emerson

One-Mile Island #8

Living what’s a dream for many of us, graphic designer Nik
Schulz checked out and headed for a remote island, St. Agnes, in the
north Atlantic. You can find previous excerpts through the link at right (or scrolling down).

Excerpt 8
By Nik Schulz

----11.18---

...While the other night was spooky, dark and windy, tonight is
quietly beautiful. It’s the first relatively clear night we’ve had in
a in some time. The night before last was absolutely lights-out, bag-
over-your-head black. Tonight the moon is shining down through the
clouds, soft, grey and cold. It’s a haunting light, a light that
feels like the moon is watching, seeing through us, drawing us out,
naked, and all of the little houses sit, quiet and still, trying
really hard to be good.

------

... I’m outside again and have taken the laptop with me. I’m sitting
against a rock called, "The Nag’s Head," a natural standing stone,
one part of which looks like the head of an old woman. The screen,
obscenely bright, drowns out my view of the landscape. I tilt it
down, so that I can see, and it illuminates the keyboard. It’s really
quite cold. Trying to type now with fuzzy gloves on, I feel somewhat
like a large Muppet. Boulders jut out of the moss to my left, frozen
in place as they tried to scurry past. The moss runs across to
neighboring pastures and down long, grey slopes towards towering
rocks, jagged and weather worn. I’ve come out late tonight to be with
this black island, and its secrets. This landscape, a faint, dark,
primeval beauty, lies silhouetted against the lit patchwork of a
shimmering sea. When the moon shows its face from behind the clouds,
everything changes in a transient rush. The land lies dusty now in
the chalky-white night. I’m transported—”wait, please!”—to another
planet.

I, voyager, sit quietly and scan the terrain ticking off
messages home, across plains named long ago. Time means little now.
This same magic night, with its same nocturnal dawn, transformed
landscape and cold, were experienced by shadowy figures that lived
here millennia ago. This shared experience transcends time. It
connects us. The same Nature that saw them, now sees me, alone on a
hillside, black parka illuminated, slick by the light of the screen,
marveling as, surely, they once did. It sees me, held in this
landscape of quiet and dreaming, as rabbits run in their sleep.

Let’s stay in touch.

1-Mile Island #7

Living what’s a dream for many of us, graphic designer Nik Schulz checked out and headed for a remote island, St. Agnes, in the north Atlantic. You can find previous excerpts through the link at right.

By Nik Schulz

Excerpt 7

--- 11.14---

Just got back from a walk tonight down to the boat shed at Pregliss Cove. It’s been raining. The air was cold and the night was absolutely pitch black—no streetlights. I’m glad I never saw Blair Witch, because if I had, I’d never be able to set foot outside at night without wetting my pants. The island was solid black. Things wobbled and jumped into the beam of my flashlight: boats lying on their sides by the shed for the winter, bushes, bracken and old churches.

The tide was out once again and I walked forever down the old lifeboat ramp, past clumps of seaweed and unidentifiable plant life, down to the very end. I started to breathe heavily as I tested myself by wading into the water in my knee-high rubber boots. The water swirled around my ankles, slyly, keenly, flashing grimly in the beam of my light. I backed out again chastening myself for taunting the sea late at night, after not even telling anyone I was going out. Not wise.

I pointed my flashlight out into the cove. The thin beam couldn’t penetrate more than 50 yds into the fuzzy, damp night. I scanned the soupy air back and forth and then... bang! A flash of white shown back at me, an aberration heaving to and fro in the chop. What the...? Whatever, or whoever I thought it was, turned out to be the beam of my own light reflected back at me in the cabin window of a small fishing boat, still moored in the cove.

It would almost be easier with my light off. With it on I could only see a small bright circle in a world of nothing. Seeing a small circle of churning sea, or there a boat, then a lobster trap jumping out of the darkness and disappearring again, made me uneasy. I did turn my light off and the sky calmed into a dark, grey glow. Stars shone and clouds slept, sprawled out above my head, while faint shadows showed the way and lighthouse beams swept the landscape from opposite horizons. Isn’t it curious that, sometimes, when we try to see, we see only little, and when we give up trying, we see everything.

