The Nature of Islands

BY LARRY OLMSTED

Hooper: “Well, uh, it doesn’t make much sense for a guy who hates the water to live on an island.”

Chief Brody: “It’s only an island if you look at it from the water.”

Jaws is one of my all-time favorite movies, even though the title character, a great white shark, is extremely unrealistic, and it takes place on a made up, fictional landmass, Amity Island. But despite this creative license, Jaws gets a lot of things about island living right, including the differing perspectives of Chief Brody, a transplanted “off islander” who can’t adjust, and the close-knit locals, who understand what living on an island means.

I belong to a golf club in Ireland called Ballyliffin that sits in the northernmost part of the Emerald Isle, on a peninsula in the Republic’s County Donegal that juts up above even Northern Ireland. When you tee it up it is impossible to forget you are on an island, as this rugged coast is exposed to nothing but the fierce North Atlantic, with whipping winds and waves crashing on rocky shores, open ocean for over 900 miles north to the next island – Iceland. When I eat fish and chips in the clubhouse, it’s locally caught cod, the fresh oysters Ireland is famous for come from Galway, and the whisky is almost all made in either the Bushmills or Jameson distilleries, both in port cities, as is Ireland’s most famed beverage, Guinness stout.

Likewise, for tourists, Ireland’s most famous landmarks all sit on the coast – The Cliffs of Moher, Giants Causeway, Ring of Kerry, Dingle Peninsula, Wild Atlantic Way, Dunluce Castle, Carrickfergus Castle, Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge, the charming towns of Waterford and Kinsale, the Aran Islands, the shipyard museum where the Titanic was built, every famous links golf course, and the biggest cities, Dublin, Belfast, Galway and Cork.

But there are also vast swaths of Ireland’s interior where you cannot see the whitecaps or the fishing boats, and for a moment it would seem possible to forget you are even on an island. But then you talk to someone, or buy something, or order food, and you are drawn back, because it is not the surfing or fishing or beaches that make an island special, it is the islanders.

I lived in New York City for many years without ever meeting my next-door neighbors, and their apartment doors were literally feet from mine – in a shared hallway. Islands are physically isolated by nature, but that kind of human isolation is not possible on an island, where communities are more tightly knit, and everyone is interdependent. In a way, island living is a slice of human history frozen in time, from back when everyone lived together in a village for mutual survival. While many islands are paradises, most also have their share of hardships, from potato famines to hurricanes, tsunamis to volcanoes, droughts to floods, and simply obtaining “stuff,” other than fish and tropical fruits, is often tricky and expensive. The power and cable and Wi-Fi go out more, the ferries break down, and things mainlanders take for granted, like getting their car serviced or going to a specialist doctor, can be major endeavors. In places like St. Barts, if you want your kids to be educated beyond grade school, you have to ship them off to another country altogether.

The upside of this is community, and people actually know each other, a trait often lost on city dwellers. In Hawaii, information moves through the islands via word-ofmouth so quickly they call it the “Coconut wireless.” Once, back before there were cell phones, on a trip to Nassau in the Bahamas, I left my Filofax, which had all my contacts and calendar info, in a taxi. At the airport, I explained my predicament to the woman at the info desk, who asked me to describe my cabbie. When I did, she knew who he was by his signature cap, and assured me she would get my book back by the time I returned to fly out the next day, and she did. Try that at LAX.

The challenges create a unity among islanders, who work hard because they have to, and then play hard because they want to. In cities like New York and Milan, people famously live to work – and at a frenetic pace – while islanders work to live, and then share more simple pleasures, from a communal fish fry to pig roast. I’ve seen no equivalent on earth of Barbados’ ubiquitous “rum shops,” sort of neighborhood newsstands cum bodegas across the island where locals stop in to buy a newspaper, sit and play dominoes, sip a rum and catch up on the island news of the day, face to face. It’s a beautiful way to live. In Bermuda residents join together to sail, in the West Indies for cricket, in Ireland they take to the links, in

Fiji they dive, in Hawaii they surf, in Mallorca there is a huge cycling sub-culture, and so on. On many islands, even doing nothing is elevated to an art form, from linen clad sunset cocktails overlooking the water to an afternoon snooze in a hammock. Islanders take their laid-back lifestyle seriously and have perfected it to such a degree that they have claimed their own calendar, universally known as “island time.” Or as a good friend of mine who is a chef from the Dominican Republic explained, “In the DR manana doesn’t mean tomorrow, it just means not today.”

Of course, I’m generalizing, and every island is different, especially where size and climate are concerned. All of the five thousand odd people who live in the town of Sao Vicente on Madeira know each other through one or two degrees of separation, while the population of Honolulu does not. But the sense of community among island dwellers is very real, and it translates into a warmth and welcome that extends to visitors. When you travel to a big city, you are passing through, but when you visit many islands, you become a temporary resident. There is a reason that “Irish hospitality” is world famous, and it’s not just because the locals are Irish, it’s because they are islanders. I have been made to feel the same way in Mallorca, Fiji, Nevis, Abaco and many other places where both locals and visitors are thrust together and linked by the waters surrounding them in every direction. That is something worth traveling for, and circling back to Jaws, as the mayor proudly noted of his island, “Amity, as you know, means friendship.”

B&R Scheduled Island Trips

Adriatic Islands Active

Mallorca E-Biking

Greek Islands Active

Sicily Walking

Dalmatian Coast Active Ireland Biking

Sardinia & Corsica Biking

Japan Walking

Central Japan Biking & E-Biking

Southern Japan Biking