Introduction

Introduction

Is it brave to put everything you own into storage and schlep out to live for possibly two years on a remote, tiny island populated with under two dozen people and over two million birds?  I don’t think so.  But when I did just that, when I packed up my whole life and locked it away, not knowing when I’d see any of it again, and went to live and work on Midway Atoll, people called me brave.  They envied me for going on an adventure.

I didn’t feel brave or intrepid.  My friends who thought that about me had spouses and children and soccer practice and family vans.  I had none of those things.  Not even a gold fish to hold me back or leave behind.  I didn’t know what Midway would be like when I got there, or how my life would be living there.  I just knew it would be different, and different was what I wanted.

            That was 2002.  I had just turned 34.  I had never been married, had no children, and the only man I’d ever loved had recently married someone who was not me.  It wasn’t courage or a sense of adventure that sent me to the middle of the North Pacific Ocean.  It was just wanting to be elsewhere.  Wherever elsewhere was, didn’t really matter. 

            I went to Midway to manage the airport on the island.  That’s what I did.  I ran airports.  I had been in the airport industry for 12 years and was working for a private airport management company based in Santa Monica, California.  It was a good gig, except for the fact that I hated living in East Los Angeles County, hated spending two and half hours a day in traffic, and thought most of the tenants and users of my airport were a******s.  So, when the company scored the Midway contract, and offered it to me, I didn’t even have to think about it.  F**k yeah, I’ll go.

         Over the next two years, I would spend 17 months “on-island”, and I break it up in my mind, and this book, as first tour and second tour.  The first tour is about 11 months when I was there by choice.  The second tour is after I had requested a transfer off and all the times I had to go back because we couldn’t keep a new manager there.  Life on Midway is not for the feint of heart.  My first replacement lasted only about 6 weeks.

         For me, life on Midway was both wonderful and horrendous.  I would become fast friends and drinking buddies with a bunch of rough and raucous guys so drastically different than I that I would never have met them anywhere but where we happened to find ourselves.  I would be stalked by a creepy Thai who barely spoke English, and be hit on more often than the laundry lady at a men’s prison.  I would learn how few material things I needed to have find happiness.  I would find confidence in skills I didn’t know I had.  I would be so bored, lonely and depressed that had a port-a-potty washed up on shore, I’d have done my very best Tom Hanks impression.  I would become the person I am today, and never could have become without Midway.

 

Reviews

[Samuel Dickens]

I think this is an excellent introduction. Well-worded, interesting and just the right length. In light of your life circumstances in traffic infested LA, your decision to go off on a little tropical adventure seems a logical choice to me.