Every year, I put together a wall calendar with my photos to give to my friends as a gift. This year’s calendar is about Boston Harbor islands. What follows is a kind of preface to the calendar. (Don’t ask me how I got into writing prefaces to calendars!) Oh, and if you want a copy, let me know.

Boston maritime historian Edward Rowe Snow once defined an island as a body of land surrounded by adventure. Islands make one want to reach them. Land on them. Explore. Take pictures.

The Boston Harbor islands are a world of their own. They live their own special lives. Formally speaking, they belong to Boston and surrounding towns. On the map, they appear to be very close to downtown Boston. But still, they are another world.

For centuries, Bostonians treated their islands with no respect, using them for whatever didn’t belong in the city: dumps, hospital, asylums, shelters, correctional schools, and even (though for that we should thank the federal government) intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.

Surprisingly, such neglect could have helped the islands survive in the end. When many of those hospitals, asylums, and forts stopped being used and fell into disarray, the islands were joined into the Boston Harbor Islands Park Area, remaining mostly in their beautiful desolation.

The story of the former Little Hog Island off of Hull makes for a cautionary tale. In the eighties, a real estate development company bought the entire island, razed it to the ground, then built it out with identically-looking condos, renamed to the hipster-sounding Spinnaker Island and surrounded it with “Private Property, Do Not Enter” signs. Here is a good example of what happens when people start paying attention to the islands.

Thanks, but let them rather remain in desolation.

The world of the Boston islands is a world of four centuries of history, of thicket and ruins, of rocks and beaches with flotsam and jetsam, of breathtaking views. Some islands could be reached by ferry; they get crowded in the summer. Others are almost inaccessible and rarely visited by the man. On all of them, however, there are no cars and no roads, but a strong feeling of timelessness. Of another life, slow and unhurried.

It is important not to disturb slow life, not to scare it away. Thus, we explored the islands in a fitting way: on a sailboat, on a small inflatable dinghy with oars, and sometimes, when it was physically possible, on a bike. Usually, on all these occasions a camera somehow found its way into our hands.

The calendar consist of twelve photographs, of twelve islands. It is surprisingly hard to tell how many islands overall there are in Boston Harbor. Do you count standalone, solitary rocks? islands that only exist at low tide? former islands, nowadays connected to the mainland?

Boston Harbor Islands Park Area includes thirty four islands, so this number is a good starting point. I am starting with twelve now,—enough remains for a couple more exploration seasons, a couple more calendars.

Each specific island, no matter how small, is its own world, similar to its neighbors in some aspects, unique in others. It feels impossible to represent it with just one photo. But all the twelve, taken together, make up a fitting group portrait of Boston Harbor islands, and by extension Boston Harbor itself—a border line between the ocean and the land, the history and the eternity.