The Island of the Day Between
In search of nature and self
Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled. —Henry David Thoreau
Into The Baltic
It was a cloudless summer morning in August 2016, and I was standing on the deck of a small ferry, my bags piled around me in a colorful heap like sleepy schoolchildren, looking out into the Baltic Sea. I was starting out on my very first solo camping trip, and I had elected to do it in a most unusual way. It would turn out to be even more unusual than I imagined.
I had spent much of the past few years climbing out of a very dark place that I had fallen into emotionally, but now I was starting to feel that change for the better was possible, and that a happier future might be on the horizon. I decided to seek help from nature.
I had always loved spending time in the woods and the mountains, and I had always loved camping, too, but I noticed one persistent issue: the time I spent in nature with other people detracted from the experience of nature itself, like taking a date to a dinner party who talked so much that the host couldn’t get a word in. And of course, many of the activities involved in camping (carrying heavy loads, putting up tents in the rain, sleeping on hard ground, etc.) are hardly designed to reduce tension between individuals. I tended to return from camping trips much happier to see my bathtub than my partner.
In order to get some one-on-one time with nature, I had elected to visit one of Sweden’s most remote national parks, Gotska sandön, which is remote not in the sense of being far up in the mountains, but rather in the sense of being out in the middle of the sea. The park consists of a roughly hexagonal island smack in the center of the Baltic Sea, about three hours by boat from the mainland, and about two hours from Fårö, which is itself an island north of Gotland. Gotska sandön is remote enough that from there, there is no land visible in any direction.
The island has a lighthouse that is now automated but used to be maintained by a lighthouse keeper, who was part of a small community on the island, but this never grew to more than ten families or so. Eventually, the lighthouse was upgraded, the school for the few children was closed, and the island became a national park, essentially uninhabited. Today, there is a campground that is open for less than four months a year. There is a park headquarters and a museum, but there are no shops, no restaurants—no nothing, really.
Furthermore—as will prove very important later in this story—because there is no harbor on the tiny island, the only way to get there is via a ferry that comes once daily, performing a rather spectacular maneuver of beaching itself and disgorging its passengers via a gangplank directly onto the sand.
I had decided to spend two nights on the island and had brought what seemed like the right amount of food, together with what seemed like way too much gear. I am not (despite the disparaging use of the epithet by some of my friends) a “gearhead”, in that I do not love to purchase doodads just for the thrill of owning them. What I am, I suppose, is a preparedness obsessive; I like to consider everything that might possibly happen and what I would need under each scenario. So I arrived on Gotska sandön with 121 different items (or classes of items; all socks together count as 1 item, for example) distributed over four bags, weighing about 30 kilos. I was ready for rain, insect bites, toilet stops in the forest, birdwatching—you name it.
Taking in great lungfulls of the salty wind, I hauled all of this gear with me onto the gangplank that allowed me to transit from the ferry to the beach. I was somewhat disappointed to learn that camping was only permitted within a fairly small area of the island, which meant that I would have several neighbors within sight and earshot, but I contented myself with the knowledge that there were many kilometers of hiking trails around the island.
I found a spot among a group of pines where I set up my tent and hung a line for my towel. I had arrived.
The Nature of our Relationship with Nature
One of the things that I love most about Sweden and its Nordic neighbors is the collective attitude toward nature. The natural world is seen not as property to be owned, but as the common heritage of everyone living in it. Everyone, then, is guaranteed access to nature and is responsible for its well-being. The clearest expression of this attitude is the principle known as allemansrätten, which is difficult to translate: “every man’s right” would be a literal translation, but the Swedish government has opted for “The Right of Public Access”. You can read all about it in English at VisitSweden.com.
Essentially, the millions of hectares of pine and spruce forests that fill (especially the north of) the country, even when they are land that is technically owned by someone, are there for the enjoyment of anyone, so long as they enjoy it responsibly. The fact that overwhelmingly, Swedes can be trusted to be responsible, in this and in other ways, is one of the truly remarkable things about Sweden.
