I recently watched a mediocre documentary, the most interesting portion of which was a series of lengthy interviews with the men who started Patagonia and The North Face. Along the way, though, the narrator stops in Easter Island to repair the broken mast of the sailboat on which he’s hitched a ride. He ends up spending a month there, mostly, it seems, flirting with a pretty local girl who he may have known before he washed up on the shores of Hanga Roa.

Now this was interesting: I spent eight days on Easter Island once, and while it was in some ways a dark and depressing visit, it nevertheless remains one of my favorite travel memories. As a little kid, I did school projects on the statues there, called moai, and looked it up in atlases, thinking about how far away it was from just about everything except the empty expanses of the Pacific Ocean. I got The Atlas of Remote Islands last year mostly to find out what it said about the island.

It’s not exactly remote now, partly because of the internet, which has made every place so curiously familiar, but also because there’s more and more air service to the island. But it’s still a lonely place, surrounded by a strange shade of blue that’s possible because there’s no continental shelf to make the depths less imposing. There’s a sense that if you fall in, you’ll sink and sink and sink. Don’t look down.