I stood there trying to breathe as the cold, the sea, the night, the residue of history, and the vast sky, faintly lit like dim wool, all conspired to take my breath from me. I breathed as if underwater, as if it were all new again and my lungs wouldn’t do it on their own.

After a while, I started back up towards the boat shed, lungs still under manual control and jumped when I saw a shadow appear on the hull of one of fishing boat sitting along the path. It flashed twice in front of me as the double beam of Bishop’s Rock lighthouse, five miles to the southwest, swept past. The shadow was my own, I realized. Jesus... I’m going to have to get comfortable with this place or I’m just going to spend the whole winter being spooked by my own shadow.

The thing is, this place is so old. So many people have lived and died here, and countless others have lost their lives in the surrounding sea, that I’m pretty much expecting to see a ghost most of the time. Then again, maybe spirits won’t bother with me because I’m only going to be here for a few months. I don’t know too much about ghosts, but aren’t their souls are trapped in some kind of eternal limbo? Given that, I kind of picture them looking for long term commitment. I guess I’ll test that theory tomorrow night when I go out again and try to breathe some more.

Let’s stay in touch.

1-Mile Island #6

Photo by Nik Schulz

Living what’s a dream for many of us, graphic designer Nik Schulz checked out and headed for a remote island, St. Agnes, in the north Atlantic. You can find previous excerpts through the link at right.

By Nik Schulz

Excerpt 6

--- 11.12---

You would think that in a place like this time would have no real bearing. Well, you’d be wrong—it means everything.

The post-office store is open for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon (but not on Tuesdays). The boat to St. Mary’s, the main island, can be had three days a week. It sails promptly at 10:30am and returns even more promptly at 1:30pm. If you miss it, you’re screwed. There’s no other inter-island boat for two days. Nobody’s going to give you a lift either, because all of the smaller boats are hibernating on land for the winter. So you have to know it takes ten minutes to walk to town from the quay, twenty minutes to do your shopping, half an hour to try to convince the woman at the bank that just because you’ve just moved here and have no credit history in this country, you’re not a liability and should be given a checking account (which won’t work by the way), an hour to have a crab sandwich, a pint of stout and a conversation about island politics with a friend at the local pub, and ten minutes to walk back to the boat. And the pub, that stalwart bastion of English culture, is only open for a few hours a week (on St. Agnes anyway) starting at 9pm tonight.

No, time is of the essence.

Let’s stay in touch.

1-Mile Island #5

Photo by Nik Schulz

Living what’s a dream for many of us, graphic designer Nik Schulz checked out and headed for a remote island, St. Agnes, in the north Atlantic. You can find previous excerpts through the link at right.

By Nik Schulz

Excerpt 5

--- 11.12---

Today for lunch I’m having three eggs, three sausages, bread and butter, and I’m ramping my tea consumption up to world-championship levels. Later on, I’m going to put on my boots, tuck my pants into the tops of my socks and walk through fields covered with cows and manure, along hedgerows and over massive granite outcroppings, past more manure, and eventually down to the sea. If there is any truth to the idea that we are products of our environment, there’s a good chance I’m going to be an English farmer by next spring.

------

I was sitting in the yard in a folding chair today; taking advantage of the sun while it was out. (The days are getting shorter.) I held a leaf up to the sun and was stuck by its beauty. It’s one of the most beautiful things I think I’ve ever seen. It was transformed from a dull flat slice into a radiant, sharp jewel—deep, luxurious, densely green, with a bright finework of lines, each expanding fractally into a sub-network, finer and more intricate than the last. Such a dazzling array, it was almost as if one could see the energy left over from its creation as lighting, flash-frozen in an instant, formed the capillary channels.

Let’s stay in touch.

1-Mile Island #4

Photo by Nik Schulz

Living what’s a dream for many of us, graphic designer Nik Schulz checked out and headed for a remote island, St. Agnes, in the north Atlantic. You can find previous excerpts through the link at right.

Excerpt 4

--- 11.12---

Yipes, loneliness is hitting me like a brick. The initial couple of weeks will be the hardest I think. Quiet house, pitch dark island, I’ve just the throbbing hum of the refrigerator to keep me company. It really is a shock to go from the media-saturated, instant-everything culture that we live in to the slow, methodical, weather-worn quiet that I’m in now. What a drawn out, pulling, emptiness in my chest.

