Islands Apart Book Signing July 30, 2009

Writer Ken McAlpine is the type of man who likes to stand in his family’s front yard in Ventura, California, and watch the seas, shadows, and stars shift. But increasingly what he sees when he looks up in the sky isn’t the bright light of the Milky Way, but the weak flicker of stars that have been dimmed by light pollution. Curious about a simpler way of life, McAlpine makes a plan to “leave the cacophony behind….to breathe slowly and think clearly, to examine how we live, and what we live for.”

In Islands Apart: A Year on the Edge of Civilization (Shambhala Publications) McAlpine spends weeks at a time alone on each of the five islands that comprise California’s Channel Islands National Park. These islands are a mere sixty miles away from a population of eighteen million people, but most of the islands themselves are barely inhabited. From here, he can hear the frogs sing and watch the seabirds dive for their dinner.

Although he’s searching for time away from the hubbub of daily life in the city, McAlpine doesn’t distance himself from his fellow men, particularly if they are campers willing to share their fancy cheeses. In between stints on the islands, he eats lunch with the homeless in Beverly Hills, sits in a desert with a ninety-eight-year-old Benedictine monk, and stands among the wooden crosses of a war memorial visited by loved ones of dead soldiers. Rather than escaping his life, he’s simply taking some time to reflect on our busy world and our place in it.

Ken McAlpine is an award-winning travel writer and the author of Off Season: Discovering America on Winter’s Shore. His work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Outside, Reader’s Digest, and Los Angeles Times. He lives with his family in Ventura, California.