Bahamas Out Island News

SO the idea was this: Six days with my wife on an uninhabited, mostly unpowered Bahamian island.

My first thought? Alcatraz is an island too.

For reasons I can’t fully explain, I experience free time as a kind of a provocation, and a week by the ocean, with all of the lying on beach chairs and staring at turquoise waters, has always struck me as less an escape than a kind of feckless surrender. Add to that a chronic need to both feed and be fed by the so-called digital grid — the e-mail, the Twitter, the RSS feeds — and it becomes clear that distraction is my distraction. The last time I got on an airplane without a laptop, there were no laptops.

No more than a small rise of volcanic rock, shells and sand lying all by its lonesome off Long Island in the Bahamas, Little Deadman’s Cay would seem well cast either as a paradise or prison with palm trees. It’s not easy to get to — you fly to Nassau and then take a prop plane for 165 more miles to Long Island, at which point you take a five-minute boat ride to this 9.5-acre private island that rents by the week.

Once there, there would be no daily list of activities, sightseeing trips to knock out, television or business centers I might use to “check in” at work. Instead, just a solar-powered house, two small beaches and a few walking paths measured in feet, not miles. There was only one thing on the island that might interrupt the séance of serenity and relaxation. Me.

Read the rest of the story on travel.nytimes.com »

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