------

I’m noticing that time slips away easily here. There are cats to pet, walks to take and cows to talk to, and since life isn’t rushing past around me, I don’t feel rushed. I heard a story when I was here last summer. I don’t know if it’s true. Maybe it was just something to test the gullibility of outsiders but it was told to me like this: A woman once wanted a porch added to the back of her house and a local carpenter said he’d do it, but he wouldn’t be able to get to it right away. “No problem,” the woman said, “whenever you have some free time let me know.” A year went by, then two. “Are you going to have time to build that porch this summer?” the woman asked again. “Oooh, I’m not sure but I will let you know,” came the reply. “Well, do keep it in mind.” That summer passed, as did the next and the next and the next. “I was really hoping that this spring you might be able to build that porch for me,” the woman inquired again. Came the retort: “Look, if I’d known you wanted it done that quickly I would have never taken the job!”

The point is yesterday it was Tuesday and today it’s Friday and I don’t know what happened in between. Anyway I do remember this:

I took a bath the other day with water from the roof heated in the stove. (We don’t really have a shower.) I fiddled with taps, let the tub fill and went to pour more heating oil into the tank outside or something. When I came back to get into the bath, the water was tinged green and floating with bits of moss. I’m not talking the odd bit of moss dancing and darting around as I tried to scoop it up. No, it was basically a moss-bath. Not wanting to waste water, I figured it might be good for my skin (can anyone confirm?) and jumped in.

It occurred to me, after I was generously moss-covered, that there exists here a much greater integration of inside and out. A lot of inside spends time outside: chairs sit for years in the garden. Cans, jugs, buckets and bottles crowd together near the path at the side of the house, and notes and notices brave the weather on the wall down at the post-office store (one building, two entities).

Conversely, outside often has no problem making itself at home indoors. Observe: my bed in the barn last summer (four shipping pallets and a mattress) now has a large row boat resting on it, various implements of yore have found retirement accommodations in various homes: propellers, oars, the odd oxen yoke. A tiny patch of clover has snuck in from a larger patch outside the door and now grows inside, near the door frame. Beyond that, moths, moss, wind and water all manage to drop in on occasion. But our door is often (standing) open and I don’t mind because I feel somehow more integrated into the bigger scheme of life than if my inside and outside never mingled. Did I mention that there are about 70–80 people living on this island? Well, there are about 70-80 spiders living in our house.

See how nicely everything works out?

Let’s stay in touch.

1-Mile Island #3

Photo by Nik Schulz

Living what’s a dream for many of us, graphic designer Nik Schulz checked out and headed for a remote island, St. Agnes, in the north Atlantic. You can find previous excerpts through the link at right.

By Nik Schulz

Excerpt 3

---11.06---

Down the road, I’m told, there is a dairy where I can order my milk unpasteurized, straight from the cow. This will be a first for me and I’m looking forward to being able to thank the cows personally for their efforts. I have to say I didn’t spot the dairy on my brief round this morning. It’s funny that I wouldn’t be able to spot something as substantial as a dairy on an island that is a mile wide across its longest length.

Behind our cottage stands the old coast guard building, built the wrong way around in the early part of this century. The look out tower is supposed to face out to sea, but someone laid the plans down wrong and... well, let’s just say the view of the rest of the island is pretty good from up there. Today I believe it houses a bed and breakfast as well as a couple of private residences but no confirmation on that yet.

The house that I’m staying in is easily well over a 300 years old. There 3 bedrooms upstairs and two sitting rooms and large kitchen downstairs. It was built by a shorter generation of islanders. I have to watch my head. The ceilings, floors and beams all heave and bend showing the elasticity of wood over great periods of time. The walls though are solid, having been built out of jumbo-Igloo-cooler-sized blocks of granite. It’s a house in progress, at one point a bathroom was added, then a sunroom, then, in the 80s, electricity, and, most recently, before I arrived, phones were installed on our behalf. The other new addition is a 30s-era Rayburn stove which heats our water and the cottage itself by burning white oil fed in from the tank outside. I say “tank” but it’s, basically, sawed-off plastic container standing on a rusty barrel, with an upside-down Tupperware tub for a lid, which is weighed down by a large rock.

