The smell. It infiltrates. It arrives sooner than you anticipate. It always comes first. You begin sniffing drifts of it a few miles out, and as the boat draws close—I’d try to describe it but a word’s a speck of dust and this smell is a whole different world.
A Frenchman in New Orleans once told me freshly dug truffles reek of sex and soil, oil and ash, sweat and citrus. The odor on Jarvis Island doesn’t need you. Been fine alone a million years or more, and wasn’t till fifty-six did President Pierce think to stick a flag in its silver dollar stench.
Remember those Louisiana peaches we worked picking one summer? Made good money and could talk all day while we did. Good chance those trees were grown with guano. Good chance that guano got dug on Jarvis, God’s last rock tossed careless into blue Pacific oblivion. Good chance a cormorant might rest upon that rock, weary from its westward flight. Good chance a thousand might. I see a flock now amassed upon a petrified cliffedge, their sharp caws blended into one blank drone. Watch them fly. Their long black wings waver like rippled satin, their white bellies flash and vanish as they dive through the darkened evening sky. They are falling confetti, the blink of stars…