Brett Martin

home to all sorts of enterprise that the citizenry either doesn't know about or prefers not to see.

Sanitariums and prisons, potter's fields and grand failed schemes.

Ruffle Bar itself had been the site of several of the latter.

Since the Civil War, it had housed a ferry stop, a resort hotel, and even a short-lived, doomed community of some 40 buildings.

We stop in front of a concrete foundation.

A building of some kind was here.

Oh look, this is a cool thing.

There are no buildings left here.

The island has returned to a deeply wild state.

There's a wall of dense brush and a few trees around which sinister gulls are circling.

We pass a flock of ducks who take one look at Alex and wisely move away.

As we search for Alex's Buddhist medallion that he'd left in the excitement of the helicopter rescue, we walk across a plain of thick, dry grass, matted down like a carpet.

Underneath, you can hear shells crunching and mysterious things scurrying around.

Still, reminders that we are in fact in a major metropolis are always close at hand.

For one thing, there's the garbage.

Piles of plastic and driftwood, but also shoes, steering wheels, prescription bottles, deflated balloons, a washer-dryer, several refrigerators, and, oddly, boats.

Three perfectly intact ones, complete with oars.

I hesitate to point these out to Alex, though, to be fair, they're probably too heavy for him to have dragged to the water.

He was always close enough to the city that simply having a cell phone would have had him tucked safely into bed within half an hour.

Alex was finally rescued after seven hours, thanks to Roman and Glubachansky.