It’s a little hokey but it works and I think that’s the criteria by which things are judged around here. Our water is collected from the roof, so the odd bit of moss or stray bug’s legs sometimes makes it through the tap (and into the tea). It has the look of a guesthouse: furniture, rugs and dishes are all hand-me-downs from various sources and eras. It’s old and a bit disheveled, but it’s home for the winter. After all, we have all that we really need: a roof that works, running water, heat and friendly neighbors all around. It’s really quite civilized.

Let’s stay in touch.

Enough about me, what about you?

By Dale Conour

emerson’s ears are burning today as Salon’s Laura Miller riffs on Philip Gura’s new book, "American Transcendentalism." At the heart of her piece is the question of individualism and its role in the pursuit of social justice.

"...Gura quietly mourns the "other half of the Transcendentalist’s dream, of a common humanity committed to social justice." Instead, he writes, "individualism" has triumphed, "in the Gilded Age and beyond." Some of us have even managed to convince ourselves that individualism is the only viable route to social justice, sharing Emerson’s faith in self-reliance as the consummate virtue. Whether they are as mistaken in that belief as George Ripley was in his, remains to be seen; here’s hoping it results in nothing worse than a bankrupt farm."

The "farm" she refers to is Ripley’s attempt at a utopian community, Brook Farm, which, like most projects which attempt to bring individuals—individualists—together didn’t pan out. Kinda like trying to form a federation of nonconformists.

It gets to the crux of our problems, really. To change the world, first change yourself. Ok, great, but what if the next guy over doesn’t want to and he’s doing things to others I think are really wrong? Do I keep my eyes on the spiritual prize, or turn activist? And by doing so, do I truly find the path I thought I was on?

You’re in the company of the New Romantics here, so look to your feelings: What do they tell you?

Links: America’s first Me Generation, George Ripley backgrounder

Let’s stay in touch.

1-Mile Island #2

Photo by Nik Schulz

Living what’s a dream for many of us, graphic designer Nik Schulz checked out and headed for a remote island, St. Agnes, in the north Atlantic. You can find previous excerpts through the link at right.

Excerpt 2

By Nik Schulz

---11.06---

I’ve just arrived on St. Agnes and still can’t really grasp yet that I’m here. Yesterday I took off from the airfield near Land’s End on the southwestern tip of England and about fifteen minutes later I was on St. Marys, Scilly’s main island. In the 45 minutes I had to wait for the ferry over here I went grocery shopping, bought socks, inquired about setting up a checking account (at two banks) and lugged my loot back to the quay. It’s amazing how quickly you can get some things done around here. On the down side my luggage is waiting on the dock in Penzance until the freight boat is repaired and can pass sea trials. My dingy pants, already stained in London, will have to suffice another week.

Upon arrival at the cottage, Hendrik (my friend Jack’s dad) went over the essentials: the electricity is on a timer—plonk the (outdated) coin through the timer every morning to keep the power on; the heating oil for the stove flows in from a small plastic tank outside—top it up daily. Check. Notably, he doesn’t hand me a key to the cottage, not that I really need one. I put away the groceries and made a pot of tea (when in Rome...) and sat down, feeling unsteady as if the horizon line in my head were swaying to and fro. I was very much looking forward to everything but reality was like jumping off a bridge—such a change. Here I am on this little island. All of the things I rail against aren’t here, no McDonalds, no Blockbuster, no noisy, rude people or trash in the streets. Yet all of these things, dislike them though I do, are familiar. Yes, culture shock has set in.

This morning I took a walk around the island, which is covered, in wet, green grass, compact, springy moss, and purple heather. There is also a tenacious cousin of the fern here, quite fecund. It clings to many a hedgerow and overpopulates many a gully. There are no roads here, only a scant network of paths, each one a Land-Rover’s width wide. It’s a tight fit since the plants and ferns keep trying to reclaim the path for themselves and given that there are only a couple of Land-Rovers and a few tractors on the island my guess is that the odds lie with the plants.

Let’s stay in touch.

1-Mile Island #1

Photo by Nik Schulz

By Dale Conour

Nik Schulz, an illustrator (Wired, New York Magazine, Make, and others), actually did something a lot of us dream of: He checked out and headed for a remote, one-mile-wide island, St. Agnes, in the north Atlantic, just before the changing of the millennium.

