Islands
I'm on an island. In fact, I'm on the far end of an island, away from the airport and almost all of the other resorts. This is the quiet side, where the wind blows so persistently that the hotel we're at doesn't offer any beach umbrellas at all. I have a sunburn on one arm, the arm I used to apply sunscreen to the rest of my body.
When people enter the sea here, they are usually wearing a snorkel. A barrier reef sits close to the edge of the coast, and the water is shallow but the bottom is rocky, with scattered coral and long settled construction rubbish, full of divots to twist an ankle. When you look below the surface of the water, you immediately see how many fish are circling, swimming school all around you, even when you are only in a few yards from the beach. It's eerie how much life there is, darting in and around you so that you'd never notice. They swim right alongside your arms and legs but you never feel them, you can only see them making their silent perambulations. Every evening at five, a hotel concierge gathers guests at the end of the dock to feed them, so there are always lots of fish to be spotted there.
Every place we go had a wooden sign post with the directional arrows attached to it, telling you how far it is to Buffalo or Sydney or Vancouver or wherever. If there isn't an actual signpost, there is a framed picture of one. Often there are license plates on the wall as well. I guess the point is to remind you how far you've gone to get away. What lengths you will go to for a good time. Driving around the rim of the island we see dozens of beachside cemeteries.
It is hard to guess where the guests are from. They could come from anywhere to this island — it is not a particularly inevitable destination from anywhere — but mostly they seem to be from Long Island. A sullen heave-set man at the bar talks about a big fire he saw on the island, and the helicopters he spotted circling it. Then he narrates his process of checking on his phone for more information. He doesn't find anything. He lets it drop. Eventually we hear his story. He and his wife come every year for three weeks to stay in their timeshare. They have been coming for decades, but everything on the island is divided into two eras: before the hurricane and after. After the hurricane many resorts for closed for over a year, and much had to be rebuilt. The island government must have done away with the old zoning restrictions, his wife said, because now they build the hotels so high you can't even see the beach. It is as if there are trying to pump as many people through as possible, while they still can.
A sign posted in the elevator explains about the seagrass. Sargassum, which has invaded the region and piles up on the beach in massive bales. The poster explains how this is happening, "according to the best educated guess of scientists," because of global warming or pollution or some combination of the two. The resort is trying its best to find a solution that balances guests' needs with the desire to "do the right thing for the environment." The phrase do the right thing for the environment is in quotation marks. As far as I can tell, this seems to be a matter of hauling the beached grass away with a front loader— we see men every morning pitchforking it into the shovel scoop — and possibly trapping some offshore in giant nets. There is a conspicuously large sargassum patch floating out in the sea about 300 yards off the coast that we can see from our balcony. We wondered where they take it; maybe the fire the man saw was a burn-off.
Life here feels like an ongoing series of small improvisations. In a free newspaper for tourist that we pick up in the liquor store — the paper was called Fun News, which I saw as a hopeful repudiation of "fake news" — the front page story is about a local "bounty hunter" who killed 10,000 lionfish, an invasive species that has taken hold around the reefs, destroying indigenous marine life. His efforts, the paper claims, have made a dent in the lionfish's ability to reproduce, and not only that, lionfish tacos and lionfish ceviche have become tasty local delicacies.
In the men's room at the beach club there was a silkscreen painting of a pineapple wearing sunglasses. The bartender serves me whiskey neat in a champagne flute because he says it would break his heart to serve it to me in a plastic cup. He mentions that he is from Guyana — "You know, Jim Jones." We are the last people at the bar. It is 9:30 p.m.
I have had the Kinks song "I'm on an Island" in my head intermittently the whole time we are here: "I'm on an island / And I've got no where to run / Because I'm the only one / Who's on the island." To the extent those aren't merely convenient rhymes and have some larger meaning, I take those lines to suggest that you can't escape the island of self — that when you feel alienated, no matter where you are, you are on your own private island that you take with you wherever you go, like Pig Pen's cloud of dust in the Peanuts cartoons. There is nowhere to run because you can't escape yourself.
But being on a literal island is a way to lose track of the private island in your mind. I start to lose my sense of self and feel like I am just anyone from anywhere who can afford to be here. It makes no sense to try to be more than one of the thousands of faces the people working at the resort must see from month to month, a name and a face and a day you will be leaving. I just cooperate with the plans springing up around me. Yes, I'll eat at the "interactive pasta station." Yes, I'll have another piña colada. Yes, I'll try the lionfish. Yes I will drink the Kool Aid.