Island Fever

I find I get a distinct feeling of horror when I look at remote oceanic islands or atolls. Especially the aerial photographs of them, as in Palmyra Atoll. The remoteness, and that endless dark of the ocean surrounding it. And only six feet of elevation. A couple of years ago, I wrote a short story set on an atoll, although the true horror of such a place wasn't something I really explored, versus the exigencies of survival for the characters in it.

Anyway, I'm researching islands and atolls for a story that's been in my head of late (really a revision of an earlier piece), and I find those photographs and the isolation of the places really horrify me. A drawing on a map doesn't really do it to me, because that's just a drawing. But a photograph makes the reality of the place more coherent to me. This place exists. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It has only a six-foot elevation. The slightest storm surge would swamp you, to say nothing of a fucking tsunami.

And reading about Palmyra, itself, made me think of yet another story, a short story. Of course, a horror story. All that ocean water, just waiting to swallow you up! Atolls are land's last gasps before they go underwater for good, never to rise again. So symbolic, so spooky!

All of that islandish thinking got to me when, on a whim, I read about Pitcairn Island, seeing what's been going on there lately. Something like 46 people live there, so it's a metropolis compared with Palmyra Atoll, which might have 4 people living there. Still, so isolated, so splendidly horrible.

I mean, I think I'd go apeshit and drown if I were adrift at sea; that would kill me before sharks or starvation or thirst -- and obviously if the choice was a desert island or being adrift, gimme that desert island. And I think the Hawaiian Islands are cool, but those are big islands, compared to those teensy ones -- the bigger the island, the more okay I am with it. But the tinier the island (and the more remote it is), the more freaked I get by it.

Maybe it's because I'm a fire sign -- the prospect of being awash in all of that water just spooks me. I look at the ocean and think "Death." I mean, it's also beautiful, and home to amazing life and wondrous animals, but for Man, there's a world of difference between coastal waters -- warm, inviting, beautiful -- and the deep sea. Like "rogue wave" -- those words spook me, too; powerful, you can reason with it, it'll destroy you -- as hokey as that "Poseidon Adventure" remake surely was, the trailer for it, showing that monstrous wave hitting the boat, that spooked me, makes my hands sweat just to recall it. Or that scene in "Master and Commander..." when the "Jonah" kills himself, holding onto a cannonball and holding his breath as he descends into the dark, trusting the cannonball to take him deep enough, fast enough, that there's no going back.

And those little islands, forgotten splinters of stone and coral in vast, untamed oceans, hoo boy! Big-time angst! The ocean spooks me. Endless mystery, unpredictable, eater of men. I'm always fascinated by sea monsters, too -- sea monsters are natural corollaries to the sea, itself, almost metaphoric. Spousette loves the ocean, and I enjoy dipping in the water at the shore, and even taking a boat out onto the sea, but when land is out of sight, something else gnaws at my bones, the endless blue-blackness of the sea, and I'll look over the railing at the water and the waves, and think "This is Death."