An Island at the Edge of Time

The glacier-scoured bedrock of Hunter Island

I first experienced Hunter Island in late summer 1968. Drafted into the Army, friends suggested a farewell camp-out by the sea. City kids all, the only camp-out we could manage was a pre-dawn trek to a nearby City Park. Hunter Island at Orchard Beach fit the bill. So we set out in the dark to the edge of the island and waited for dawn.

Daybreak found us hiking out along Hunter Island's iconic shoreline. A shoreline guarded for at least ten thousand years by huge sentinel stones that punctuate the landscape. Emboldened shore birds were awakening on the marsh. The world brightened as morning spread over the woodland. Suddenly my personal problems seemed small.

The first people, the people who who walked here thousands of years before we came surely felt the same way. Standing on bedrock predating their arrival by a million years, they must have wondered about the rolling tundra then spread out at their feet - spruce forests of moose, bear, wildcat, and mastodon. All survivors of a colder world before the melting glaciers filled the valleys to become the sea.

They came, these migrant people, with spears and arrows, following game across the continent. They came for food, for shelter, for adventure. Following the retreating ice they would not have missed the message of the standing stones: there is something greater than ourselves.

Swan over the coast of Hunter Island

By the early 1600’s much had changed. The largest mammals were hunted out of existence, the valleys turned to seas, the natives now clearing land with fire, planting corn and squash, following the deer and rabbit in a communal way of life.

Settlers from Europe when they came saw in the land a different purpose - timber, wheat, hay, livestock. They cleared it, fenced it, claimed ownership and demanded profit. But even they, at first, saw in nature something greater than themselves.

By the 1800’s Hunter Island had a new owners and a new name. A landed gentry carved the landscape into a grand estates, an artificial havens bought with the coin, safe from the surrounding blight of a city crammed to capacity. Hunter Island became grand, its forests felled for a commanding view.

In the nearby city a population of immigrants exploded. As tenements simmered and boiled it became clear that open space and access to nature was a right denied. Men who still saw something greater than themselves seized the opportunity to acquire and preserve a natural landscape fast disappearing from the view.

The little of nature that remained was purchased by governments in the name of the greater good. The land was reserved for the preservation of an alienated people.

Hunter Island, its great stones guarding the coast, lay silent and aloof, awaiting the next new transformation of the world.

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