Saturday, we put a treasure tin together and headed out to do this, before Martina had to go back to London. We ran into trouble just getting to the island... there was a traffic jam on the Bay Bridge and it turned out that someone had run into the sand barrier on the off-ramp going for the island, and we couldn't even take it. We ended up going all the way over the bridge, and pulled a quasi-legal u-turn as soon as we could, before it would involve a toll on the way back. Back up and over and we were in.

We stopped for a quick picnic before the old Naval gates, and then we headed in. As soon as we did, though, the low fuel light on Martina's car went on. Fuck. We parked at 3rd Street and Avenue M and decided we would traverse as much of the island as we could on foot.

The island seems to be a place in-between; half-abandoned, half-condemned, half-inhabited, half-industrial. Buildings from the old Naval base have been abandoned and no one's in any apparent rush to tear them down. Just as we were thinking that the island was deserted, people would show up with their dog, or there'd be a couple people at the bus stop, or suddenly we'd notice the tennis court had people on it. We were all ghosts to one another. Even ourselves, feeling like transient phantoms observing something out of phase.

We found a seemingly-forgotten park taken over by geese, and placed our treasure inside one of the climbing domes. Later we'd see a couple guys come on the baseball field with a radio-controlled flyer, charging the geese fearlessly with the plane.

But how real could this place have been? Why all the abandoned playgrounds? To what ends were there bottles hanging from the trees? How many places can you board up and forget?

We got near the residential area, and some sort of van was parked in a field of dead grass, across the street from where houses stood. The back opened up like a stage with microphones and speakers, and a few adults were leading two teams of kids (boys vs. girls) in a series of high-point games. At one point the girls won 110,000 points over the boys in one fell swoop.

Even the residential area suffered from decay. Rows of inhabited townhouses stood next to and between other rows that were fenced off, marked with "hazardous material" warnings, and boarded up. We walked down an alley between fenced-off back-yards, pushed through a hole in the outer fence, and ended up on Perimeter Road at the opposite corner, a few feet from the water. We circled clockwise around the island's outer edge, came up on some windsurfers, returned to the industrial sector along Avenue M, saw the bus going the other way. Returning to Martina's car, we headed back to the peninsula, transitioning to real, present people once again.