Heidi Julavits - The Folded Clock - A Diary

Today I rowed back from an island. We’d eaten dinner on this island, my friends and family and I. We’d collectively hauled a thousand pounds of food and gear to this island in order to survive three sunny hours on it. Ours was a motley August crowd — locals with roots that extended back many generations, locals who’d escaped from New York twenty years ago, an editor, an all-but-dissertation philosophy professor, a writer, an artist, two men who run silent meditation retreats in Mallorca and Nepal, three men named Ben, a lot of children. The party extended horizontally along the beach.

The mood was light but also, inevitably, charged. Islands make people competitive, maybe because the subconscious fear of shipwreck and survival permeates even the most casual outing. Who will lead the masses when the weather turns and the food runs out? Who will be sacrificed to feed the starving useful people, the ones who can fish and make fires and sing morale-building sea shanties? I often contemplate my odds of surviving a shipwreck and how to improve them. When I was breast-feeding, I nurtured a lot of shipwreck fantasies. What if I were shipwrecked with my baby and ten adults on an island with a large box of Clark Bars? Wouldn’t it be best if I ate the Clark Bars and breast-fed everyone on the island, because my body would transform the worthless sugar into valuable fat and protein? Wouldn’t that prove to be the wisest survival strategy, and wouldn’t that guarantee I’d never be killed for food?

I was no longer breast-feeding on this particular island trip; I had to prove my indispensability in other ways. So I swam and swam and swam. I could maybe dive for lobsters; I could maybe go for help — that’s what my eternal swimming said to the people sitting on the beach. I swam while others drank beer, and slowly realized that they, too, would have to swim, swim or maybe be killed. My individual survival was clearly essential to the survival of the group. Was theirs?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people swim on an island trip before. The water is probably fifty-three degrees out there. Then, near hypothermic, we ate the food we’d brought, and not each other. We watched the sun set, and quelled our panic that we’d have to spend the night, because the boat wouldn’t start, or possibly it would sink. We loaded the scow with bags and people and transferred them to the lobster boat. I decided to row back to the mainland in a dinghy. I rowed with the artist and his squid-loving son. The son fished and caught a sandbar. His father bit the line loose with his teeth. As the moon rose, and the sun definitively set, and we were in darkness, I told them the true story of Boon Island. Boon Island is a long pile of rocks located six miles off the southern coast of Maine. In December 1710 a ship called the Nottingham Galley ran aground on this rock, which measured then and measures now three hundred by seven hundred feet. The fourteen survivors lasted twenty-four days during the winter . They did eat one another in order to pull off this astonishing feat.

Boon Island , published in 1956, is a thinly fictionalized account of their endeavor written by Kenneth Roberts. Maine children are (or were in the ’80s) assigned to read Boon Island for English class. Should our own personal hardships overwhelm us, well, we should be thankful our feet weren’t turning to translucent sponges in our boots. I guess this was the lesson. Or maybe this is too clichéd an understanding of why we were assigned this book in English class. Buck up, etc. This is so prevalent an attitude in Maine that we didn’t need a formal education to learn it. The takeaway horror of Boon Island was far more existential. Yes, these men were freezing and eating one another, but the cruelest factor of their island internment was this: they could see smoke rising from the house chimneys ashore. As they suffered, they could watch the cheery proof of people warming themselves by fires and cooking food that wasn’t, an hour ago, a friend. That struck me as far worse punishment than simply being shipwrecked on a rock. It seemed an appropriate metaphor for being marooned in Maine as a kid — there was another world out there, you could watch it nightly on TV, but how could you reach it?

On a windless night, without a current, the row from the island back to shore is an easy one. I was no longer proving my indispensability to the group; I simply wanted to take the slow way to shore under the half-moon, because summer is almost over, and these are the quiet, twilight moments that, if properly collected and preserved, help me survive the New York winter. I start amassing these moments during the final weeks of August. I must salt supplies for storage. They must last me until I can return to this place I angled for years to leave.

Today my husband and I decided to rearrange our furniture. Our apartment has never looked right to me; probably we should hire an expert to fix it, but I am too proud. I am too convinced that I am secretly a decorating prodigy and to pay for professional help is beneath me. I understand that, with all of the money in the world, and all of the space, a person would require some help to sort through the infinite options available to her. I don’t have such problems. I like what I can afford. I like what fits. Within these narrower choice parameters, I usually choose well.

In this apartment, however, my talents have been stymied. Five years after moving in I’ve yet to crack the code. The light, as I’ve noted, is an issue. The light comes from the wrong direction. The rooms are oddly shaped, and the walls are full of doors and windows. My husband tries to discuss with me what to do with the apartment — how we might better sit in it and walk through it — but I often grow testy with him when he broaches home improvement topics. I cannot explain why, save to say that my inability to properly inhabit this apartment feels like a personal failing; I am embarrassed that I need his help. When I disagree with where he wants to put a piece of furniture, I tell myself that he has a terrible sense of space (he doesn’t). He cannot eyeball a void, I tell myself, and understand what it is capable of accepting. He’ll suggest we put a bed against a wall that is, to me at least, obviously too short. He’ll insist, gamely, that we try it. I insist it’s pointless to try. I hate that I can’t just say, “Sure, let’s move that bed,” and let the bed be right or wrong. Let the objects in the house fail or succeed to fit in it, not me.

Today I talked with an artist and a poet about luck. The artist (a man) is in his sixties; the poet (a man) is in his twenties. The artist is a cheerful curmudgeon, a man of years; the poet is sweetly irreverent, and still expecting, before he is too much older, his fame day. We started to talk about a book only two of the three of us had read. It soon became clear that the poet, though socially irreverent, was, in his mind and opinions, hard and unforgiving, while the curmudgeon was a man of great compassion. I was speaking in defense of this book, and the poet was speaking against it. He called the book “lucky”—as in, the writer had not been talented or deserving of his success. He’d been fortuitous; he’d stumbled into fame. This assertion made the artist come to the defense of the writer he did not know and the book he’d never read. He spoke sternly to the poet, like a father to his son of whom he is cautiously proud but also a little envious. “That’s a cheap shot to call a person lucky,” he said. “Everyone relies on luck to succeed.”

It was lucky that he said this, because I’d been thinking about luck that day. I’d been writing an essay about my son’s birth for an anthology of birth stories. My son was born at home, and the midwife didn’t show. This isn’t exactly what happened; she showed, I sent her away, she went really far away, and by the time we called her back it was too late. Or almost too late. She arrived with roughly thirty seconds to spare.