived the blind horseshoe crab’s ambiguous quest. I contemplated our participation in an ancient ritual, and how we, as human often do, changed the course of things. But in altering this one animal’s course by launching it back into the water and thereby whisking it away from the intertidal zone where organisms surface to die, I capitulated our act backwards across time as a metaphor. I yearned to believe that we were affirming the sanctity of life in face of that inexorable second law of thermodynamics which life on earth so beautifully violates. Life exists only in opposition to this march of physics. While we temporarily delayed the inevitable march of the universe one less victim, the image of the lone, blind horseshore crab remains burned into my memory.
One night, parlaying our luck against a softening evening shower, we trekked out towards Nannygoat Beach, at the south end of the island. It was sea turtle breeding season, and we hoped to find sea turtle emergence tracks or any trace of a large, sleek salt-water reptile pulling its ungainly terrestrial weight across the sands with the singular instinct to lay eggs. During sea turtle nesting season, any form of light is prohibited from the beach – all the better, and with the arms of the Milky Way lighting our way, we hardly needed a flashlight in any event.
We walked past the maritime forest and the ancient sand dunes, but just before reaching the beach we paused as we caught sight of a blood red moon, details blurred by its savagery, laying low on the eastern horizon, like some awful phantasm of the mind. Mesmerized by familiar celestial companion turned livid, we sat on the beach just above the slow crash of the waves and watched the moon rise, below the echoing thunders and flashes of an evanescent storm. As I sat fixated on the rising moon, the chorus of tree frogs and a million insects encompassing me, I felt not far removed from Shakespeare’s Caliban who declared that
The isle is full of noises...
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will wake me again (The Tempest, III, iii, ll. 141-145).
During one of our visits to the island, our research group had the distinct honor to eat at Lulu and George’s Restaurant. Hardly a restaurant in the mainland sense, George and Lulu operate out of a cabin next to their house, and cook sporadically for any visitors who call months in advance seeking a true island meal. Located in the Hog Hammock community, Lulu and George are life-long islanders. Lulu tends to the needs of the farm while George spends his days trawling and fishing. Both have youthful faces which betray their true age – their figures are weathered and sculpted by Sapelo.
In her small dining hall, Lulu served us a feast like no other. The meal focused on a low country boil made up of fresh shrimp carrots, different potatoes, onions, and an assortment of island vegetables. Complementing the boil were cavernous bowls of grits, beans, and mashed potatoes. Added into the mix were fresh fillets – slabs – of Pompano, and buckets of blue crabs the size of dinner plates. We ate a meal of the island, but crafted by an islander. When we asked Lulu the details about cooking this enormous feast, she paused.
“Well you know what: I put a little bit of myself into everything I do,” she reflected.
We sat for several hours as Lulu regaled us with stories of the island, her life and her family. While Lulu was not a professor of any institution of higher learning, it was undeniable that she was profoundly more learned in the ways of the world than the majority of Ivory tower academics. Not all forms of learning can be taught or found in books. Lulu’s sage advice on cooking, farming and her wonderful charisma all made it clear that some types of education live in the hollows of world “out there.”
As we returned to our lodging at the Marine Institute, bellies full and minds ablaze with stories, I wondered if Lulu somehow shared an odd connection with that blind horseshoe crab. One was an unexpected encounter with death and the other was a celebration of humanity, but both events were tied by the intangible forces of the island. I was haunted by both Lulu and the blind horseshoe crab – haunted by the wonder of an island so unlike anything in our buildings and laboratories of learning, “something,” as Loren Eiseley writes “not quite in simultaneous relationship with the rest of the world” (The Invisible Island, 161). Although, I had touched the island and literally incorporated it into my being, I was only a visitor whose sojourn on Sapelo was only temporary.
We left Sapelo Island as we had arrived — by boat. The day we left the island it began to rain, but the storm clouds suspended their Tempest to open a window for a safe departure. As the ferry gently took us back to the mainland, we drew ourselves out of the rythym of the island and resumed wearing our masks of civilization. We spoke to each other in short clips, laughed slightly, but somehow we had all recognized that the island spoke to us in way not familiar to the usual routes of human communication. While Sapelo was an anondyne to our daily concerns, we had experienced the profound mystery of an place servered from all connection with anything that was familiar to us – but its isolation, savagery, innocence continues to grip and occupy the mind.
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