Over There

If you happen to be in New London when you get the urge to run away, your options are obvious. There’s any place on any road a car can navigate.
There’s any destination where the buses and trains stop. There are the ferries to Block Island and Orient Point. And near them, just a little off to the side, there’s the other ferry. You could easily mistake its pleasant red-brick terminal for a non-functioning memento of an earlier age, when ferry travel was classier, or at least appeared that way. That ferry goes to Fishers Island.

I don’t know anyone who’s been to Fishers Island, but someone must be going there: the boats leave New London, and return to it, several times a day. Once I’d been reminded of its existence, I of course wanted to go there too. I wanted to know what was out there, just a few miles offshore. Instead, as the approaching winter cold makes the thought of a ferry ride unappealing and the price of said ferry ride makes it impossible, I decided to run away by reading about it instead.

It was frequented by Indians and got its name from Adrian Block. Its connection to New London starts before the city’s founding, with John Winthrop, Jr. He lived there before moving to the mainland, just across the water so that, as Frances Manwaring Caulkins writes, “the owner of these two noble domains could look over Fisher’s Island Sound, from either side, and rest his eye on his own fair possessions.”  

The ubiquitous Joshua Hempstead sailed to Fishers Island many times, mostly to deal with livestock and paperwork, but sometimes unintentionally; the area was, and is, prone to strong storms. Like New London, it was hit hard by the 1938 hurricane. It barely survived a 48-hour storm in 1815. Also like New London, it was raided and burned during the Revolutionary War.

Though the Winthrop family owned the profitable island for generations,
its jurisdiction was often contested. It bounced between Massachusetts,
Connecticut, and New York, and for a short time it was officially controlled by no entity but Winthrop himself. In 1879 New York won out, though the island is closer to Connecticut and retains, among other Connecticut-ish things, a zip code starting with 06.

A hilarious New York Magazine article from 1985 paints a picture of an idiosyncratic, insular community, devoted to family, tradition, and enjoying your extreme wealth away from the curious eyes of the grubby masses. I instantly recalled a day last summer, when I passed some time in front of New London’s train station watching a group of pastel-clad preppies who seemed to have walked straight out of a Vampire Weekend video. Where did they wash up from, I wondered? And now I knew.

The article mentions the difficulty in reserving a place on the ferry, then only possible on the island side. Modern technology has done away with that restriction, but I wondered if the police still meet the ferry to send outsiders back over.

It was intriguing to think of a land with its own strange culture lurking there just beyond my own shore, even if that land was only one mile wide and nine miles long. I checked to see what more practical, travel-related sources said about it.

TripAdvisor had one listing, for a restaurant, which had not been reviewed.

The island’s one hotel was reviewed on several sites, but the reviews were very mixed, almost suspiciously so - what better way to keep people out than claims of high prices for bad food and service?

Fishers was too forlorn even for Lonely Planet, which responded, when I searched, ‘Sorry, we couldn't find anything about: “fishers island”.’

But for all that, when I walked nosily by the terminal, nothing about the scene looked exclusive at all. A ferry was docked, preparing to depart for that near-far place. I didn’t see any passengers, but perhaps the boat was taking supplies, or the people were below, hiding from the damp chill. Whatever it would meet when it docked on the other side (and someday I will find out, I told myself), it would soon turn around and head back, continuing the loop between island and mainland that began hundreds of years ago.