For four years in the middle 1960s, my family and I spent our summers on Hurricane Island, about ten miles off the coast of Maine. We lived first in a wall tent and later in a cabin. An Outward Bound school occupied almost all of the island’s solid granite bulk – from a distance it resembled a basking whale – so our days were pretty full, from run and dip just past five in the morning (nothing like a long drop into 45º water to get the juices flowing) to meetings and skull sessions before bedtime. Poor Mother, in constant fear of our kids going over the side, kept life jackets on them whenever they were near the sea. Later, she took over the equipment storerooms and hired a full-time babysitter to spend the summers with us.

On sunny days she took the kids berrying. They foraged for green apples (for pectin) in an abandoned orchard, filched sugar from the kitchen, and made raspberry jam. Meanwhile, out on the water, on the cliffs, or in the swimming area, I was shepherding my watch of twelve young men through ever more ambitious challenges. To be at sea at night in an open boat, navigating by distant lights or buoys, was about as close to perfect as a life could be. And the island, foreign to us all at first, became our Ithaca, to which we returned, like Odysseus, at the end of each voyage.

In Maine’s Baxter Park lies an almost fjordlike pond named Wassataquoik Lake. Near one end of it is a tiny island with a semi-enclosed shelter. We had to paddle the length of the lake to get to it, and there was only one canoe. We were five by then; so I told the two older kids to “shore it” while I took Mother, the two-year-old, and the gear to the island. Then I’d come back for them. Everything went smoothly. But as the older kids and I approached the island, the wind suddenly died and reversed direction, and within five minutes was blowing a gale, whipping water off the waves and whirling it up onto the mountainside. We huddled in the screened shelter. I managed to get a fire going, and we shared a pot of chicken soup. It was the only time in my life I felt that my family’s survival depended on what I was doing right then. That little island will always be a very special spot. If I ever get strong enough again, I’m going back.

Somebody once gave me a book titled The Islandman, by Tomas O’Croghan (the Anglicized version of his Gaelic name). I have it still, and can almost find it on my shelf in the dark. Tomas chronicles the lives of the people on the Blasket Islands, off the coast of Dingle, where they lived on whatever they could reap from the sea and shipwrecks. They had a hereditary king – called simply The King – until 1953, when the Irish government removed them for bureaucratic reasons. They heated with peat and made epic trips in canvas-covered currachs to Dingle on the mainland, where they traded for necessaries, tippled a bit, and almost invariably ended up bruised and bloody from joyous brouhahas with the Dingle boys.

I’d always wanted to go there; but even if you’re in Dingle, it isn’t easy. By sheer good fortune, we were there when the weather gods smiled. We rode out in a fishing boat, landed from a Zodiac, and walked, almost reverentially, the abandoned ruins of the stone houses. Below us shone the beach, the White Strand, where they raked seaweed for manure and on Christmas Day each year beat each other to a pulp at hurling.

There’s Hepburn Island, off the north coast of Canada, where we camped a couple of times and found remains of ancient semi-subterranean Thule houses. From its cliffs we could look south at the barren north shore of our home continent. The Thule imagined themselves the only people in the world; it was easy to see why. From where I sit here typing, I can look to the windowsill, where I’ve placed a couple of relics of that lonely island – a flake of granite and a row of muskox teeth. What I’d give to go back again!

Meantime, I’m looking forward to an afternoon voyage from mainland Norway to the Lofotens. We’ll be out there two nights – codfish drying racks everywhere; glacial peaks like fangs; fantastic food (ask me sometime about the seagull egg I thought was a crunchy avocado); the legend of the Italian nobleman who discovered salt cod and made a fortune trading to Rome; and tales of the fishermen who gathered here each Christmas season to trawl for cod from sailing vessels. They’re chronicled in a novel, The Last of the Vikings, which I’ll re-read tonight as a refresher. And all around, the sea.

Is it any wonder I’m in love with islands? They make the turmoil and busyness of the mainland seem so trivial and far away. And sure enough: When we return to land, nothing there has changed.