HELF

September 1, 2024 1:09 PM

No one keeps an official list of uninhabited islands worldwide. If they did, it would be long. Norway and Sweden alone have hundreds of thousands of desert islands, including some that are astonishingly remote. One glacier-covered Norwegian island, Bouvetøya, is more than 1,000 miles from the nearest point of land. Desert islands conjure isolation so effectively they’ve become our go-to metaphor for it. We have desert island books, desert island discs, and desert island foods. The New Yorker Cartoon Bank includes nearly 400 hits for “desert island,” perhaps because with just a few lines—a horizontal parenthesis of sand, a few palm trees—an artist can conjure a scene that’s both instantly recognizable and totally self-contained. Reality is more complicated. from Why Some People Are Paying to Be Left on a Desert Island—Alone [Afar; ungated]
posted by chavenet (24 comments total)

+1 for the post title.
posted by briank at 1:24 PM on September 1 [31 favorites]

When I started reading the description my mind went to Balls Pyramid: isolated, remote, like something you'd find on your way to Númenor. But in practice the spots in the article look much more pleasant. It would certainly bring you back to first principles being on a place like that, alone, with the just some palm trees and sand an ocean for hundreds or thousands of miles. It's amazing it's still possible.

And did I read it correctly that it's only a couple of hundred dollars a night? That sounds impossibly inexpensive.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 1:32 PM on September 1 [3 favorites]

I can think of quite a few people that I would pay to have them sent to one of these places.
posted by Ideefixe at 1:46 PM on September 1 [6 favorites]

With our without food and water?
posted by Winnie the Proust at 1:51 PM on September 1 [5 favorites]

🏝️
posted by HearHere at 2:03 PM on September 1 [2 favorites]

That's one way to get over a screen addiction.
posted by ocschwar at 2:45 PM on September 1 [1 favorite]

Ooohhhhh they pick them up again later

Not what I was expecting at all
posted by seanmpuckett at 3:09 PM on September 1 [11 favorites]

You can secularise a culture all you like, and actually practiced Christianity can discredit itself as disgracefully as it can, but you can never get rid of that little monastic-eremitic itch, that says, ‘forty days and forty nights in the wilderness’
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:17 PM on September 1 [13 favorites]

This feels like one of the last gasps of colonialism, the fantasy that well-off white people can go to 'untouched' places and assert their importance and identity while feeling they 'discovered' something.
That they're doing it in the parts of the world most affected by the consequences of their lifestyle is kind of chef's kiss in a dark, twisted way.
posted by signal at 4:53 PM on September 1 [8 favorites]

I totally understand the impulse. Grew up in Texas with wide open spaces that I did not appreciate, moved to Germany where you're never not around at least some form of civilization. You can almost never be alone, even at the top of a mountain or deep in a forest, 80m people in 138,000 square miles vs texas at 25m people in 268,600 square miles. Coming back to Texas for the first visit after that, it was amazing to go outside of cities and not see any evidence of humans except for a road as far as the eye can see. Being constantly surrounded by people can be exhausting.
posted by LizBoBiz at 5:01 PM on September 1 [10 favorites]

I don't really see a problem with the people in this article. Rich people spending money on an adventure that results in plastics being cleared from a remote beach. Sounds good to me.
posted by ocschwar at 5:12 PM on September 1 [7 favorites]

I think it's not that much unlike the impulse to walk the Appalachian Trail (etc) but without all the strenuous walking. Camping for a little while with no goals and nothing much to do is actually a pretty weird experience in modern life.

