One Thousand Islands

On our first date Sophia ordered a salad with Thousand Islands salad dressing and blew my mind. “Hold on,” I said. “How many islands?”

She laughed. “I’ve never really thought about it.”

But it was all I could think about. “That’s so many islands!” I said. “Imagine exploring them all. A thousand adventures!” 

Sophia smiled at me. She thought I was doing a bit.

“It’s a perfect number,” I said as we brushed our teeth at her sink some time later. “One thousand! Huge, but not unconquerable. It could be the project of a lifetime. Mapping them one by one. Each tide-swept cay, every wave-embattled outcrop.”

“Are we still talking about salad dressing?”

“No. Some might contain wonders I’d be the first to find. Sea caves and shipwrecks. Undiscovered species. And you know what else?” I looked at her in the bathroom mirror. “Some of them must have treasure, Sophia. Just statistically speaking: at least one of those thousand islands must have buried treasure.”

“Huh,” said Sophia.

Where could I find a map, I wondered on our wedding night. Where the X? How many skeletons buried with it? Was I the kind of man to undertake a quest like that? Was I the type to dig for treasure?

Is it a good thing, to dig? You hear about shipwrecks, old mines, sudden riches. How many search, though, for each who finds? What’s the ratio? How many die destitute and alone in mine shafts that hold only rats? You only hear the cool stories. There’s a term for it: survival bias. It takes courage and perseverance to find out if you’ll be the survivor.

When I told Sophia I was leaving her, she said, “Just tell me it’s an affair. Tell me you don’t love me. Tell me it’s not about the salad dressing.”

“It’s not about the salad dressing.” I put my hand on her knee and she jerked away. “It’s about the islands.”

Island 1

The larger, civilized islands were the first I visited, on the schooner I bought with my half of the condo sale. Their tourist attractions were insipid, their beaches eroded and trash-strewn. The locals met me at the docks with ingots, idols, ships in bottles. They all had prices. I stayed at an all-inclusive resort that did a pig roast every night. 

“Have you ever been further out?” I asked the couple next to me at the bonfire. 

“Oh no,” they said. “This is quite far enough for us.” 

There was no treasure here.

280

I traveled on wilder paths. Most of these islands, solitary and clutched by stunted shrubs, were inhospitable. Dime-store Charybdises swirled with hoodlum menace near their shores. Feral cats hissed from the brush.

There was beauty, too, in these crannies of the world. I found a volcanic crescent with a shy pink beach tucked inside. The sun rose as I sat damp-assed in the sand, the tide limping away from my feet, and I had it all to myself. Crabs scuttled in and out of tiny holes. I didn’t miss Sophia. I felt I had found a secret.

It wasn’t treasure, though.

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I tacked endlessly from one squalid rockpile to another. Most were no bigger than a coffee table. I hacked them beneath the waves with a pickaxe. This way I wouldn’t accidentally revisit them. 

I made notches in the mast of the ship as I went.

803

I was scanning the horizon when I felt a crunch beneath my feet. Sullen black rock dug its broken teeth into my boat. I’d run aground on one of the very islands I’d chopped away. I was stuck fast. 

I waited for the tides; I tried to lift it off myself, but it was hopeless. My boat tipped gently into the ocean, as though snuggling into a blanket. 

I loaded my dinghy with supplies and paddled off. In a way, I found the boat’s loss freeing. The worry of care and maintenance was gone. I had pared all of the trappings of my life away. There was only me now, and the islands.

913

My skin blistered in the sun, and my hands tore on the paddle. My clothes became rags. Food ran low. But there were so few islands left! With each one I crossed off the list, the chances increased of finding treasure at the next.

1000

Finally, I saw ahead the thousandth island, a lump of coarse sand with two anemic palms fallen against each other like drunks. Beyond it: unending sea, a void. 

I dug and dug, but no treasure appeared. My hands were raw. But this was the last island! Simple math dictates that if you cross off 999 options, the thousandth is the one. Sophia would see. Everyone would see. 

I looked up and realized that the palms, in their leaning, made an X.

The island sank lower. I was waist-deep now, and around me stretched the glassy expanse of sea. No islands left, no people in any direction. I alone poked above the flat water. 

My shovel chunked into something hard. I dug out a human skull. 

“Do you see?” I cried to the sky. “Treasure is always buried with bones. I’m the survivor! It’s me! I’m almost there!”

Progress was more difficult, as the water rose to my neck. Finally, the shovel thunked again. I gasped with excitement. I crouched underwater, scooping with my hands. I could barely see through the cloud of silt. Once, twice, I came up gasping for air, and then went back down, scrabbling at the sand. Groping for the treasure.