Here I could draw a contrast with Southern Europe. I recently went on my first solo camping trip here in Portugal. I was a bit nervous about feeling disappointed after all my experience with the wide-open forests of Sweden, so I looked for the highest-rated campground I could find. I ended up going to the Parque Nacional Peneda-Gerês in the northeast of the country, which was very beautiful. But it was clearly not Sweden. I arrived at the campground, which turned out to have a chain-link fence around it and a gate that could be locked at night. I paid for my spot and was told I could take any site I liked in the “small tent” section of the campground, which was distinct from the “family tent” section, the “forest cabin” section, the “glamping yurt” section, the pool, the restaurant, the paid parking section, and a few other sectors within the confines of the fence. I found a spot that was nice enough but had to listen to a group of young Portuguese playing loud music while they set up their camp, and a pair of Swiss families engaged in the rodeo-like process of herding their children down to the river to swim (you have to pass through the gate, since the river is outside the fence). It was nice, but it wasn’t Sweden.
Nor was it the United States. I remember my friend Miguel, who comes from Spain, telling me about his disbelief when arriving in the US at the vastness of the forests—even those in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states. He said, “You have no idea how much more wilderness you have here. I remember when I was a kid in Valencia, and my father would stop the car when he saw a squirrel so that we could all get out and look at it—a squirrel!”
He is right—we have vast and beautiful natural areas in North America. But as an American, I have always preferred the Swedish conception of nature, which is admirably benign, almost loving. My sense is that the new North Americans who started to arrive from Europe around 1600 had a much more antagonistic view of nature. The pioneers saw the forests and the prairies both as sources of danger to be conquered and as resources to be exploited. To this day, many of the Americans I know have a certain fear of the wilderness, or even just of the woods near their house. Many city dwellers have never spent a single night under the stars, and perhaps it’s no wonder, when they are bombarded with stories of avalanches and bears and people who strike out into the wilderness never to return. Sometimes I think that culturally, things haven’t changed that much since those the early pioneer days. But let’s return to Sweden.
“I am at two with nature.” —Woody Allen
The Island and My Self
I loved camping on Gotska sandön. Even though there were other people around, they were, after all, Swedes, and so were unlikely to talk to me. The one exception was a woman who struck up a conversation with me in the communal kitchen area. She asked me, Är du själv?, which I have always found to be a very odd way of asking whether someone is alone. It literally means, “Are you self?” I told her that yes, I was self, and she said she admired anyone who would go camping all alone. It turned out that she was a representative in Riksdagen (the Swedish parliament), and her party affiliation was—can you guess it?—the Green party. She was on the island with her husband to have a little time not quite alone with nature. Not quite self.
I spent my days on the island walking and talking. Yes, talking. Talking sometimes to the birds and the squirrels and the trees, but mostly to myself. You see, one of my favorite activities in the whole world is to take what I call a “thinking walk”: I choose a route, and I choose a topic to discuss. This is often a question to myself, such as “What improvements to my life can I imagine making?”, or “How could I manage my friendships better?” And then I set out down the forest trail and hold a one-sided debate with myself. I have learned that I need to do this out loud, because I am highly distractible, and my thoughts, when not herded by the sheepdog of speech, tend to wander around and get lost.
I walked many kilometers per day (putting in over 30,000 steps!), down paths that ran deep through the forest, along cliffs overlooking the sea, over dunes and along beaches. And I talked to myself. I took notes in a notebook, which, when I finally returned to my apartment in Stockholm, I transcribed into my journal. Looking over these journal entries now, I find that I dealt in quite meaningful ways with subjects such as these:
The state of my well-being in terms of a seven-part framework I designed for myself
The pros and cons of my job, and what small adjustments might make it truly enjoyable
A taxonomy I developed of the four types of motivations for behaviors
How I felt about the past stages of my life, and what I hoped for in future stages
In other words, my time in the woods was part hiking holiday and part conference on the topic of Gregory. If that sounds egotistical, bear in mind that nobody else was subjected to it apart from a few shrikes and jays.
