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Chapter 3 draws on (post-)phenomenology, ecocriticism, and Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry to examine a set of diaries and memoirs from the US–Canadian border region in the Pacific Northwest that express a permeable conception of islands and the islanded self. It argues that memoirs like Helene Glidden’s The Light on the Island (1951), Muriel Wylie Blanchet’s The Curve of Time (1961), and David Conover’s Once Upon an Island (1967) imagine islands as spaces inserted within larger ecological and geological continuities. Their reimagination of islands in multiple interconnectedness disrupts arbitrarily drawn political borders, yet they also have a tendency to construct a unified ecological landscape with its own exclusions. Conversely, George Vancouver’s North Pacific journal—the foundational text for this chapter—and the geological diary of George Gibbs inadvertently offer a more radical island poetics: in these texts, the unfamiliar islandscapes aesthetically resist the cartographic drive to fix them.

While HEW and USDA pondered these appellate court decisions, we turned our attention to several more local DDT problems. From a New York Times article (May 3, 1970), we learned that the Olin Chemical Corporation was manufacturing about 20% of the nation’s DDT in buildings owned by the federal government and leased to Olin on the site of the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama. A DDT-contaminated effluent from this plant was leaking into the Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge at concentrations known to inhibit reproduction of birds and fish. The refuge also served as a drinking water supply for the city of Decatur, implying a human health hazard as well. Downriver fisherman were also eating their catch, thus concentrating DDT to higher levels as well. In October 1969, the federal Water Quality Administration had recommended a stricter pollution control standard for the Olin plant. Olin said it could not meet that standard, and the Army then overruled the Water Quality Administration’s recommendation. So on June 5, 1970, EDF, along with the National Audubon Society and the National Wildlife Federation, sued in Federal District Court against Olin, the Department of the Army, and the Corps of Engineers seeking to stop the DDT-contaminated discharge. The complaint was written by EDF’s new attorney, Edward Lee Rogers. I supplied the scientific support, which was easy, since it was similar, although steadily expanding, to the Wisconsin hearings and the USDA and HEW cases. Only three days later Olin threw in the towel! On June 8 Olin decided to close its DDT plant and no longer make DDT. DDT apparently was not worth defending. They said they had reached that decision shortly before our case was filed. True or not, it was a quick and easy victory. We needed it. We had won by winning. Even as the legal briefs went back and forth between EDF, USDA, HEW, and the appeals court, another DDT battle was brewing in California. For years scientists had been puzzled by the extremely high levels of DDT contamination along the coast of Southern California compared with other marine environments.

A Friday in July . . . Boston is a tangle of cranes and earthmovers, half-built flyovers and half-dug trenches and a huge steel snake slithering along the narrowest of paths through the chaos—Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited, weaving its way through the city’s $15 billion highway construction project known as the Big Dig and heading westward toward Albany, Cleveland, and Chicago. We’ve said our last goodbyes to the family, hauled our backpacks into our two-person sleeping compartment, and finally, after weeks of ever-more frantic preparation, begun to feel the rhythm of the world rumbling slowly by beneath us, the rhythm of our lives for the next six months. The train picks up headway as it groans past the hallowed green walls of Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox and the spiritual center of New England, the dense triple-decker blocks of the inner suburbs and the verdant lawns and oak groves of the outer suburbs. James and I sit across from each other, grinning slightly, both a little intoxicated by a cocktail of excitement, relief, and anxiety. Family, friends, work, school, daily antagonisms, and well-worn rituals are all receding physically if not yet mentally. Over the horizon ahead loom Alaska, the Pacific, Japan, Vladivostok, Lake Baikal, and 25,000 miles or so of who knows what else. But it’s no big deal, we tell ourselves. We’re heading home, just taking the long way. Just past dawn, west of Cleveland, we’re running two and a half hours late. Our sleeping car attendant, Fred, tells us that we lost time overnight to track repairs, slow-loading mail shipments, and freight trains. Once you start to lose a little time on this run, he says, you quickly end up losing a lot, because the tracks are owned by the freight companies, and their trains have priority. If an Amtrak train slips off schedule, it starts the kind of chain reaction of delays that have earned this train the nickname the Late Shore Limited. I ask Fred if we’re going to make our connection in Chicago. “Not if we keep stopping like this,” he says.