Those In Wooden Cabins Ought To Throw Stones
My Favorite Place: Gotts Island, Maine
“Access to Great Gott Island requires a private boat. The closest mainland boat launch is in Bass Harbor on Mount Desert Island. The island's public dock, located in the small harbor on the western side in Bernard, is accessible three hours before and three hours after high tide.”
Thank you, Maine Coast Heritage Trust, for laying to rest my fears of publicly posting about my favorite place on earth lest my horde of readers descend upon this sacred land like so many brown-tail moths.
My great grandfather Thorstein Larsen designed and built a house on Gotts Island - you can read about it in the June 1972 issue of House Beautiful. My parents brought me to that house the day after I was born and I spent the majority of the first year of my life on the island.
When I occasionally descend into the harrowing abyss of being aware that I exist (I know you know what I’m talking about), I am sometimes able to clamber out with the aid of a little pet theory about how we become our selves. I’m not saying this is what I believe is real, just that I find it helpful sometimes:
Our sense of self is not some immutable soul from another realm, but a distinct point of light brought into focus by our surroundings. We are the first lungfuls of air we breathe, the milk we drink, the love poured into us by our family and friends. Being is not a solo, being is a relative position in space and time. Death will be a diffusion, not an extinguishment, and in an infinite universe on an infinite time scale we will come into focus over and over again.
I drivel on about this because if there is any truth to this idea, it is supported by how I feel on Gotts Island. I spent such a significant amount of time on Gotts Island as a fetus, infant, and growing child, and when I’m there I feel like all my atoms are properly arranged. As my brother Lars and I were sitting on the deck watching the ocean gargle and spit against the granite coast, he said, “I feel like this is where I’ll come when I die.” Amen, brother.
It’s been a long time since I’ve spent a long time on the island. I’ve been zooming around trying to figure out how to be in the world, and it takes more than a few days to shake that off and settle in. I was extremely happy to be able to spend the second half of August there this year.
The furthest you can walk in a straight line without getting your feet wet is just over a mile. There are around thirty houses on the island, no power grid, and no year round inhabitants since 1930 - although my dad has a fantasy of updating that statistic. There isn’t really much to do but sleep, read, play board games, go for walks, play badminton, throw a baseball back and forth, swim in the ocean, row, sail, fish, build fires, cook food, and be with friends and family.
I got to hang out with my dad instead of cramming in a visit. I split wood with my brother, caught mackerel, cooked mackerel for me and my cat.
We swam in the 57 degree ocean nearly every day. My childhood friend Conor, who hadn’t been to Gotts Island since 2004, came with his wife Lizzie. We hauled lobster traps and smashed the boiled lobsters open with rocks while wearing the same shirts we’d been wearing for three days.
And, I got to see the island through the eyes of my three and a half year old nephew Julian. The moment he got to the house, he sprinted almost immediately to the rocks in front of our house. He loudly proclaimed we were in the Pride Lands and had to protect them from the hyenas. We clambered back and forth from beach to beach, me watching him trial and error his way toward finding the same routes I and my brothers navigated when we were his age.
After one and a half round trips, I was exhausted. I am continually shocked by how tiring it is following a young child around. I sat down on the rocky beach and told him to come join me. I picked up a rock and threw it into the water. “More hyenas are swimming ashore to attack us. We have to sink them.” Julian’s eyes lit up. “We got sink ‘em!” He picked up a handful of pebbles and flung them into the water. I dug around me with both hands, searching for and quickly finding worthy projectiles. I flung them one after the other into the formerly calm inlet, working the water into a frothy boil peppered by Julian’s pebble spray. We threw, chucked, tossed, and flung for half an hour. We were late for dinner.
I hope I ignited a passion for responsibly throwing rocks. Because it is my favorite thing. I’ve thought a bit about why I like it so much, why I can do it for so long without getting bored. Throwing rocks in the ocean, throwing them as far as I can, trying to splash the same spot ten times in a row, bouncing one rock up on to rest atop a bigger rock and then trying to knock it off. Throwing rocks as hard as I can at a rock that juts out above the rest, watching my missiles crack and spark and zing off in different directions. I throw until my arm hurts and then I throw a little more.
I like to disturb the surface of the water and then watch it ripple its way back to calm. It’s meditative. I feel like I’m training for some unknown future act of heroism - one day I’ll be hiking and a mountain lion will come running toward me and I’ll have one chance to drill it between the eyes with a rock I’m carrying just in case. I know that’s ridiculous - if a mountain lion wanted to kill me, I would never know a thing about it. But I think these things nonetheless.
I feel like I’m influencing history. Not in a significant way, but I am hastening the geological breakdown of the island. I am a wave crashing upon the shore. A million years from now a crab will nestle in a patch of sand that exists because of a rock I broke apart that disintegrated a hundred years ahead of schedule - instead of a different crab nesting in the same patch one million and one hundred years from now.
I just like being in a place where it feels so right to do nothing.
Maybe some day I’ll be here again, and pick up the same rock.
Enjoyed every sentence plus the extra smile of Batty. What a wonderful place to experience
holy cow thats a lot of lobsters