Books in Brief. - "On Whale Island: Notes from a Place I Never Meant to Leave" - book review

National Review, Sept 16, 2002 by William F. Buckley Jr.

On Whale Island: Notes from a Place I Never Meant to Leave, by Daniel Hays (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 240 pp., $22.95)

This book is by the co-author of My Old Man and the Sea, the incomparable account of travel on a 25-foot sailboat from Old Lyme, Connecticut, to Old Lyme, Connecticut, via Cape Horn. Daniel Hays was then 24 and not quite grown up. Now he is 39 and not quite grown up -- which is how those who wonder at his naturalist and solipsistic obsessions wish it would always be. A brilliant and articulate father (David) was dominant in the first book, but this one is all Daniel and his little island off Nova Scotia to which he took his bride and stepchild for one year of exultant isolation. He is hardly indifferent to the lively, combative wife who endured it all ("for Wendy, my joy forever" is his dedication), or to the bookish 12-year-old Boy Tarzan, superbly exfoliated ("Last month Stephan got to the part in The Princess Bride where the hero dies. He burst into tears and threw the book into the ocean. I waded in, dried it off, and read it to him until the hero came back to life. He sniffled a little, and then he took the book back").

Hays is a superb writer of the outdoors and the indoors, and chronicles even his own misanthropy with wit and cunning ("I seem to be unbearable to my family. Especially at night, when I must turn on the radio so my thoughts can unfocus, otherwise they cling on and on, leaving fractal trails in multiple shades of black"). When he has only one more day of the committed 365 to stay on his island, he writes, "I'm content here, and I'm watching the seasons go by and I want to stay forever this simple. I can hear an outboard, Kingsland's foghorn, the bell buoy off Weed Harbor, a high note of wind in the trees, a distant surf. The house shudders in the wind, small gusts shaking the glass globe in the lamp. A birdsong, another deeper background wind noise, some specific waves."

This book can't be held up as a guide for Thoreauvians intending to do the same thing, since there are not enough of these to satisfy a publisher. But, sure, there'll be others -- they are not entirely different, after all, from the legions who set out on a boat alone intending a circumnavigation. Yet it is amusing (and instructive) to survey a list of what was consumed on Whale Island in 365 days: toilet paper, 0.2 miles; beer, 96 bottles; wood, 4.9 cords; propane, 380 lbs.; Monopoly, 47 games played. Electricity: "In one year we used the equivalent of one electric stove with its broiler and all four burners going for one hour."

The list is followed by "Major fits: I'm leaving. (4) I'm dying. (7) You make my life hell. (16) What the hell am I doing here? (15) I have no life (44) We're out of chocolates. (1)"

Devotion to nature at Hays's level of intensity and lyricism is hard to keep up. But Hays does it. "I could never listen this completely before. I have stood in our harbor and heard water being dragged through seaweed, a jellyfish turning over, a ripple being reflected off a rock. Just for these new sounds in my life I want to stay here forever." He has left Whale Island, which is of course the right thing to do, though doing the right thing can be a pain. If he decides to go back, we'll find a nice place for Wendy and Stephan.