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Travel Advisor
Can I go to Cuba without breaking the law?
Our travel expert offers advice on making your way to Cuba, lost traveler's checks, pricing a Disney/Universal Studios trip and finding that Florida healing center
By Donald D. Groff
[08/19/99]

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This Welsh writer creates masterful, idiosyncratic illuminations of the world
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[08/18/99]

Out of the Blue
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[08/17/99]

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By Tanya Shaffer
[08/14/99]

Wanderlust
After Ed
With some help from Bali, I learned how to let go again.
By Kiersten Aschauer
[08/13/99]

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By Bill Noble

August 20, 1999 | My friend Zoltan smiled as we described our odyssey. June and I would leave town in a week, giving up high-profile jobs in city government. "We're heading west," I told him, "no kids, no spouses, no middle-class hassles." We packed sleeping bags in the trunk along with a cookstove and tarp in case it rains.

"No tent?" he asked.

"We want to be under the stars," I said.

"Romantic us," June added. We had left our marriages three months before and moved in together. She had teenage daughters, I had preteen sons, and neither of us knew where this would take us ... except we wanted to be together. We had no itinerary other than heading west, no timetable other than returning to the kids "in a few months".

We planned to resume modest writing careers from years before. Marriage and child-rearing had intervened, and we had opted for the safety of secure employment. Now, we wanted to break away.

"I have an idea for you," Zoltan said, describing land he owned on Cyprus Island in Puget Sound. "It's uninhabited; it would be a great place for you to write. My wife and I spent five days there when we returned from our Peace Corps assignment," he said. "It changed our lives."

"Great!" we both said.

Two months later we were at the bow of an open boat, plowing our way through choppy, chilly Puget Sound about 150 miles north of Seattle. We were on our way to Zoltan's island in the San Juan chain, known also as the "Sunshine Islands" because of steady, daily sunshine. We'd been camping without a tent almost every night, trying to resurrect our writing talents. We kept journals, tried personal essays and short story openings ... but nothing seemed to work.

"Do you suppose it was this tough for Fitzgerald?" June wondered.

"I feel rusty," I said.

"None of this feels right!"

Maybe we needed to be in one location awhile, instead of jumping in the car every morning and speeding somewhere new. Were we mixing up our priorities? Were we writing because we wanted to travel or were we traveling because we wanted to write?

"Over there!" the boat captain pointed. Rising in the mist was a dome-topped island, green and shadowy. "That's Cyprus," he said. "It rises to over 800 feet, and it'll take you the better part of a day to walk around."

In the distance the sunlight played on several seals floating lazily in the blue-black water. "Water temp's about 43 degrees," the captain said. "You're not gonna want to swim."

June and I exchanged a look. Water cold enough for seals meant it would be chilly when the sun went down. But we'd packed well. We had sweaters and warm slacks as well as bags of supermarket food, jugs of water and our cookstove.

And our writing cases, of course.

Twenty minutes later we stood on the pebbly shore of Cyprus Island, watching the boat slide into the mist. The captain's final words echoed in our minds: "I'll be back in six days," he said. "You have an emergency, just make a bonfire on the beach."

It's scant reassurance when you're suddenly alone, and the nearest human is 15 miles away. No radio, no cell phone, no e-mail. June and I looked at one another, and the starkness of our situation blossomed. For months we had lived together, but always there had been an agenda: going here, there, planning to do this or that. Now we had nothing but six days on an uninhabited island. No crutch for the relationship, no way to avoid or slip around unpleasantness.

Thirty feet above the beach hung a series of wide rock ledges, and we chose one for our camp. We hauled our supplies up, broke out a bottle of wine to celebrate and enjoyed the softness of the late afternoon weather.

"Let's have dinner on the beach," June suggested, and she sent me to find boulders to sit on while she made a special chef's salad. "I have a couple of secret ingredients, and I want to surprise you," she said, and I made my way to the beach to wait for her.

Next page | Twenty minutes later, I heard her cry