Books in Brief.("On Whale Island: Notes from a Place I Never Meant to Leave")(Brief Article)

On Whale Island: Notes from a Place I Never Meant to Leave, by Daniel Hays (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 240 pp., $22.95)

This book is by the co-author of My Old Man and the Sea, the incomparable account of travel on a 25-foot sailboat from Old Lyme, Connecticut, to Old Lyme, Connecticut, via Cape Horn. Daniel Hays was then 24 and not quite grown up. Now he is 39 and not quite grown up -- which is how those who wonder at his naturalist and solipsistic obsessions wish it would always be. A brilliant and articulate father (David) was dominant in the first book, but this one is all Daniel and his little island off Nova Scotia to which he took his bride and stepchild for one year of exultant isolation. He is hardly indifferent to the lively, combative wife who endured it all ("for Wendy, my joy forever" is his dedication), or to the bookish 12-year-old Boy Tarzan, superbly exfoliated ("Last month Stephan got to the part in The Princess Bride where the hero dies. He burst into tears and threw the book into the ocean. I waded in, dried it off, and read it to him until the hero came back to life. He sniffled a little, and then he took the book back").

Hays is a superb writer of the outdoors and the indoors, and chronicles even his own misanthropy with wit and cunning ("I seem to be unbearable to my family. Especially at night, when I must turn on the radio so my thoughts can unfocus, otherwise they cling on and on, leaving fractal trails in multiple shades of black"). When he has only one more day of the committed 365 to stay on his island, he writes, "I'm content here, and I'm watching the seasons go by and I want to stay forever ...