The Island of No Nation

With Doug Paulson and Lan Tuazon

November 25, 2007

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Lan always wanted to visit the Nonations Islands in the Bronx.

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But when we got there we couldn’t find them.

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From all my charts, they should have been just North of Hart Island in the Long Island Sound.

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But but we just couldn’t see anything out there.

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As we paddled closer to Hart Island we alerted the attention of the 24 hour guard: a large police boat slowly circled the island.

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Hart Island is a potter’s field, tended by inmates from Rikers Island. My friend Siobhan Liddell landed there once on accident, years ago. She said that it was beautiful.

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We decided to paddle North and see what we could find.

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We noticed a cresting wave ahead – a sure sign of a submerged island!

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The waves were right where the Nonations Islands should be.

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It turns out that East Nonations and South Nonations Islands are here, completely submerged at high tide.

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We floated slowly by the rocks. There was something unsettling about knowing they had been down there all along.

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Just ahead we saw something that looked like a fortress. We seemed to be under the watchful eye of the Hart Island patrol boat, so we drifted North a bit,

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and snuck up from the rear.

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There was a ramp on the blind side of the island.

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Here is what we found.

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Everything about it looked like a construction site, not like an abandoned fortress.

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Doug found out later that this is going to be someones house.

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Back in the water, I was getting hungry and the wind seemed to be picking up against us.

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But there was one more stop to make.

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I wanted to get a closer look at this little wreck. I thought that we had landed back in the Bronx.

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But as we walked into the interior we started to notice things.

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Like a huge old cannon facing the Sound.

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And this wrecked house.

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The floor of the building was completely fallen away.

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It looked like someone was fixing up the building at some point, and then left it all to rot.

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When we are in places like this, Lan sais that she can feel the presence of all the people that have lived and died here.

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She says she doesn’t like the feeling, but sometimes I think that it draws her to exploring abandoned buildings.

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It was hard to piece together all the things that we were seeing.

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What was this place?

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We found some kind of overgrown octagonal church or meeting place.

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And as we walked along the shore,

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we realized that we were seeing buidlings that we had seen from the water on the other side.

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We were not on the shore of the Bronx at all, but on a large island right next to it.

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I’m not sure why exploring an island is so much better than when you are just on land.

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But somehow we felt like we had discovered something rare and special.

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Back in the water the wind was dead against us and we paddled hard to get back to the beach where we had launched.

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When we got home that night, Doug looked up where we had been online. He found this site about David’s Island – information compiled by Michael Cavanaugh – who grew up on the island. http://www.home.earthlink.net/~michaelacavanaugh/id1.html

-Marie Lorenz

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