No Day at the Beach

Kent Russell, writing in The New Republic, on a man who moved to a desert island. An excerpt:

After dinner, Dave escorted his customer a few hundred yards into the blackness, to a vaulted fiberglass hut. Inside was an undulating tile floor, two rusted bed frames topped with foam rubber, and a plastic toilet that flushed rainwater. Green lizards scampered along all surfaces, scooping mouthfuls of translucent ants as if playing jacks with their tongues. The structure was wide open at its front; from the outside, it resembled nothing so much as a shell abandoned by a giant hermit crab.