From the time I was 7 years old, I drew myself islands.

On pads of graph paper that my father brought home from work, I would sketch fragments of land, highly irregular in shape, but with towns on them — and sometimes even transit systems. I'd trace winding roads and railway routes over their rugged topography. And I knew exactly where the ferries would dock that allowed you to reach them.

The magical thing about islands, I felt both then and now, was that they were something you could see at a glance. Whether they were real or imaginary, they gave the nuggety satisfaction of certain sculptures. And in their very limitations of space, they offered a realm that could be completely mastered, unlike the chaotic sprawl one finds on almost any mainland.

At the same time islands can offer avenues of escape, whether from a dull workaday existence, a disappointment in love or exhaustion with the world's travails. There's something about stepping aboard a ferry that lifts your heart straight up. You find yourself believing that the cares and nonsense of daily living can't possibly apply to a place surrounded by water. Time itself abandons its tick-tock limitations — for a day, or a week, or however long you can afford it.

On Puget Sound's Blake Island, amazingly, you can achieve a solitude that seems unlikely for a place within shouting distance of a major metropolis. Even on a sunny day, all you have to do is stroll 100 yards in either direction from the Tillicum Village landing. Believe me, the tourists don't follow you.

BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER / THE SEATTLE TIMES A gull shares space with two oystercatchers on Destruction Island off Washington's coast.

If you're ever in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, Newcastle Island Provincial Marine Park offers the same pleasures. It's just a matter of taking a short passenger-ferry ride, docking at a picnic ground and then following fir-needle-cushioned clifftop trails. The sense of isolation you get along them is almost spooky.

Of course, cities can be on islands, too. Manhattan may be the most famous, but it has competition from Venice (in its low-lying lagoon) and Stockholm (on its durable rock islets). Even cities that aren't real islands can feel like islands: Think of San Francisco or Vancouver, surrounded by water on three sides, or our own Seattle, which sometimes seems more shoreline than solid ground — especially when the ground starts shaking.

Islands change the rules; islands invent climates of their own.

On the Isles of Scilly, an archipelago 28 miles off England's Land's End, palm trees grow: a whole shrubby hillside of them! Daffodils bloom as early as January or February and are an island export. Transport between islands — Tresco, St. Mary's, St. Martin's, St. Agnes, Bryher — is by water-taxi. (The best islands get you out of your car.) And the waters at the heart of the archipelago are so sheltered that flowers grow right down to the waterline at high-tide, aping their freshwater lakeside counterparts.

Islands can make continents vanish. It's always a small thrill, in this over-connected age, to flirt with the notion of being marooned. On New England's Block Island, once, heavy fog set in while I was staying there and the mainland simply vanished. The ferries couldn't run; planes couldn't land. We were quietly, pleasurably stuck.

Islands can also be a form of time travel. Think of all the general stores (an almost extinct species) still in operation in the San Juans.

Another time-capsule island is McNeil, home to the McNeil Island Corrections Center. A decade ago, for a couple of years, I was a regular there — not because I was an inmate, but because I knew the warden. Home to more than a dozen small farms by the 1880s, McNeil later became home to a federal penitentiary which bought up all civilian land in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1976, the feds declared the prison obsolete, and in 1981 Washington state took it over.

These days, there are pastures, the remnants of an old village center, dirt roads. Apart from the prison, McNeil is, in its outward appearance, an island community from 70 years ago — it's Vashon and Bainbridge and Fox Island, before they got so gussied up.

STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Low-hanging fog drifts in and out of the Beaufort Range overlooking Point Alberni on Vancouver Island.

Forbidden islands

The McNeil Island I got to know is off-limits to most people, and I feel lucky to have seen it. But that's the only time I've ever had inside access to a forbidden island.

In New York, where I lived in the early 1980s, there was a forbidden island that used to catch my eye on a daily basis. I used to see it on my Brooklyn-to-Manhattan commute, when the F-train rose high above the Gowanus Canal and gave me a view of Upper New York Bay, including Governors Island.

