Articles

My grandmother bought her first island in 1952. It was eight acres in the shape of a meaty drumstick, a hunk of sunbaked granite off the eastern shore of the Georgian Bay, in southern Ontario. The island was strewn with juniper and blueberry, along with a few magisterial white pines, each extruding from the nearly soilless surface like a frilled sandwich pick from a crusty loaf. At its highest point was an outcrop of smooth, pink rock—a viewsome site for a cottage. Fifty feet below lay a natural harbor. At a comfortable swimming distance from shore were three shoals, strategically arranged like a hedgerow, as if to demarcate the property line. My grandmother, the wife of a Cleveland investment banker, named the island Tyrone, after the county in Northern Ireland where her father had been born. She paid the Province of Ontario $1,800 for it, a transaction belying the strong probability that no government official—and likely no more than a handful of human beings ever—had set foot on it.

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For two years I’ve been walking into the tall grass to take snapshots of this field at the top of the “crooked mile,” a winding hill that leads into the shallow valley of swamp and stream in which my house stands, just past the sign that reads pavement ends. I use my phone. I want the rough eye. The note. The diary. The record. The document. This time, this moment, unplanned.

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Toward the end of the film version of Peter Gent’s corrosively sarcastic football yarn North Dallas Forty, a lineman played by real-life gridiron hero John Matuszak throws a fit upon hearing one more you’re-not-worthy upbraiding from a sniveling, corporate-minded coach. “To you it’s just a business, but to us it’s still gotta be a sport,” he shouts. “Every time I call it a game you call it a business, and every time I call it a business you call it a game!”

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