Sand Island was the name, in the early 1970s, for a microscopic dot of land off Pohnpei, an island that is much larger, but still only a speck in the vast western Pacific. This blog is named Sand Island because that dot was the setting for happy childhood adventures. Time and memory have turned the island into a symbol of a balanced life, and an ideal to find again.

Sand Island is the green spot to the northeast of Garden Island. Sand Island is now called Joy Island, and the site of abandoned resort hotel huts.
I think I've been in mourning for Sand Island and the three years when my family lived on Pohnpei. It's a middle-aged thing, in part. My restless parents left a suburban life in California for Catholic lay missionary teaching jobs in a very remote place. Now, at the age of 46, I am older than they were then. 

On Pohnpei we didn't have much to do during weekends because at that time there were no roads to the Jesuit campus where we lived. We had to explore the parts of the island that we could reach on foot or that were no farther than a day's roundtrip by boat. Luckily, there were a handful of beautiful islets nearby, on Pohnpei's outer reef. Unlike the main island, which is ringed by muddy mangrove swamps, the reef islands were uninhabited and surrounded by beaches, coral, and sand. Sand Island was one of the smallest islands we visited and it wasn't on the reef, but inside it, amidst acres of shallow, sand-bottomed lagoon. If we happened to stay on the island when the tide sank lower than expected, during the trip home we had to get out of the boat so that it would stay afloat. I recall my parents walking the boat through shallows, leaving a murky trail and scaring up stingrays that shot away like shadows from puffs of sand. 

My brother Ron and a family friend on one of our outings 
My parents had a Micronesian outrigger canoe made for us, but it was too small for
my brothers and me to ride in all at once
We didn't have television or telephones, little radio, and sporadic power. Google Earth didn't exist, of course, and I don't remember having a clear idea of the shape and size of the island. In three years, I never saw the other side of Pohnpei. When we were on Sand Island, I had no idea what lay around the western peninsula of Pohnpei, though I always wanted to know. Our ignorance and isolation meant that we sometimes felt like the first people in the world to discover narrow entrances into the deep mangrove, hidden corners in the reef, or bizarre marine life. We went shell crazy and scoured the reefs around Sand Island at low tide, turning over chunks of coral looking for cowries and cones. We never knew what would be revealed: eels, octopi, sea urchins... We gathered buckets of shells and now I feel guilty about how we picked the reef clean. I didn't want to stop collecting, even if I wandered far out on the reef, alone. 

Sand Island was low, windswept, fairly clear of underbrush, and you could see through the coconut trees from one side to the other. My brothers and I snorkeled and came in for picnic lunches of warm peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Schools of mullet and needlefish—fast, thin surface swimmers that appeared as dark lines on the horizon of water across our facemasks—surrounded the island. Stingrays abounded in the sand and seagrass and we knew they were dangerous, but we kids explored freely. Once, I swam over a large, deep hole and I could just make out the sandy bottom, which was covered with the dark, slowly-moving shapes of stingrays. This terrified me, and one of my greatest fears was, and remains, getting pulled by overpowering currents into deep water. The worst possible fate I could imagine was being dragged by a tidal rush through a reef pass, past the pounding surf of the outer reef's protective ring, into the dark blue, vacant Pacific. Weren't my parents more concerned about us? Now, I'm amazed at the number of close calls we had. Nothing poisonous lived on Pohnpei, but the ocean was full of danger, including fast tides that drained the reefs nearly dry.

Sometimes I wonder if I have tried to re-create or re-capture the calm security my parents provided, the undemonstrative but committed care that allowed my brothers and me such freedom. After three years on Pohnpei, we were eager to begin a new adventure in the outer world, where (we thought at the time) "real" things happened, but sometimes I think I have been out of place since we left. The last thirty-five years have been a distraction, a detour from the inevitable, and I think I have always expected to end up somewhere like Sand Island, a tropical place where I could explore nature unchaperoned. Now, I am impatient with guided tours and cautious, passionless travel.  

An 1874 book about an American missionary in Pohnpei, entitled Ponapé: Light on a Dark Shore, describes a boat trip around Pohnpei that was delayed by bad tides. The group had to spend the night on a small, uninhabited island, and I wonder if it was Sand Island. It could have been. I'll end with the book's description of that island, partly because I liked finding this antique account of such an obscure place, partly because of its quaint enthusiasm: 

"What a gem of a little island it was! Nearly circular and no larger than I could run across in three or four minutes, covered with a velvety carpet of grass, studded with young cocoanut trees, with a white sand-beach strewn with shells and corals, it seemed like a mimic island only, brought up by some magic wand as a home for the fairies. We seated ourselves on the beach while we worshipped and sang 'All hail!' to the Maker of heaven and earth, then launched our canoe and away. The morning was cloudy, earth and sea and sky all of an inky purple. The mountains, however, were darker, except a streak of light struggling through a break in the clouds and reflected over the waves. I can never tell when Ponapé is prettiest, she is so beautiful in every mood. Now the dark clouds are mostly gone. On one side the blue sky, streaked with silver, is smiling down on the green-robed hills, but on the other the grand old mountains veil themselves still in mist."