I look’d now upon the world as a thing remote, which I had nothing to do with, no expectation from, and indeed no desires about: In a word, I had nothing indeed to do with it, nor was ever like to have; so I thought it look’d as we may perhaps look upon it hereafter, viz. as a place I had lived in, but was come out of it; and well might I say, as Father Abraham to Dives, Between me and thee is a great gulph fixed.

—Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

The female narrator of Foe, J. M. Coetzee’s 1986 reimagining of Robinson Crusoe, wonders “by what right” her island prison belongs to the man called Cruso: “by the law of islands? is there such a law?” I was untroubled by such nuances of maritime code when I laid claim this summer to my own desert isle in the Hudson River. I had appropriated a kayak from the tool shed of my cousin’s ex-wife (by what right: said cousin’s enthusiastic encouragement) and soon landed on an island near the mouth of Stockport Creek, ringed with undulating green masses of the invasive European water chestnut. It was state land, so I could not pretend, like Defoe’s hero, that I was “king and lord of all this country indefeasibly.” Yet it was a meager little plot, without even a charred log or a crumpled Bud Light can to suggest that