NO OVERNIGHT DOCKING: Sign posted on dock at northern end of Rapture Island, several miles south of Beauty. There are more than thirty islands in Narragansett Bay, and Rapture, though uninhabited, is one of the largest. (Personal photo/Josephine Saint-Martin)
Chapter 18
Lucky was right: Rapture Island is small. Very small.
It’s a little rocky on both ends, with trees in the middle. Among those trees, I can make out a few old buildings—or what remains of them. Just stones, really. And at one end of the island, near a weathered pier, a white-and-red lighthouse beckons like a finger into the water.
Not a single human being in sight.
Just the two of us.
Our own private getaway.
Lucky pilots us to the pier by the lighthouse, shutting off the motor to startling silence. And as he moors the boat, I exit it and tread onto old, gray boards stippled with white bird droppings. The boards bounce like rubber with each step.
It smells good out here, like saltwater and cedar, and as I approach a boxy, gray clapboard dock house on the sandy land at the end of the pier, the sweet scent of shrubby beach roses drifts from beneath its dusty windows.
A painted sign stands between the empty dock house and a footpath that splits between the lighthouse and farther into the island. It reads:
RAPTURE ISLAND
FIRST SETTLED BY THE NARRAGANSETT TRIBES.
SOLD TO EARLY AMERICAN PATRIOT, ROBERT HART.
HAS BEEN: TRADING POST, PIG FARM, RELIGIOUS COLONY.
RAIDED BY THE BRITISH IN 1776.
DESTROYED BY THREE HURRICANES.
SETTLED BY FORK-TAIL ROCK SWALLOWS IN 1969.
MINDFUL HUMANS MAY VISIT THE RAPTURE BIRD SANCTUARY FROM APRIL THROUGH OCTOBER. PLEASE PAY FEE TO TOUR THE ISLAND INDEPENDENTLY TO THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER.
NO OVERNIGHT STAYS. NO FIRES. PICK UP YOUR TRASH. DON’T PICK ANY VEGETATION OR FEED ANIMALS. STAY ON THE DESIGNATED TRAILS.
PEACE BE WITH YOU.
“Oh my God,” I whisper as Lucky trudges up behind me. “How did I not know this was out here? This should be a huge tourist attraction for Beauty. This is … amazing.”
“Yeah?” he says, hefting the strap of the cooler across his chest.
“Yes.” I swing around, trying to take it all in. “Look at all this. Everything.”
“Everything?”
“Like, okay, first of all—I love beach roses. They’re better than garden roses, because they’re the outcasts of the rose kingdom, and wherever we’ve lived up and down New England, there they are, like a good luck sign that smells amazing,” I say, smiling.
“Never thought about them that way. My mom calls them trash roses.”
“My mom says they’re magnets for bugs. See? Outcasts of the rose kingdom.”
He nods. “I can get behind an outcast.”
“And second, the website for the island isn’t half as weird as this sign, so now I’m totally intrigued about what’s here. But, oh my God. This sign! Wow!”
He shrugs. “Told you.”
“Lucky.”
“Was I right, or what?”
“You were so right. Hold on a second. I need to set up some shots from different angles,” I tell him, and he agrees, cheerful and patient, watching me work as I capture the strange sign. He even helps boost me up by my waist, letting me stand on his bent knee, so that I can get a better shot from above.
How could all of these things exist on one tiny island—the Narragansetts’ settlement, the religious colony, the pig farming, wars, hurricanes … all of that, only to be deserted and forgotten? It’s as if it’s one big time capsule of humanity’s successes and failures, and all that’s left is a marker of what happened. A marker, a sign, one last communication: Don’t forget us.
The best sign in all of Beauty.
Maybe the best sign in my entire collection.
“It’s so weird and beautiful,” I tell Lucky after I change out my film.
“Just you wait. This place gets weirder, if you’re interested in exploring?”
“Well, I didn’t come all the way out here to get back on the stupid Narwhal, I’ll tell you that. You promised me a colonial ghost town.…”
“Did indeed,” he says, looking upward. “Wish the sky looked a little better. The forecast said the storm passing over Connecticut should miss us, but those clouds are starting to worry me. Should probably ask the lighthouse keeper about them. No one knows weather patterns like sailors and lighthouse keepers.”
“And meteorologists, maybe.”
“I suppose,” he says, smiling. “Come on. Let’s check in.”
Problem is, we can’t. When we hike to the lighthouse, there’s a sign on the door that cheerfully informs us where the keeper is: GONE FISHIN’. It doesn’t say when this person