Islands enthrall me. Always have.
As a kid my favorite Jules Verne novel was Mysterious Island. My favorite TV show was Adventures in Paradise.
I grew up believing that men ought to go down to the sea in ships. I later did just that on a U.S. Navy destroyer. During a Pacific crossing we refueled at Midway Island, and I was blown away by the water beneath our hull.
It was so unimaginably clear that our ship might well have been floating on air.
With Nordhoff and Hall I followed Fletcher Christian to Tahiti and Pitcarian Island. I was awed by the Knights Hospitaller’s defense of Malta against overwhelming odds. Robinson Caruso was a kindred spirit.
And complements of Verne’s imagination I was able to climb aboard that balloon with the escaped POWs who were swept away to a volcanic dot lost amidst a vast ocean.
When I read Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki – wherein men went down to the sea in a balsa raft – I was hooked. It was a grand adventure. And so hooked, I naturally read his book, Aku Aku.
Talk about the original mysterious island.
Rapa Nui is perhaps the most remote populated island in the world. It is an island of secret caves where family carvings are hidden. It is where the Short Ears slaughtered the Long Ears.
An island where a people long since lost in the mists of time used Stone Age tools to carve giant effigies weighing tons. But that didn’t stop their creators from, somehow, moving their stone giants great distances to stand sentinel along the shore.
There to guard against…who knows what?
The mute sentinels didn’t help. When “civilization” finally did arrive, the encounter was perhaps predictable. As Heyerdahl wrote:
“Through a misunderstanding one native visitor was shot on board one of the ships, and a dozen others were shot ashore, while the Europeans got off with the loss of one tablecloth and of a few hats which were stolen while they had them on their heads.”
Indeed, the islanders were so cruelly mistreated by one visitor after another that they began to hide out in their secret caves whenever another sail appeared over the horizon.
Many decades later, I’m rereading Aku Aku. This because my wife asked me what was at the very top of my travel bucket list.
That place I absolutely must visit before I die.
And suddenly I was 12 again. And I didn’t hesitate to answer.
Easter Island.
My most mysterious island.
And so I am once again on my way to Easter Island. Only this time in body as well as in my mind and my dreams.
We’re talking a 10-plus hour plane ride due south to Santiago. Followed by a five-plus hour flight due west to a rocky dot situated somewhere between Chile and Tahiti.
My arthritic hips and bum knee are just gonna have to suck it up. Because I’ll be trekking from beach to volcano, from quarry to coast, from treeless plain to lava fields – from one giant stone image to the next.
In search of answers to questions I’ve been wondering about since in my teens.
Islands enthrall me. Always have. And now I’m off to the most mysterious island of them all.
Eat your heart out, Gardner McKay.
P.S.
And, yes, I did wear a tiki round my neck back in the day.
FreeGNV 