Governors Island was used as an Army post from 1794 to 1966, and as a Coast Guard station between 1966 and 1997. For 200 years, civilians had no access to it. From a distance it looked like a green park in the middle of Upper New York Bay, with the rooftops of a few fancy officers' houses and brick administrative buildings just visible among its trees. In 2003 it was opened to the public. I've still never made it there — but photographs suggest it's another time-capsule island, a near-bucolic anomaly amid the urban density surrounding it.

More forbidden islands: the nonstop tease of rugged Cypress and Blakely islands and half a dozen smaller islets (Strawberry, Frost and Willow islands), as you take the ferry from Anacortes out to Orcas and San Juan Island. They all slide temptingly by before you're given a chance to disembark at Lopez. The smaller islands, especially, have a rock-ledge fantasy appeal — you just want to float out and clamber on them.

One island I've been to that feels as though it should be unattainable sits in the middle of Crater Lake. And you do have to work for it. There's a steep path down the inside of the crater — a mile or more of nonstop switchbacks — and you know with every step you take that you'll pay for it with the hike back up.

At the bottom there's a boat that looks like a measly affair from the crater rim, but it turns out to be a good-sized launch holding 30 or so people. After taking passengers on the tour of the north rim of the lake, the pilot drops you off on Wizard Island and gives you 15 or 20 minutes to explore it.

It's a place where you know, in your gut, you have no real right to be. When I look at a photograph of it and tell myself I've been there, I still don't quite believe it. The ground is rough with volcanic rocks that weigh hardly anything, and shade is provided by conifers that have managed to gain a purchase there. The Park Service offers to let you stay there and wait until the next boat comes around. That gives you time to climb up its cinder cone. But for all the magic of the place, one may not want to risk it.

Another kind of island is the Island of Diminishing Returns: an island off an island off an island. That's the case with the Strait of Georgia's Chrome Island, which looks like something from a storybook.

It's a shapely rock hump with a bright-striped lighthouse, a lighthouse-keeper's house, outbuildings and a few well-placed, wind-shaped trees topping it, all so picturesque they look like toy-train-set decorations. Chrome Island dangles like a pendant off the southern tip of woodsy Denman Island, which mimics in miniature the north-south angle of mountainous Vancouver Island, which huddles against the North American continent as though too timid to go far offshore. I'm not sure why, but I could stand all day on the southern vantage point of Denman Island and stare at that crowded array of rock-hump, lighthouse building and precariously perched trees. Maybe there's a faint sadistic pleasure to be had from gazing on island confines so dramatically scale-reduced.

SANTIAGO ANDRADE / AP A land iguana, native to the Galapagos Islands, is shown on the island of Fernandina in this 1999 photo. Fernandina is the third largest island of the Galapagos.

Islands no more

Not all islands stay islands. Some have the option of committing "islacide," as Thurston Clarke put it in his wonderful book "Searching for Paradise" (the hardcover edition was titled "Searching for Crusoe").

That's what Canada's Prince Edward Island and Scotland's Skye both did when they built bridges to their respective mainlands. Skye, you might say, merely connected itself with a larger island: Great Britain. But with the Channel Tunnel, or "Chunnel," Great Britain itself now has a rail connection and a road link (sort of: the cars board a train) to the European continent. Theoretically you can now drive from Skye to Vladivostok or Shanghai without ever taking a ferry — at least, not a ferry over salt water.

Sjælland, the island that's home to Copenhagen, compromised its insular status years ago with its bridge to the island of Fyn (which has a bridge to the Jutland peninsula, which is attached to the European mainland). But it really blew its island character with the building of the Øresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden. Once there are two routes off an island, both by automobile and train, it really doesn't count as an island anymore. (At least the Chunnel preserved Great Britain's island appearance by discreetly diving underneath the English Channel, thus keeping the white cliffs of Dover as England's wave-washed front door.)

