I’m living on an island!

Jul 26, 2010 by Daniel Ross-Jones

I took a day trip to the north today, visiting Whangaparaoa, Shakespear Park, Waiwera, Warkworth, Snells Beach, Algies Bay, and some other stops along the way.  At one of the beaches in Waiwera, though, I looked out and there was this little island only about a hundred metres off shore.  (Google Maps informs me the name is Mahurangi Island.)

This island is really quite beautiful, in a way.  It is covered in native bush, does not look inhabited or tamed for tourist’s sake, in a way is a small reminder of New Zealand before canoes and ships arrived with people who now inhabit its lands.  It is a small reminder of a world long passed.

I like islands.  Even though I don’t think I could do so permanently, I always wanted to live on an island.  In fact, this was a common theme growing up in my family.  One of the lakes we would drive past on our way to the Twin Cities when I was a kid had a rather large island in the middle, and mom always declared that to be “her island.”  Likewise, I claimed a small little “island” (actually it’s a peninsula, but who’s counting?) on Pokegama Lake just south of my hometown as my own.

“I want to live on an island,” I’d say.  I had it all planned out — I’d have a boat, a cabin, a wood stove, and plenty of pop and Cheetos.  (Hey, it was my life on my island — I was calling the shots, and since mom wouldn’t let me have a diet consisting of pop and Cheetos, they had to come with me on my island.)  I would also bring books and a radio; these were the quieter, gentler days before the Internet, digital cameras, and all the rest.

So I saw little Mahurangi today and thought of those times, of my fantasy of living on an island.  I decided that Mahurangi was just as good a place as Lake Pokegama, and so when I live on an island it’s going to be that island.

The irony, of course, is that I actually am living on an island at the moment.

Include this realization in the, “Duh, table for one” category.  But it didn’t really dawn on me until today — in spite of making references to North and South Islands, in spite of talking about an island country — that I’m living on an island.

And so another childhood dream is fulfilled.  I’m living on an island.  I’m not drinking a bunch of pop, eating a bunch of Cheetos, and I have yet to be on a boat.  (A ferry will have to count, and I’ll be on one of those in the next two weeks.)  But I’m living on an island.  One more dream ticked off the life bucket list, even if I didn’t realize it until five weeks later.

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