Customer Reviews

An Island Out of Time : A Memoir of Smith Island in the Chesapeake

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

An avid reader of publications like National Geographic, I found this book to be a very enjoyable and accurate depiction of an area that receives too little attention. The only thing that could improve this story would be full color photographs illustrating the brilliant sunsets, changes in water color, the wildlife and the characters that are detailed throughout. This book sparked such an interest in the area that my family currently is searching for a new home on the Crisfield side of the Bay. We appreciated the pace of life and the simplicity that have caused the locals to resist change and embrace their past. Many thanks to the author for clueing us in.

Tom Horton's "An Island Out of Time" is more than just a documentary of life on Smith Island, it's a paean to individuality, to spirituality, and to the love of things natural whether they result in environmental disaster or reclamation. The uniqueness of life on a semi-isolated island in the Chesapeake Bay is also a refreshing look at the idea of community - unburdened by political correctness or ultra-sophisticated analysis. Horton waxes poetically about the sun's play over the marshes, or the clarity of the water, the coldness of the waves in a storm, and the gradual decay of the island's ability to survive. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone who wants to understand the real impacts of the Chesapeake - or celebrate its uniqueness.

Although the book is indeed well written, please be advised that if you like cats you may have a hard time getting past a chapter where Mr. Horton describes his efforts to kill many cats (mostly through trapping them in barrels and taking them to the mainland to be gassed), because they caused problems for his asthmatic son. I really couldn't get past it, and have taken a dim view of the whole book because of it.

The background information leading to this chapter is troubling, because it paints a picture of a father willing to risk the health of a severely asthmatic child by taking him to an island where emergency medical care is available only via a harrowing boat ride to the mainland (described in the book), where the atmosphere is horridly humid and difficult to withstand for healthy individuals, and where the a large population of beloved cats roam freely everywhere. Mr. Horton describes the qualms of his wife who is really unwilling to uproot herself to live on the island, and his serious concerns for the health of his son. But he is determined that his son should experience the idyllic life of the island whether he wants it or not, but the conflicts concerning his desire to recreate for his son the same childhood experiences that he had himself as a child, with what appears to be overwhelming frustration with the impediments to this wish presented by his son's health issues, result in Mr. Horton displacing his anger on the cats that lived near the schoolhouse his son attended. After you read the chapter on the cat killings, it throws previous threads in the narrative in an entirely different light. What appeared to be obstinacy against better judgement (really risking his son's life because of the difficulty in reaching emergency medical care), becomes the portrait of a callous father displacing the anger he should feel toward himself in a charming chapter of descriptions of animal cruelty.

Notice that all the reviewers here live near the Chesapeake Bay. This bay will interest and speak to all those that have an interest in a society and environment almost gone. A super read, intimate in detail and beautiful in imagery.

Horton writes an environmental column in the Baltimore Sunwhich Isometimes enjoy and sometimes don't. So I was prepared for Island Out of Time to be average. But I was more than pleasantly surprised. Horton has written a first-rate account of the watermen and their families on Smith Island from the first-hand observations of his family, which lived on the island for several years, as well as great oral accounts from the islanders themselves.

I received this book as a gift, never having heard of the author or Smith Island. After reading the book, I feel very lucky to have discovered a new favorite author. Tom Horton's book is a gem! He's a talented writer and Smith Island is a rare and beautiful subject. As an Iranian, I found his descriptions so enchanting that I plan to visit Smith Island someday soon.

This book is appropriate for all ages and especially for those who appreciate the environment and a simplicity to life that is fast disappearing.

As a previous reviewer noted, Mr. Horton single-handedly decided to exterminate almost all of the cats on the island to help his asthmatic son. The thing is, if his son was that asthmatic, why did he take him to an island with no emergency medical care? Why did he not home-school his kid until the cats could have been gotten rid of humanely. He slaughtered the cats despite their care taker's tears. He seems like a heartless, selfish man who is willing to risk his child's life and then shoot anything that gets in his way.

He reminds me of Jon Katz, who is also a gifted writer but completely heartless and narcissistic. The following article, written by Mr. Horton for the Baltimore Sun, shows just how little he cared about killing all those cats:

[...]

The Day the Fur Flew
When Tom Horton moved to Smith Island, it was a dream come true. He could muck around the Bay again and know his children would be well-educated in a one-room schoolhouse. There was just that one little problem with the cats.
June 09, 1996|By TOM HORTON
(Page 9 of 10)

I returned to the island victorious, but surely no hero. Alice had been too tearful to even talk in school that day, and when she returned to Ewell, she took with her the remnants of the school cats. Like fine dust from a windstorm that takes forever to settle and pervades every crevice, the incident had stirred up a cloud of what the islanders called "nomini," a word they used for bitter backbiting of the sort that can wrack a community. The cat roundup was the first time I had abandoned all pretense of being a neutral observer and taken an action that directly affected the island. Until you jostle a portion of it, you can't imagine how intricate and pervasive is the web of connections amid such a place.

There were pro- and anti-cat factions, muddled further by pro- and anti-Horton factions and pro- and anti-Alice factions; and, of course. just about everyone in every faction bore some kinship to one another. The nomini grew very intense. The PTA for a time looked as if it might dissolve over the incident, just before its big fund-raiser. "Beloved Murn, Rest In Peace," read the message hung in the school beneath a cutout picture of a cat. Murn, you see, was supposed to have been saved, but a top secret message to Miss Evelyn to keep him penned up the night before the roundup never got through.

My own son solemnly informed me, just in case I had forgotten, that it was after all "the pride and joy of the whole school" I had done away with.

As summer neared, and crabbing pulled the island into its frenzied orbit of round-the-clock work, the nomini seemed to be fading. I was in Baltimore, visiting friends who used to live in the bay islands. Famished, I ordered a large pizza, a rare treat for the water-locked. Something distracted me for a few minutes, long enough for a trio of pet cats to nearly devour the whole pizza. They were hardly housebroken, my friend apologized. He had just brought them up a few days before from Tangier island. I have no doubt, even if it is separated by six miles of water from Smith, that those cats were avenging their Smith Island kin.

Tom Horton's great gift as a writer is his ability to conjure up the natural world in words. His memoir of his family's time on Smith Island is his best work yet. Note I said yet. A book by Tom Horton is always a cause for rejoicing. His environmental writing is up there with Aldo Leopold and Barry Lopez.

Tom Horton's great gift as a writer is his ability to conjure up the natural world in words. His memoir of his family's time on Smith Island is his best work yet. Note I said yet. A book by Tom Horton is always a cause for rejoicing. His environmental writing is up there with Aldo Leopold and Barry Lopez.

This is a wonderful, gentle read. So many of the memories are not indigenous to Smith Island. It wasn't so long ago most of the Delmarva Peninsula's small towns were so much like the Islanders.