Bahamas Out Island News

THERE are times in this world when you want to get lost, well and truly out of your head, and find yourself vulnerable and laughing amid real, untrammeled beauty and hardship and life. This feeling comes across some like a fever, and they go to the movies. For others, only serious, difficult travel will do.

People fly to India, stay in a hut for a month. They sail across the Pacific. They camp for weeks in the remotest stretches of northern Maine or build yurts in western Montana or walk the Alaskan bush with binoculars and field guide. They go to Australia. They suffer the hardship of distant travel against the serenity they hope to find when they get where they’re going, and they work hard to earn the money or time that allows them to do it. Run into someone just back from a long sojourn to the outback, tanned and rested and suddenly kind, and odds are he’s either wealthy or Buddhist, a college kid, dreamer or life dropout, sometimes all five.

People fly to India, stay in a hut for a month. They sail across the Pacific. They camp for weeks in the remotest stretches of northern Maine or build yurts in western Montana or walk the Alaskan bush with binoculars and field guide. They go to Australia. They suffer the hardship of distant travel against the serenity they hope to find when they get where they’re going, and they work hard to earn the money or time that allows them to do it. Run into someone just back from a long sojourn to the outback, tanned and rested and suddenly kind, and odds are he’s either wealthy or Buddhist, a college kid, dreamer or life dropout, sometimes all five.

The travel is easy enough. Flight time from New York City, not counting a pleasant overnight layover in Nassau, the commonwealth’s capital, is five hours total. Five hours away and you can spend three days, dawn until dusk, on the water, the horizon as wide and lonely as the moon, seeing precisely this: No other people. No houses. No boats. No planes.

There is only the water, a soft pale grassy green flecked with white that gives way to teal in the channels, and to straw-ruffled browns on the flats, the oily green rise of mangrove hummocks behind them. There are clouds scudding through the immense blue sky, scattered terns wandering the waters with muted cries. There are manta rays pulsing along in the deep, and turtles breaststroking on hidden currents, menacing lemon sharks and motionless barracuda and shrimp and crabs and lobster and conch. There are jacks, and needlefish, and grouper. And there are bonefish: silvery ghosts feeding hard on the tide in the shallows, their dusky tails breaking the surface at the far edge of your eyesight.

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