Would You Like to Live on an Island?

The St. Lawrence River is not a place so much as an initiation. People arrive — first-timers, phones out, their breath caught somewhere between curiosity and reverence — and they leave changed, slower, steadier, tuned to a different frequency. The River does that. It resets that thing deep inside you.

Your first sight is like stepping into a story that’s long been in motion. The earth, sky, and water open into a labyrinth of islands with granite bones and River homes tucked into wind-stunted pines like hidden secrets. It’s where you begin to understand you’ve stepped into a world shaped more by patience than by progress, where life moves with the current, where history is audible if you just listen.

Postcards have long been the River’s unofficial archive, protecting the sharp edges that memory softens over time. A century’s worth of travelers have frozen their astonishment in carefully written cursive on the backs of beautiful linen cards: “View of Alexandria Bay,” “Sunset from Benson’s Rift,” “Idle Isle, Residence of Gen. J. Leslie Kincaid.” These fragments of a hundred summers now sit in cardboard boxes, lay in family chests, or are on display in antique shops, each one a quiet witness to someone’s first encounter with wonder.

Among the islands that tighten the River’s narrows is Idle Isle, once known as Rose Island, it was purchased in 1922 by General Kincaid, whose political influence helped establish Pine Camp in Jefferson County, the military site that would later become Fort Drum. His stewardship of Idle Isle is an integral part of the island’s quiet lore.

Ownership on the River is less a right than a form of guardianship. You don’t own an island, you hold it for a time, you honor all it gives, and you hand it forward. Idle Isle has lived many lives this way, absorbing families, summers, storms, and the long ritual of greeting the same shoreline, season after season.

One postcard rises above the others for its simplicity and its weight. Written by a visitor named Rita and postmarked July 5, 1958, it made its way from the islands to a family member in Pittsburgh. What was likely her first encounter with the River, she didn’t try to explain what she was seeing or capture in words, the spell it casts. Instead, she let her first experience with the Islands speak, offering an intimate question that holds both a curiosity and an imagining of a life rooted among the islands:

“Would you like to live on an island?”

It’s a small sentence, but it lands with the force of an invitation to a different life. Because to live on an island here is to be folded into a community, defined not by roads, but by waterlines, not by convenience but by interdependence. It is to learn the weather intimately, to measure time by sunlight and shifting winds, to understand that solitude is a kind of wealth. It’s a life of distance and closeness all at once, removed from the mainland, yet deeply connected to those who live along the shoreline.

Not everyone is given this question. Fewer still get to answer it. To live on an island in the St. Lawrence is to participate in something rare: a continuity of place that refuses to be rushed, a geography that shapes character, as much as it shelters it.

Visitors sense this immediately. They come for a weekend and they feel the pull, the quiet realization that life can be conducted at human scale: a freighter sliding downriver with impossible grace, a heron gliding over glassy water with steady wings, or a sun casting twilight colors as deep as heated brass. For some, the postcard question is a whisper they carry home with them. For others, those lucky few, who are pulled enough or just simply called, it becomes a way of life.

The River has been eternally generous this way. It lets you arrive a guest and leave transformed: part witness, part guardian, part historian, and part dreamer. Each island, Idle Isle amidst the many, murmurs the same timeless whisper: slow down, listen, belong.

Would you like to live on an island?

Some questions don’t ask for an answer. They reveal one, they surface something already true inside each of us.

By Mark E. Russell, Idle Isle, NY.

Mark Russell is a graduate of St. Lawrence University and the Western New England School of Law, and has applied legal precision and narrative clarity to every venture he’s led, from early startups to global agencies and now to CatalystXL, the software-as-a-service company he founded to simplify how organizations communicate and operate. Russell has written for multiple publications — among them Detroit’s TBD Magazine — and contributed to Mastering Communication at Work along with two chapters in the New York Times bestseller, Spend Shift. He lives in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, with his wife, Amy Saunders Russell, their three River Rat children — Emma, Sam, and Trey — and their miniature schnauzer, Stella. The Russells divide their time between their home overlooking Lake St. Clair and their summer island retreat, Idle Isle, on the St. Lawrence River.