Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 10 Pot Island

We came to a stop off of Pot Island. Disbelieving Reader, I am not making this up. It’s a real place. With supreme confidence belying his youth, Jay’s son Jason went overboard in an overpowered sixteen-foot RIB, a rigid inflatable boat, on a mission to retrieve Jay’s longtime friend Vladik, who would join us for the weekend as we made for Block’s eponymous island.

Pot Island is typical of the Thimbles; a granitic lump, about an eighth acre of which sits above the high tide line. Inland it is partially covered with mosses and spruce and maple. Its smooth pink rock is exposed at the water’s edge, sloping steeply. Maximum elevation is ten feet.

In the four hundred years since Block’s visit, the inhabitants and owners, if Man can be said to own any land, have gouged out four faux beaches for easy access. Quarrying of the famed Stony Creek pink granite, used in the base of the Statue of Liberty, the lower exterior of Grand Central Station, and Grant’s Tomb, all in Manhattan, South Station in Boston, and the Battle Monument at West Point, and elsewhere, continues to take place nearby on the mainland.

There were five houses on the island; two owned by hedge-fund managers, one a Yale faculty member, and one a trust-fund baby. Originally summer homes without proper insulation or power for even a New England spring or fall, they were, one by one, being upgraded in scale and opulence. Only the fifth remained the simple retreat of the previous generations. It was this modest 900-square-foot, one-story residence where Vladik came to get away from it all. At one time such a bungalow was called a trophy home, symbolic of the owner’s triumph elsewhere. But the game had changed, as it had changed everywhere thanks to the concentration of wealth in this second gilded age. Now, such a bungalow was called a teardown.

I took a break from the tour and watched Jason as he beached the boat on the southeast landing. Vladik hopped in, carrying what looked like a heavily laden bike messenger’s bag over his shoulder, a long duffel in one hand, and a black rifle in the other. Moments later, they had returned, and Vladik climbed a ladder onto the Lucky Strike. From the second deck, a crane arm rotated outward, lowering a halyard to Jason, who secured it to a stainless steel shackle polished to the bright sheen I’d already come to recognize as regulation on the yacht. Then he too climbed the ladder and the RIB was hoisted out of the water. Captain Nick put the engines in gear, and thirty minutes after boarding the Lucky Strike at Moby’s Dock, we were steaming, that’s a nautical term, for the Race and Block Island.