The World Outside Your Door: Kelly's Island

“The charge of an island fortress cannot be something a man gives up without ambivalent feelings…”
Joan Didion, “Rock of Ages”

Joan Didion was writing, back then in 1967, about the island of Alcatraz, only recently at that time emptied of its inhabitants when the famous prison was closed. Al Capone and the notorious “Birdman” had once made their residence there, but when Ms. Didion paid a visit the sole inhabitant was a lone federal employee, paid to do what minimal upkeep was necessary, who lived there with his wife and dog. As recorded in an austere and incandescently beautiful essay published in her classic 1960s collection "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," the writer found that she did not want to leave, that she would have stayed if only someone had asked her to. “It is not an unpleasant place to be, out there on Alcatraz with only the flowers and the wind and a bell buoy moaning and the tide surging through the Golden Gate, but to like a place like that you have to want a moat. I sometimes do, which is what I am talking about here.”

An island has its own spirit, a “mentality” conditioned by the surrounding waters that appeals to solitaries, and that would invariably solicit Ms. Didion’s literary instincts, honed to a fine point by her self’s fragile sense of apartness. It is not at all coincidental that she wrote with such keen insight about life on Hawaii in the decades after Pearl Harbor, still haunted even in the 60's--as the body bags from Vietnam arrived at Oahu--by war. You have to want a moat.

Indeed, you do. I’m out here today in the middle of Lake Erie, on Kelly’s Island. Happy as a clam. Happy like a fool. After the hour-and-an-a-half drive to Marblehead, and the twenty-five minute ferry across the Lake, I arrived at the dock and walked to the bed-and-breakfast with my bags. Checked into my room and rented a bicycle. A pink one! The pink bikes had baskets, the black bikes did not, and I wanted a basket damnit! In case I found—I don’t know—buried treasure or something. (As the lady at the desk said “It’s just a color.”) I rode around the island on a pink bicycle hoping to find buried treasure.

Kelly’s Island. It’s hardly Alcatraz, or the Hawaiian Islands. It’s a resort spot, with a state park, and is teeming with sunburnt well-to-do types, teenagers, kids with ice cream cones, putt-putt golfers, fun-in-the-sun partiers and all the rest. (But it’s not Put-In-Bay, which I gather is some kind of Gomorrah, but one where everyone is too drunk to actually do anything wicked.)

But an island is an island and it appeals to a certain type, appeals I suppose to some kind of universal boy fantasy of a place you could claim for your own, find buried treasure beneath, build a moat around, stand on the beach with a flaming sword and defend against any who dared to cross the waters. How to explain this? Well, first of all, it’s small enough to traverse in its entirety on a bicycle in under an hour. But large and diverse enough in landscape and topography that you can forget you are on an island, surrounded by water. Out in the middle of the island are woods and fields and quaint, lonely country homes and for all you know you could be in rural southern Ohio, or Missouri. There’s history on the Island, human and geological. The glacial grooves are a large fossil remnant of the Wisconsin Glacier, which moved across this territory 25,000 years ago in southwesterly direction, then receded 10,000 years later, leaving behind some 50 yards of grooved stone, only uncovered in the 1800s. Much of the human history on Kelly’s dates from the 19th century and—if I was not misreading the dates on some of the stones in the Island’s graveyard—even the 18th.

And there is an indigenous, year-round resident life here—a few churches, a school, an AA meeting or two, a municipal hall. The first school on the Island was built in 1837, and the school that today stands on Division Street in the middle of the Island was built in 1901. But I was sad to read on the website of the Kelly’s Island School, that it would be suspending operations; plans were in the works to transport the handful of Island children to schools on the mainland. (Speaking of boyhood fantasies, what child would not like to ride a ferry across a Great Lake to get to school?) The marquee outside the school lists the names of what I surmise are the graduates—all five of them.

That’s where I’m at and happy like a fool.