The Invisible Husband of Frick Island by Colleen Oakley (autobiographies to read .TXT) 📗

“You know, Back to the Future?”

“No, I get the reference.” His mom was an eighties movie buff; made sure he’d seen all the classics, including all the original Supermans, more than once. “But what do you mean?”

“Frick Island.” She grinned. “You’ll see.”

—

Anders flipped on the light of his studio apartment with his elbow, clutching a paper cup of soda and a sack dinner—a Quarter Pounder and five-piece chicken nuggets—in one hand and his laptop in the other. But as had become custom, he didn’t enter right away. He stood frozen in the doorway, his eyes scanning his efficiency kitchen for any sign of movement. The day after moving in, Anders spotted three cockroaches scampering along his laminate countertops, and he had been at war ever since. If there was one thing he hated more than being the center of attention, it was bugs.

Assured that all was well, or at least still, Anders set everything on his card table and tried to ignore the thumping rap music that flowed nonstop from his upstairs neighbors, a couple of college kids who attended the local university. As he settled onto the lone folding chair, he almost wished he’d taken Jess up on her offer to grab dinner after work. Though she was an overenthusiastic NFL fan (Ravens) and often told pointless and meandering stories about her two Weimaraners, she was technically the only friend Anders had in town.

Anders powered up his computer, tucked into his cheeseburger, and opened his email, his eyes quickly scanning the new messages—a forward from his mom and a link Jess had sent earlier from the Humane Society. Then he clicked on the URL in his favorites bar: theadventuresofclarkkent.com. He scrolled to the most recent podcast: Who Gives a Cluck? and scanned the data: twenty-seven listens, one comment. He sat back and sighed. He’d worked on this one for weeks—an in-depth profile of the founder of Concerned Citizens for Poultry, a woman who traveled the country protesting at fried chicken festivals, and down comforter and pillow factories, and was most recently arrested for driving her Ford Focus into a turkey transport truck off Route 30 ten miles outside of Salisbury.

He scrolled down to the comment, though he already knew who had sent it.

LeonardC404: Wow! Great opener—detailing her inner thoughts as she risked her life and others on the highway to free those birds. I was gripped. Can’t wait for your next one.—Dad

Annoyed, Anders rolled his eyes. Leave it to Leonard Caldwell to effuse praise when none was due. Obviously, it wasn’t “great,” or more people would be listening to it.

Anders had started the podcast in college, after the news editor at his school paper turned down his profile pitch on a notorious student on campus named Mark Harris, a full-bearded, wide-smiled man who had been attending the school for nine years—and had no plans for matriculation in the near future. More rumors swirled around him than around JFK’s assassination. He was a legend, yet no one knew if the stories about him were true. Had he really been involved in an S&M love triangle with the provost and the women’s soccer coach? Was he the one who hid a nest of yellow jackets in the visitors’ locker room during the school’s rival football game? Had he really sung “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” in a duet with Charles Barkley when the basketball star appeared at a karaoke bar in Atlanta?

Anders followed Mark around for weeks, recording interviews, observing his daily life, mostly trying to avoid the contact high from his near-ritualistic vaping sessions—and he edited the material down into a fascinating inside look at Mark Harris’s life. That podcast was listened to more than sixteen thousand times, half the student population of his university, and Anders thought he’d stumbled onto something big. Podcasts were the next big thing—the perfect medium to tell stories that newspapers no longer had the time, space, or money for. And what if his took off? He fantasized about those sixteen thousand listeners doubling, tripling, even quadrupling! Forget crawling his way up that very long ladder to Newsweek, the New York Times; he could sprint to the top. He could be the next Ira Glass on This American Life or the next Sarah Koenig and Serial. NPR would be banging down his door to hire him.

Except, within a matter of weeks, he soon realized that Mark Harris was what the listeners had been interested in, not Anders’s own journalistic storytelling prowess, and his audience dropped sharply with each consecutive episode. Still, he had thought this poultry woman story had legs.

He slipped his earbuds in to drown out the rap music and typed “Frick Island” into his search bar. Though he had looked through past issues as Greta suggested and could write the Cake Walk piece in his sleep without ever stepping foot on the island (It was literally a cake walk, he had thought to himself, wryly), Anders was committed to treating each article as though it were an A1 feature, carrying on methodically in his research. He clicked on the first result.

Frick Island is a 1.2-mile strip of land in the Chesapeake Bay, twelve miles off the coast of Winder on the eastern shore of Maryland. With no airstrip or bridges, the island is accessible only by boat. Passenger ferries run twice a day, year-round, to and from the island.

History: Native Americans resided on the island for nearly twelve thousand years until the early 1600s, when it was discovered by Jamestown settlers. The island is one of the oldest English-speaking communities in the region and is known for its unique dialect, which linguists have dubbed Tidewater English.

Present Day: As of the 2020 census, there were 94 people living on the island. Most residents are direct descendants of the first British settlers. The median income for a household was $26,324, and the median income for a family was $29,375. The main profession is fishing. The town boasts one church, one