Island Fantasies

Island Fantasies, No Man Is An Island
November 3, 2002
What is it about Islands that beckon? I suppose each of us can come up easily with our own vision of island living. I grew up in the Philippine Islands. I know exactly what it's like to live in an island. So what possessed me to pay $450 a day to stay at Greyfield Inn in Cumberland Island where there's absolutely nothing else in the place but it's maritime wilderness? The only lodging in town is Greyfield Inn with 12 rooms; otherwise you backpack and rough it in the wilderness camps to sleep over in the island. Greyfield is a 5-star historic inn operation where dinners are a dressed-up affair preceded by cocktails and civilized conversation in the antique-furnished living room. You are given a tour of the Island by a resident naturalist in an open truck with blankets provided to warm your lap. At the end of the tour, he switches the wheels to the 4-wheel mode and drives on the beach for miles and you see nothing but wide dunescapes and wild horses and shore birds and blue sky and foaming waves. The air meeting your face is crisp and fresh you can just feel the exchange of gases taking place in your lungs, clean air in, polluted city air out. After the tour, you can pick up your gourmet picnic basket and you can take it anywhere to have lunch. You can eat in the wide front porch or on picnic tables on the front lawn, or in the back overlooking the marsh, or you can take it under the canopies of spreading live oaks decorated with hanging Spanish moss, or you can take it to the beach on a bike available everywhere in the inn property. On the beach you can walk for miles without meeting anyone except a wild horse or a flock of migrating swallows, or sea gulls. The inn provides special bikes you can ride on the beach, and I learned to ride the bicycle this way, an exhilarating experience I'll always treasure for years to come. Camping out means, well you know what camping is. It would be not as primitive if you can get reservations in the Sea Camp area, the only developed section of the Island for the public. For $4 a day users fee, plus the ferry ride to get to the Island ($12) you can have camping amenities such as power connection, flushing toilets, cold showers, and fire pits for cooking. But you have to bring everything else of course and carry them on your back for at least 5 ½ miles and then you pack all your garbage after breaking camp and take it on your back again because you're supposed to leave the place undisturbed, without any sign that you've been there. Cars are not allowed on the Island unless you're a descendant of one of the 10% landowners in the island. The rest of the island is owned and administered by the Park Service as a National Seashore. That was designated in 1972 after wrangling by conservationists, developers, politicians, and the heirs of industrial tycoons, the Carnegies primarily. Now the Island is available to the public albeit in limited ways. Because it is operated as a wilderness area there are restrictions in its use. The 4 camp sites 3 of which are in wilderness areas, only accept 20 reservations each at a time for a maximum of seven days each stay, so the island only sees about 50,000 visitors a year. The waiting list is about 6 months. It is the same for Greyfield Inn, the only private enterprise on the Island, by virtue of heir succession. If the owners decide to sell the National Park Service has first option on the property, which it will exercise for sure so that the whole Island will be all public eventually. I made reservations a year ago only to cancel it because Johnny was stricken with virulent systemic lupus. When he got slightly better to allow travel, I made another reservation 6 months ago to visit the Island to celebrate our 34th wedding anniversary. I mentioned this to friends during dinner at home one night and in a single response everyone wanted to come too. Right then and there we logged on the Inn website and as fate would have it there were 3 rooms available and the Abelleras, Mallaris, and Apanays booked them that very instant.
Why did we want to go? Why all this excitement about an Island? The first time I returned to visit home, after being away for 20 years, we went to a resort island off Cebu. It was a different experience than what I had when I was growing up in Pasacao. Though those childhood years in Pasacao I remember as priceless, the island experience this time as an adult has other yearnings and fantasies tacked on to it. Perhaps I have been influenced heavily already by western ideas, or have I drifted slightly from my roots? I said then, “ Oh, let’s buy a little Island here to retire to!” And what was I envisioning then? I had an image of an idyllic paradise. Sunshine and balmy weather all year round, fragrant breeze blowing your hair, walking barefoot on the beach under moonlit skies, I, the queen of this piece of earth, separate from the rest of the world, in my own domain, self-sufficient and beholden to no one. I will surround myself with beauty and with the joyous company of family and friends, who will come and visit and I will shower them with hospitality and generosity and I in return will be enriched by their presence and affection. That was the scenario. I thought it was original then until I learned about the settlers of Cumberland Island, especially the last tycoons who built their mansions there and tried to live in the Island albeit on a grand scale, but the broad stroke is exactly as I saw it in my whimsical musing.
The Island belonged to the Timucuan Indians in pre-Columbian times. They are now extinct, killed by the diseases brought by the European colonists, to which these tribes didn’t have any immunity. They were tall, reaching seven feet to the Spaniard’s average 5 ½ feet. They were formidable and brave warriors to be sure, but the white man’s germs wiped them out and a succession of these white settlers tried to live in the island. When the English drove out the Spaniards they named the Island after the Duke of Cumberland. Later the Crown parceled the Island to loyal subjects and the Island evolved into Plantations until they were broken up after the Civil War. The new industrial tycoons, the Carnegies primarily bought most of the acreage and lived their fantasies on the Island in much the same way I envisioned it. The ill-fated John Kennedy, Jr. and Carolyn Bissett had very romantic and exclusive notions of the Island and had their supposedly secret wedding there. The Dungeness Mansion, which is now in ruins, was the center of that lifestyle. It was surrounded by gardens, it hosted glittering socials for family and VIPS and the beautiful people of the era, it cultivated crops and raised farm animals, it fished in the surrounding waters, it was a self-sustaining entity. But obviously it didn’t last, the dream cannot be sustained. Today the Island is close to how it existed when the Timucuans boiled the sap from the indigenous holly bushes that grow on the North Shore and in their ceremonial rituals they formed a circle and drank this brew until they were intoxicated to the point of throwing up. So our company of dear friends drank Cabernet that we smuggled in our luggage, we toast our friendship, our affection for one another, and cherish our fortune of being together as couples for over 30 years and for $450 a day we got to live our Island fantasies and we only have to pay the price in expendable dollars. That was a good deal, if we forget about the swarm of ticks and gnats and mosquitoes that would eat one alive whenever the air gets warm. We were glad to flee the Island in a fast boat to escape this attack.