“So there was this guy come up here years ago, all the way from Columbia University. A sociologist. He wanted to write his thesis on tourism and how small towns deal with it—or something like that anyway. So he gets a house up here and starts hanging around the bars and talking to people. Starts dating a local girl. And then he gets a job, like waitering. He shacks up with the girl. Gets a bartending job. He’s drinking more. Not really writing so much. Wintertime he starts drinking a LOT. I talk to him, like ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ and he’s basically not doing anything anymore. And then, one day, he up and disappears. It’s a big mystery, nobody knows where he went. He turns up 8, 9,10 years later in my office and it took me a minute but then I was, like, ‘Hey—I know you. Man, what happened?’ He’d gone off to California. Never finished his thesis. Dropped sociology and went to law school. He was a lawyer out in California. ‘The island sucked me in,’ he said. ‘I had to get out of here.’” –J.H. 7/2/08