“Columbus was a criminal,” the man driving the taxi toward the airport said, threading his way through the traffic, the roundabout decorated with thousands of pink, glossy conch shells. “We started a petition to get the government to take down that monument.”

Some people say Columbus first made landfall at the southwestern tip of Samana Cay in the Bahamas, between Rum Cay and the Plana Cays. In other words, out in the middle of what feels like nowhere. Nowhere people belong. The fisherman’s cottages are in ruins. The wildness of the beaches (up close they’re scattered with plastic bottles, half of a grocery cart from a Puerto Rican chain, what you might call civilization a current, a common wind direction away)—the seductiveness of waiting space, waiting to be inscribed. The beautiful corollary that whatever you write will soon be washed away, and waiting once again.

We sail down the southern coast of the cay after visiting the reef—a shark considers us, reminds us that we are objects of curiosity, not, never will be again, really, of this element, our amphibious breathing sacrificed, perhaps, for the ability to control fire). The coast is one long beach, pale yellow with a green fringe. It is calling, calling—the land ends but the reef continues, a white fringe of breakers marking it, a sliver of turquoise connecting that long island with a tiny island, two small peaks of land. The kind of place that looks, out here, almost human in scale.