The Landscape: Stony Adriatic islands scattered along the
length of Croatia's coast. Coarse green shrubs and olive
trees whose thin leaves flash silver undersides to the
breeze. Translucent blue: a breath would cloud that water
of glass.

Light has a clarity there that is like no place else, and
it provokes a clarity of thought. Priorities and needs slip
so easily into place. You realize the hollowness of the rat
race, of consumerism, of chasing anything at all. Life is
distilled down, and you understand contentment: a bottle,
a gentle breeze, a pretty girl to cuddle. What need for
anything else?

Self-contained with car, tent and food, you hop from island
to paradise island. Travel by ferry - the shush and
ebb/swell of the waves and the salt smelling air - standing
on deck gripping a freshly painted rail, watching the
islands recede as the coastal mountains near.

Each new island brings a small village or two with winding
streets and stone houses, maybe a fortress or an ancient
Venetian trading house from the days when that city-state
ruled the waves. In each new town or village you pause for
bitter coffee softened by a mound of cream, and
all-absorbing conversation over a round cafe table in a
sleepy plaza.

Inevitably, you thread your way down rough gravel roads to
your own deserted stretch of shore, where you peel off
sweaty clothes to slip naked into the silken waters. You
dive deep, past the thermocline, into the grip of the cold.
Then, surfacing, float on your back with eyes closed,
gently rocked by Amphitrite's currents. The rest of the
world sinks down through your back to melt away, lost in
the briny deep.

On the stony shore the sun dries salt to a thin powdery
crust on browned skin. Under the olive trees you eat a
rustic lunch of bread, hard cheese, and coarse local wine
drunk straight from the bottle. Your backdrop is the
bleached bony spine of the mainland that towers over the
islands and the sea, and in the distance the slow clonk of
sheep bells.

The poet Derek Walcott wrote that islands can only exist if
we have loved in them.

Islands symbolize isolation, remoteness, and sometimes even
shipwreck: the forlorn seclusion of the castaway. We sit
and gaze out at the sea that surrounds us, but it is
ourselves that we are looking into. How remote the past
seems. Island life is insular, detached, inward looking.
It's closed off, like the blinders of first love, when
nothing exists except the two of you within the little
round space of that cafe table. The outside world is
helpless to intrude. Perhaps that's why islands symbolize
romance better than anyplace else.

Large islands embody the permissiveness and sensuality of
islands in general, but they lack the feeling of isolation.
Small islands are better. You feel it most acutely at
night. Sitting on a tiny sandspit surrounded by the inky
void of ocean and sky, you're like Vishnu on a lotus
flower, dreaming entire worlds, creating realities because
nothing else exists, and nothing can.