No woman’s an island — then along comes COVID
When interactions must be navigated with care, something shifts
Over the past eight summers, I made the twelve-hour journey from my home in Toronto to arrive, exhausted but elated, at a small, wooden house outside the village of Tilting, at the farthest edge of Fogo Island, off the northeast coast of Newfoundland. There I’d write for hours and walk the island’s rocky shore paths, thrilled to be alone. Watching gannets plunge and Arctic terns dive while mountainous icebergs floated past on the steely Atlantic, I relished wild weather and the feeling of leaving the rest of my life behind. During these COVID -19 months, I’ve thought often of those days, now that life has become a different kind of island.
Since the lockdown in March, I’ve spent most of my time living on my own in an old, stone schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario. The schoolhouse, decommissioned in the late ’60s, with two big slate blackboards still fixed to the walls, has been a private residence since then. It lies on a dirt road to nowhere, surrounded by fields. For five years I’ve used it as a writing retreat, never imagining that I’d retreat there in a global pandemic. Nor that, during the pandemic’s early days, I’d go for a month barely leaving the property or seeing anyone as I grappled with an entirely new way of feeling islanded.
In those first weeks, I read avidly, eager to hear others voice experiences of isolation. While contemporary astronauts might be floating up in orbital space, they have constant company in their weightless abode and so I shucked off feeling like an astronaut. The words of Polish writer and recent Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, describing her introvert’s relief at the slowed quiet of quarantine, offered kinship, until I realized that she shared her Wrocław apartment with her husband. Currently uncoupled and accustomed to living solo, I took my dog for walks through my neighbour’s woodlot, tamping a trail through the grass that months later has become a worn groove. I let my mind travel out into her canine body, her ecstasy at a new scent, her pointed paw and mad dash in pursuit of it. I thought of all the children who’d once studied and quarrelled in the wide room where daily I banged around by myself.
While I’ve always relished time spent alone, something shifts when every interaction with others has to be navigated with extreme care. I broke down and got Wi-Fi, the thing I swore I’d never do when I first began making escapes from city to country in the years before COVID-19. But nerve endings, alert to any presence entering a room, don’t respond the same way to a head popping up on Zoom. I turned to island literature, seeking stories of endurance and self-reliance, tumbling back into memories of a childhood favourite, “Island of the Blue Dolphins” by Scott O’Dell, a fictionalized account of a young Indigenous woman from the California coast, abandoned on an island, who clothes and feeds herself while making a wild dog her companion. Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” offered a colonialist anti-lesson: what not to do when shipwrecked. Terrified of the world around him, Crusoe builds obsessive fortifications against the unknown and shoots friendly goats to eat, taking months to realize he might milk them.
During those past summers on Fogo Island, I wrote about characters who cultivate resilience, immerse themselves in the natural world, and never leave their island home. Cut off from travelling back to the place that inspired “Blaze Island,” my recent novel, I had to internalize the same self-sufficiency as my fictional protagonists. I also wanted to test myself against the restlessness that so often sends us spinning elsewhere in search of respite and stimulation. Instead I set out to note newness in the same place day after day, Queen Anne’s lace blooming in the fields, then the mauve asters. One September morning, as I tramped up a hill through the cedar woods, the dog began barking madly, as if she’d spotted a live presence. Skunk? Porcupine? Overnight, or so it seemed, puffballs had pushed out of the damp ground like large white heads, as sudden in their appearance as ghosts. Strangers, indeed, and edible ones.
During the pandemic, time itself has taken on the qualities of an island. The familiar past of communal dinners and movie outings floats off like a receding coastline. A future of more than a few weeks feels now like a distant shore, leaving the present as its own small, bordered land.
Of course I recognize the privileges of my pandemic island. Able to work from home, I can leave behind the anxiety of daily masked encounters and the need to navigate physical distance every time I walk out the door. Speaking at an online event this spring, Black American writer Kiese Laymon used the term COVID islands to describe the sharp differences that race and class bring to pandemic experiences of risk and morbidity. Nor do I want our collective future to drag with it the social inequities and ecological catastrophes of the retreating past.
An early reader of my novel, an educator who lives part-time on Fogo Island, reminded me of another aspect of island life. When a bad storm hits and cuts them off from others, islanders band together, growing cheerful in the confrontation with extremity, he insisted. Being islanded is not all about isolation.
While schooling one’s self in how to be self-sustaining is essential, so, too, are lessons of care, towards those with whom we don’t share close quarters, even those unknown to us.
I’ve got Netflix for the cold nights ahead. I’m still buying produce from the organic farmer up the road whose restaurant supply business dried up with COVID-19 and whose farm eggs taste like brilliant bursts of sunshine. This fall I planted a new garden bed, including two tiny hazelnut trees. Elsewhere a volunteer apple seedling shot out of the ground with sudden verve. I like to imagine the fruit of these young trees nourishing planetary islanders in the years to come.