, a hero of mine, actually recommends doing something somewhat similar. Every year he does an “annual review”—often on a retreat by himself—in which he thinks about how things have gone over the past year and what goals he wants to set for the coming year. I think this is a spectacularly healthy thing to do and have adopted my own form of this practice.And Then Nothing Happened
The trip did not end in the way I expected. On my third morning there, I awoke to a brisk wind blowing in from the west. I went down to the campground notice board, where there was a sign tacked up that said, in typically laconic Swedish fashion, that there would be no boat today. Apparently, the sea was too rough for it to land on the beach.
For a moment, I experienced a feeling akin to claustrophobia, except that rather than feeling constrained in space, I felt constrained in options. There was only one boat per day, which meant that my next chance to leave the island would be twenty-four hours later. And there was nothing to indicate that the sea would be calmer the next day. I was stuck on the island. Marooned—I rolled the word around my mouth like a lozenge. Could a person be marooned in a campground with a hundred other people?1
In any case, I went back to my tent and took stock of my food supply. For once, my tendency to over-prepare would pay off—I had enough food for another day. I decided to go and... do what?
I have heard the question asked in contexts as diverse as podcasts and dating sites, “What would you do if you were given an extra hour?” The answers I have heard others give are rarely inspiring: “sleep more”, “exercise”, “probably watch Netflix.” I don’t think people bring much imagination to the task, precisely because they know it’s not going to happen.
But look: Here I was on a tiny island in the middle of the sea, with absolutely no obligations whatsoever, and I had been offered a marvelous present: an extra day. A completely free day that I could spend in any way I liked, and nobody would ever even know how I spent it. This was a completely novel experience, and it made me giddy. I walked down to the beach and picked up a smooth, oval, light gray stone looking like the moon, which I decided would be my memento of this free day. I have it still.
How did I spend the day? Much like the previous ones: hiking to the old lighthouse, observing seals, watching the waves crash on the sea, taking photos, and being “self”. And of course, talking. I continued the colloquia on the thing that is Gregory’s Life (so boring to others, so fascinating to me) and how it could be developed. It felt like I was making progress toward a more positive future for myself.
And Then Nothing Happened Again
And then the next morning, I went down to the notice board to find a sign saying, “Still no boat today.”
This time the feeling of claustrophobia started oozing toward panic. How long would I be stuck—I spit out the overly sugary lozenge of “marooned”—on this island? And I had eaten all of my food! What would I be forced to do to survive? Might members of the Green party turn out to be tasty, thanks to their healthy diet?
This time the glorious promise of an extra day shone more dimly. I went to find the park warden, who assuaged my fears, telling me that they had a store of freeze-dried meals that they could distribute to people in an emergency. I was handed two foil bags of dehydrated meat and potatoes and sent back to my tent.
I reasoned that actually, this was fine. I had yet another opportunity to do the things I loved on the island, and there were still trails I had not walked. So I spent more time communing with the forest and its dwellers, and more time talking to myself. My photographs grew ever more abstract and inspired.
And then, that evening, sitting on a sand dune, I had a beautiful experience.
The sun was setting over where Sweden lay invisible, and the sky was filled with billowing eighteenth-century clouds. As the wind whipped over the dunes, bending the grass into meaningless question marks, the colors of the sunset spilled out over the clouds and into the pools between the sandbars. I was overcome with the beauty of the place, and felt a sadness that I could not share it with anyone. But then the sadness blew away, and I saw that nothing was missing. When you are alone with nature, you are not alone. And besides, I was Self.
Yes, I suppose that if this island were Gilligan’s, I would be the Professor. Oh well, it could be worse, I suppose.
Beautiful. I remember the “time stone”, and I think about it sometimes. The idea of being awarded more time made a big impression on me.
No doubt the irony is intentional on your part, but I'm struck by how your assertion that "Nothing Happened" on those two lagniappe days is far from accurate. On the contrary: Something big happened for you! Although I'm not much of a nature guy (I recently got a hearty laugh from someone when I told her that I'm an "indoorsman"), I'd venture to say that a hallmark of being in nature is that the distinction between presence and absence—between something happening and nothing happening—tends to blur. More or less in the same spirit, I love the idea that "I am self" could mean "I am alone." It puts a positive spin on a condition that's typically viewed as negative, and it captures the way that a rich, full solitude and an aching loneliness can be two sides of single experiential coin.