View from Hermit Island (from Unofficial Hermit Island website)

Thanks to the hermit, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 will be memorable to me even without the catastrophe that branded the date—”Nine Eleven”—into history.

The weekend leading up to Nine Eleven started in the dashing fashion typical of that eventful 2001 for me. Anja Brüll and I left Concord, Mass. early Friday evening, driving through the dark to the Harvard Forest center in central Mass. to meet my friend Bob, Harvard Design School’s landscape-ecology professor, and his class of 25 landscape-architecture students. We showed slides illustrating our version of Design with Nature: Me on landscape-based wastewater-cleaning methods and Anja on her Bio-Dome atrium that sheltered an Eden that could clean water and soil. Anja’s presentation proved far more popular. Who could blame these students? They, like most, were entranced by this tall, lean 31-year-old German with wavy blonde hair and form-fitting pants and jacket who planned to clean the world’s polluted industrial sites with her cooling tower-shaped greenhouses.

Bob thought we were staying the night there, but we left late, driving for hours down dark country roads to the highway and more dark roads to Brunswick, Maine, passing a brightly lit subsection of a 9-floor steel ship under construction at the Bath shipworks, turning at the “chocolate church” landmark, and pulling up to a charming 18th-century house to meet up with my friend Abe Collins and his friend Mike. We found them in the kitchen at 2 a.m. nibbling grapes and cheese, and giggling. Abe and Mike were either inebriated or high or both, but Mike sobered up to give us a tour of the charming sea captain’s house in which he grew up. In the morning, we piled into Abe’s beat-up Isuzu truck, stopped for blueberry scones and drove on to our destination and Mike’s inheritance: Hermit Island.

Hermit Island is a spit of land connected by a causeway to one of Maine’s Continue reading →