Islands, pt 1 : Silence, and the night

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We were staying in a small family-owned inn on one of the hundreds of islands scattered along the southern coast. The staff had left the premises after dinner had been served and the dishes collected and cleaned, and we were alone in the building. It was not yet late, though very dark. We’d found the small pension by random means, sans reservations or prior publicity. It was off-season, just after the summer tourist crowds and just before the autumn holiday of Chuseok where everyone travels to visit family. 

The room had a patio attached where we watched a gaudy sunset as we finished up a seafood stew brought and prepared by the lady who owned the house. The sky showed us more colors splashed about than we ever get to see in the city. The air was brisk, the breeze gentle enough to stimulate the mind and keep insects at bay.

The island, called Bogil-do, is remote but well-inhabited considering that it’s far enough from the mainland that a ninety-minute ferry ride is required, yet nevertheless able to support a small city with a old-style outdoor market, clothing shops (one of which inhabited a city bus converted to the purpose) a school, and even a couple of PC rooms. Another island appeared close enough that you imagined you could throw a stone to it, but in fact you would need to hire a water taxi or take another ferry that only ran intermittently. A bridge was under construction to connect the two for auto traffic. Our cell phones carried a signal but a span of about an hour had elapsed during the ride over when this was not so.

We were close enough to the water to be able to observe the shoreline for several kilometers in each direction, and at night after the sun had gone down completely, barely-perceptible flashes of lights bounced off of the broad, wrinkled surface of the water, the passage surrounded by scattered buildings that attempted to overpower the darkness with electricity and utterly failed to do so, vanishing either way into blackness studded by receding lights that lined the single two-lane asphalt that circled the island. From our room, a few dozen meters above the water, the silence was near-total except for the movement of leaves from a gentle breeze and the white-noise background lublub of water gently tapping the shoreline. The two-lane was a short walk from us but for the entire evening no engines drove on it, as there was simply no place to go. It was an island, and the residents spent their days during that season harvesting goods from the ocean that could be converted into money.

We read books, treating the TV as if it had been absent or malfunctioning, a wordless agreement between us that switching the thing on would reanimate all the furniture of the city that we were attempting to banish.  My traveling companion (and future spouse) nodded off on the futon and I kept reading while sipping some beer, and writing a bit in a little notebook. We had brought our phones, but we left them switched off most of the time.

Sometime after 10 that evening, I thought I heard something in the dimness outside, far off, then gone. Then I thought I heard it again, but it was faint enough that it could easily have been imagination at work. I slipped a sweater on without a shirt, and stepped into sandals to go out on the patio. The lights that lit the narrow path leading from the main road were on a timer that would keep them working until midnight and the yellow-orange glow illuminating the trees and bushes had no effect at all on the smashing brilliance of the stars overhead, so bright and full of dazzle as to almost seem to include a threat in some inexplicable way.

The sound was still there, becoming definite, a buzz, but slightly higher pitched than a car or a diesel, and getting louder. After a minute I could see a light up the hill coming closer.A few minutes later, a motorcycle turned in a wide arc through the small parking lot, the sound jarring and uncomfortable after so much quiet, and a brisk wind, fresh with ocean salt and scrub pine, cut through the gaps in my clothes and tugged at the loose parts of the fabric.

The rider took off his helmet and waved at me, so I waved back. He got off his bike and stood about a hundred meters away, so conversation was unlikely. I had no inclination to walk down to meet him, and after a short time he got back on his machine and rode off.

When the silence returned, it was more pronounced than it had been before, and it’s a mark of what city life does to a person that I did not feel peaceful and serene in my mind because of it, but rather alone and isolated. When I came back in the room, the door closed with a soft thud behind me and the silence was complete. The building was a relatively new one and even the floor was noiseless beneath my feet.

In the morning we negotiated an hourly rate with a bored taxi driver and toured the nearby area.

We found a monument and a park with gardens devoted to the memory of a poet, Yun son-do, who had made his residence here in the 17th century, where he wrote some longish verses about the nobility of fishermen which Korean schoolchildren are still required to learn. There is a forest of evergreens, old-growth and unimpeded by history, a thing rare to see in Korea. We saw a sign for a beach, and went there and walked on it, round golf-ball sized stones. It’s the only one on the island, the rest of the shoreline consisting of steep slopes and rocky cliffs.

Despite the impression one gets of wilderness and rocks and ceaselessly dashing waves, this island had been settled for hundreds of years before the arrival of the poet, and enjoying an academic tradition from China going back a thousand years or more at a time when Americans were fretting about where to put the commas in the Mayflower Compact.

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