Hanging Out In The Out Islands
December, 1972
They are the final sigh: sunny green islands, 700 of them, scattered over 100,000 square miles of gleaming warm ocean, death shiver of a mountain range going down for the last time, drowning old peaks crusted with coral and sawed off by the sea. They are fragile; most are merely cays, islets, barley rising into the air, usually snarled with the low mangrove scrub that the thin topsoil grows when left to its own devices; and others are pocked by huge brackish salt marshes, lunar and desolate, whe...