Actually, he did something else a lot of us keep saying we’ll do: He kept a journal.

Since many of us may not ever get the chance to do this, and because Nik’s descriptions of the island and his life there are so evocative, I’m running short excerpts from his journal every other day, along with his photographs. You can read his first excerpt under "Extras" at right; subsequent excerpts will debut here first, and then can be found through that link.

To kick it off, here’s an email Q&A between Nik and I.

Q: Talking with you about your trip to St. Agnes, I was really struck by your motivation for doing this, which was that you felt you needed to leave the city and go to a sparsely populated little island  [70 people] in the north Atlantic ocean in order to find ways to reconnect with people. Makes quite a comment on society, no?

A: Yeah, you wouldn’t expect it but I think it sort of makes sense. The more people, the bigger the land on which they live, and faster the pace of their lives, the less chance they’ll have to run into and spend time with one another. Reduce all of the variables and the opposite seems to be true.

Q: How were you rewarded for taking this leap, for changing your life for awhile?

A: Well, at first I was rewarded with disorientation and loneliness. It was more difficult than I thought to leap from fast pace of San Francisco to slow quiet of St. Agnes. Mentally, it felt a little like jumping from a moving train. After the initial tumble though, it was very satisfying. I had more time to spend with the friends I made (I always feel like the time we spend with one another is our biggest luxury). I had a sense of being part of the land. I noticed the changes in the color of the sea, the heights of the tides, the phases of the moon (there were no street lights, let alone streets—during a new moon, the night was bag-over-your-head black). The biggest reward though, was realizing that I enjoyed writing and could actually do it.

Q: What surprised you most about yourself during your stay?

A: The latter was the biggest surprise. Also, I found that I enjoyed pickling smelt. I was surprised to learn how much I was a product of my environment. In San Francisco I enjoy going to art openings and riding motorcycles. On St. Agnes I enjoyed soaking small fish in vinegar.

Q: How did keeping a journal affect your experience?

A: I found that I actually remembered it. It saved it from getting lost and fading away. In recording and rereading our experiences, I think we can learn from them. We can discover our own truth and make future experiences even better. In this way, I think journaling can be part of a powerful process.

Q: You wrote a lot, you took photographs, but did you draw too?

A: I didn’t. I’ve never been much of a sketcher. I know that’s probably funny, given that I’m an illustrator. I work on the computer, mostly.

Q: Any advice about the practice of journaling you can pass along?

A: In my experience, it seems like you need two basic things. The first is space, the mental kind. I didn’t have a TV, a radio, many books or even a job. I found that I only wrote because I was in a vacuum, and you know how much nature hates that. Writing rushed in to fill the void.

Then, of course, it helps to have some experiences or ideas that you feel compelled to record. I look at it kind of like making tea. You need your space (the water), your fire (the heat) and your experiences (the tea). They infuse one another. I’m not saying we all need to quit our jobs and move to an island but if your water is all full of the rocks and sand of everyday life, a) it’s hard to fit the tea in there too, and b) it’s just gonna taste all gritty.

Link: Nik’s website

Let’s stay in touch.

Global warming and the Shock Doctrine

By Dale Conour

In a recent post, I asked a scary question:

"...are we, thanks to the success of capitalism, and because of the changing global climate, heading toward a world society not defined by the traditional national or racial boundaries, but by the claiming of favorable locations by the haves, more marginal areas by the have-a-littles, and the shitholes begrudgingly held by the have-nots?"

And then I suggested that this was territory most likely already covered in sci fi. Turns out, the same speculation is showing up in today’s non-fiction. This month’s Rolling Stone features an interview with Canadian journalist Naomi Klein about her new book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," a look at the rise of  the  military -industry-private contractor complex, which has cashed in after a series of natural disasters—and manmade ones, ala Iraq.

When asked to look into the US’s future, Klein posited:

"We could have a fully privatized response to climate change, with a small group of people buying their way out for a couple of generations. Our world could look more like Baghdad—a green zone guarded by Blackwater and everything provided by Halliburton and then just a raging red zone outside."

Links: To the victors go the spoils, NaomiKlein.org

Let’s stay in touch.