Imaginary islands

Some islands are impossible to reach because they're the stuff of fiction. Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" offers an island of the mind that almost every young boy (and, I'm sure, the occasional girl) knows well — and it was with great distress that I realized, a few weeks ago, that my Penguin classic edition of the novel has no map of Long John Silver's hangout. I'm sure my old, long-lost Grosset & Dunlap children's edition had one.

The Little Prince's planet, with its cooking-gas volcano in need of cleaning, surely counts as an island. And Prospero's seat of power in "The Tempest" is the very essence of island — even if it's always, when we see it, bordered by footlights and accessible by stage aprons. Only actors, it seems, can inhabit it; the rest of us have no option but to observe it from just "offshore."

William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" presents us with an island none of us is eager to go back to — but it stays blazoned on your mind as a warning of what can go wrong if an island falls into the wrong hands. As Clarke observes, an island provides a "small and human-sized stage" on which "your life will count for more and your accomplishments will be remembered." The downside of this is that an island can fall under the sway of a single, deranged personality far more readily than a whole continent can. Just ask Piggy.

Herman Melville wasn't too keen on the Galapagos Islands either, seeing them as "an archipelago of aridities, without inhabitant, history, or hope of either in all time to come." Yet his account of his visit to the place in 1841 (six years after Darwin's) becomes so feverish and unglued in his 1854 story, "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles," that it's a thrill to read. Yes, the Galapagos exist, but they're the stuff of fiction here. As Margaret Drabble notes in a recent edition of Melville's masterpiece, we're dealing with "something more fantastic, less subdued to fact, than a travelogue."

The most famous imaginary island of all may be the one where Robinson Crusoe took up residence. Again it is based on fact. Author Daniel Defoe drew inspiration for his 1719 novel from the story of castaway Alexander Selkirk, who spent 4-1/2 years (1704 to 1709) marooned on Isla Más á Tierra, 400 miles off the coast of Chile. Selkirk's name was changed and much of the detail was Defoe's own invention. Such is the power of fiction, however, that Más á Tierra is now better known as Isla Robinson Crusoe.

Imaginary islands are one thing; but truly unattainable islands are another.

Unattainable islands draw the eye and make you itch for the ability to transport yourself on the strength of mere wish-power to the unlikeliest crags, the most outlandish atolls.

Who hasn't, while strolling around the peak of Mount Constitution on Orcas, looked down at the astounding view and wished that they could teleport themselves down to Barnes Island, Clark Island or their even smaller neighbors, lying a mile or so offshore? You can reach these by private boat, I'm sure. But that's not quite the same thing as being able to wing yourself down onto them on impulse.

More intimidating, but no less alluring, are Destruction Island off the Washington coast at Kalaloch or Tillamook Rock off the Oregon coast at Cannon Beach. In the case of Tillamook Rock, human approach meant loss of life in the attempts to build the famous lighthouse there. Sequim writer Dennis L. Noble's "Lighthouses & Keepers: The U.S. Lighthouse Service and Its Legacy" offers a vivid account of this daunting engineering feat.

National Geographic fed my island dreams all through boyhood, and the best island of all, to my mind, was Surtsey: an underwater volcano off the coast of Iceland that, in 1963, began tentatively to form an island where no island had been before. In 1965, lava flows secured the continued existence of the hitherto unstable island. That same year, Surtsey was designated a nature reserve. Plantlife arrived not long after. But the place is still off-limits to the casual tourist.

Whether large or small, real or imaginary, reachable or unattainable, uninhabited or packed with tourists, islands exert a hold on us. They promise isolation or escape, relaxation or castaway fantasy — or maybe just the salutary lesson that comes with being precariously perched at the edge of an alien element (icy lake, warm ocean) and sensing how small you are.

Islands, at their best, break up reality — and reality, surely, needs to be broken up once in a while.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com