The bit about them having to clean the islands up so they *feel* isolated and the guy who escaped for 40 days of solitude and brought his laptop and satellite link with him so he could still work were highlights.
posted by nickzoic at 5:18 PM on September 1 [7 favorites]

Uninhabited Island is an interesting reference book by John Fisher. It simply catalogs deserted islands in every ocean with details of ownership, history and inhabitability. Elsewhere he writes about it as a goal to do some kind of anti-/alter-nationalist homesteading, and specifically mentions the idea of scuttling a tanker on an uninhabited atoll. It isn’t direct (state-sanctioned) colonialism, but I do think it’s rooted in a uniquely American individualist anarchism national mythology, where your identity is constructed to show your mettle by taming an “unpeopled” frontier wilderness. The defunct publisher, Loompanics Unlimited, specialized in publishing exactly those sort of books pre-internet A lot to unpack there…
posted by rubatan at 5:20 PM on September 1 [5 favorites]

I want to go to there.
posted by erebora at 7:44 PM on September 1 [3 favorites]

That title is certainly best of the web.
posted by Sphinx at 9:41 PM on September 1 [1 favorite]

I am fortunate to live in a part of the world embarrassingly rich in uninhabited islands and, having spent recreation and meditation time on a fair few, I totally get the appeal. Except on the most literal level, though, there's more to the desert island experience than just having someone drop you off on an uninhabited island.
posted by Nerd of the North at 11:14 PM on September 1 [6 favorites]

Hmmm.. I could have sworn this was the subject of an FPP a few years ago but the only mention I can find of it is in one of my own comments on another post.

Anyway, one of my favorite local customs and a rite of passage for area 8th-graders is a school program that takes them to one of the nearby islands to spend the weekend with only a tarp, a sleeping bag, and whatever they can fit into in a coffee can. (They're chaperoned, so it's less Lord of the Flies than you might think..) At least I think they're still doing it - I really hope it survived the pandemic. Assuming it's still going on, they've been doing it for around 50 years..
posted by Nerd of the North at 11:43 PM on September 1 [5 favorites]

I hope the mods will tolerate an on-topic auto-puff here. I've blogged about loadsa interesting islands incl. Ball's Pyramid, Bouvetøya and (obvs) Bob's Island.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:58 PM on September 1 [3 favorites]

I don't get the post title.
posted by JanetLand at 6:54 AM on September 2 [2 favorites]

One of my favorite Boy Scouts camping expeditions was on a desert island. My troop was able to beg, borrow, or allegedly steal about 20 power boats, enough to ferry the troop to the island, a ways off the coast in the Long Island Sound. The island had a couple of shoreline springs, a few shipwrecked small craft, beaches full of shells and flotsam and jetsam, trees, and not much else. We camped, fished, did the usual boy scout things involving fire and found bits of burnable things, and had a grand old time, not having to to worry about bears, raccoons, skunks, or the other land-based critters who always seemed to show up looking for food when we camped. Maybe not a true desert island experience, due to numbers and that we had boats to leave at any time if it became necessary, but perhaps as close as any of us were likely to have.

I checked a few months ago, wondering what had happened to the island. The satellite view shows it is entirely covered in about a dozen houses now, some developer must have divided it into quarter-acre plots and built what look like mcmansions on them, shoulder-to-shoulder. I couldn't even see any trees, whereas the island before had been covered in scrub oak and wonderfully weird twisted trees hunched over by wind and stunted by salt, just lawns and what looked like manicured shrubs all crowded together in the few open spaces not covered by housing.
posted by Blackanvil at 7:03 AM on September 2 [5 favorites]

JanetLand, it's a reference to a Far Side cartoon.
posted by snwod at 7:11 AM on September 2 [5 favorites]

I would 100% do this. In fact, now that I know it exists, I’m doing a lot of math in my head trying to make it work out. Oh hell yeah a deserted island, I am in.
posted by mygothlaundry at 6:53 PM on September 2 [1 favorite]

There's one in the Boston Harbor where camping is encouraged. Still within cell range, however.
posted by ocschwar at 12:19 PM on September 3 [1 favorite]

I took a ferry through a Norwegian fjord to Bergen (highly recommend btw). Besides the many spectacular waterfalls and gorgeous cliffs, I remember passing tiny islands as we got closer to the sea. Just a few trees or bushes, a mound of rock, and nothing. I wondered if the locals ever took a small boat out and had a little picnic there some days. Just a small oasis of solitude.
posted by Phredward at 4:33 PM on September 3 [1 favorite]