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Island Siren Song

By Ryan Murdock

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Published: 22Jun2009
Word count: 517
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The Landscape: Stony Adriatic islands scattered along the length of Croatia's coast. Coarse green shrubs and olive trees whose thin leaves flash silver undersides to the breeze. Translucent blue: a breath would cloud that water of glass.

Light has a clarity there that is like no place else, and it provokes a clarity of thought. Priorities and needs slip so easily into place. You realize the hollowness of the rat race, of consumerism, of chasing anything at all. Life is distilled down, and you understand contentment: a bottle, a gentle breeze, a pretty girl to cuddle. What need for anything else?

Self-contained with car, tent and food, you hop from island to paradise island. Travel by ferry - the shush and ebb/swell of the waves and the salt smelling air - standing on deck gripping a freshly painted rail, watching the islands recede as the coastal mountains near.

Each new island brings a small village or two with winding streets and stone houses, maybe a fortress or an ancient Venetian trading house from the days when that city-state ruled the waves. In each new town or village you pause for bitter coffee softened by a mound of cream, and all-absorbing conversation over a round cafe table in a sleepy plaza.

Inevitably, you thread your way down rough gravel roads to your own deserted stretch of shore, where you peel off sweaty clothes to slip naked into the silken waters. You dive deep, past the thermocline, into the grip of the cold. Then, surfacing, float on your back with eyes closed, gently rocked by Amphitrite's currents. The rest of the world sinks down through your back to melt away, lost in the briny deep.

On the stony shore the sun dries salt to a thin powdery crust on browned skin. Under the olive trees you eat a rustic lunch of bread, hard cheese, and coarse local wine drunk straight from the bottle. Your backdrop is the bleached bony spine of the mainland that towers over the islands and the sea, and in the distance the slow clonk of sheep bells.

The poet Derek Walcott wrote that islands can only exist if we have loved in them.

Islands symbolize isolation, remoteness, and sometimes even shipwreck: the forlorn seclusion of the castaway. We sit and gaze out at the sea that surrounds us, but it is ourselves that we are looking into. How remote the past seems. Island life is insular, detached, inward looking. It's closed off, like the blinders of first love, when nothing exists except the two of you within the little round space of that cafe table. The outside world is helpless to intrude. Perhaps that's why islands symbolize romance better than anyplace else.

Large islands embody the permissiveness and sensuality of islands in general, but they lack the feeling of isolation. Small islands are better. You feel it most acutely at night. Sitting on a tiny sandspit surrounded by the inky void of ocean and sky, you're like Vishnu on a lotus flower, dreaming entire worlds, creating realities because nothing else exists, and nothing can.

Ryan Murdock's pursuit of travel literature has taken him to some of the world's most unforgiving places, including Mongolia, Tibet, Nicaragua, and North Korea, by Russian jeep, motorcycle, dugout canoe, horse and camel. Please visit http://www.ryanmurdock.com to learn more about his adventures and to follow his Road Wisdom blog.

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