ABSTRACT
“No man is an island,” but almost in the same breath one can add that every man would like to live on some kind of island. It is quite likely that the human dream of finding a peaceful island, sufficiently remote and insulated against the world’s intrusions, a place that provides peace and an opportunity to contemplate one’s self and one’s ideas, is, in fact, an ideal that is similar to the understandable desire to retreat into the security of one’s youth and childhood. The seeking out of a place in the wilderness, a search followed almost universally by great prophets, philosophers and leaders, is in fact a kind of secret obsession of thoughtful people. Virginia Woolf expressed the idea’s obsessiveness in the title of one of her greatest works, A Room of One’s Own. The peace, the quiet, the privacy of the scholar’s cubicle is but another expression of the need to retire into a kind of secret world of one’s own. Those pleasant retreats which many religious orders offer for the use of people of the world provide happy opportunities for refreshment and rejuvenation after the weariness and turmoil of everyday life. The thoughtful reader can be grateful that a good many individuals who have sought the curative force of solitude have seen fit to describe their experiences in print. The idea of retirement to an island, whether it be in the Canadian wilderness or in the much travelled Puget Sound, say, returned to me recently when I picked up at random at a library book sale a copy of David Conover’s Once Upon an Island. His work is not intended to be the final repository of philosophical insights into the human needs for peace and quiet opportunities for thought and contemplation. It is instead a happy narrative of two young people, deeply in love, who dream of living out their lives on a mile-long, two-hundred-yards-wide island, off the coast of British Columbia. Their dream comes true as a result of a series of minor miracles, and then begin some years of extremely hard work, as they homestead on their island. Their life they lead is characterized by a strong sense of partnership, by mutual understanding in difficult circumstances and by physical hardihood. The book makes for pleasant reading as Conover describes their labor to build their homestead and the heady pleasure they felt in living off the land and from what the sea produced for them. Their mutual affection might have become cloying had not the couple been possessed of salty good humor and amusement at inevitable shortcomings. This is no starry-eyed tale of an always successful homesteading effort, but instead a healthy report on how their “ways and means committee” sought and for the most part found answers to all kinds of problems. Their self-dependence, their insatiable desire for freedom, makes the reader shake his or her head in astonishment, but in admiration as well.
