activity as would-be rescuers in the form of two strikingly young Coast Guard personnel roared alongside and jerked the corpse from our grip onto their bright orange, overpowered emergency response craft and began a fumbling, wide-eyed CPR before zooming away to a waiting ambulance. They were trying their damnedest, but the light was already gone from Sullivan’s eyes. After we returned to the dock and cleaned our catch, I loaded the butchered crabs into a plastic cooler. My oldest nephew helped me carry the heavy cooler up the dock. Then I dropped my nephews off at home and headed out the road. For several years I had been living in a one-room cabin twenty-five miles north of Juneau, on a small, quiet cove more than halfway out the only highway that runs any distance from the mountain-corralled town. Go fifteen miles farther and the road dead-ends at a point of nowhere that serves best to remind Juneau’s residents that though we may be physically attached to North America and its five hundred million or so other human inhabitants by the bedrock of the continent, we are in essence an island community,