By Ty Sawyer

updated 1:42 p.m. ET Sept. 29, 2006

“I’ll tell you everything you need to know about Lord Howe, mate,” said a man riding alongside me on his bike. He was barefoot — the sign of a local. I hadn’t asked him a question. He’d just pulled up beside me and started talking. “I haven’t watched a telly in 10 years. My mind is bliss. I wake up every morning, look at the lagoon, Lidgbird, Gower and all them birds and still think I’ve fallen through heaven’s hedge and straight into a postcard of paradise.” He looked at me, down at my shoe-clad feet, and said, “Have ya met Ian? He can tell ya all about this make-believe island. Weeds, birds, fish. The lot.”

In 1998 I read an article about Lord Howe Island. The words and images were like an enchanted net. I could close my eyes and imagine the tingly scent of its salt air, see the quiet hush of green on the steep cliffs and feel the downy touch of the water in the lagoon as it swirled and wrapped around my body. My traveler’s heart had been caught. But Lord Howe is on the way to nowhere, and for 18 more years it sat in the middle of the southern Pacific, waiting, wrapped, unchanging. Always at the edge of my memory.

When I finally found a way to get to Lord Howe, I did no more research. No articles, no videos, no books. I refused to break the spell I’d carried with me for all those years. I wanted the island to surprise me. I wanted to sense and feel everything as though a dew-fresh kiss; to travel like T.S. Eliot and “know the place for the first time.”

Now, 18 years later, I’d been on Lord Howe for almost 24 hours. I’d also been awake for most of those 24 hours because I’d fallen through the same hedge and knew if I slept and truly dreamed, my sleepy reveries would pale in comparison. Dreams here are idle time in wait of the dawn. But I couldn’t rip my gaze from the night sky anyway: a sky that sits so low over the island that you’ve no doubt you could readily sail the world using just the thick carpet of stars and galaxies above for guidance. The images I’d carried with me, the memories of a place I’d never been, were all coming alive, virtually unchanged, with every glance.

And, yes, I was on my way to meet Ian.

Lord Howe rises from the ocean like a fairy tale castle. Its two ramparts, Mounts Gower and Lidgbird, reach almost straight up into the misty heights of the sky. White strips of water fall from their sides like ribbons from a maypole. From above, the island looks like it was pieced together from a thousand perfect island dreams. Thick forests and open, green grass fields curl around each other, crescent sweeps of sand smile up from the island on all sides, and the water in the lagoon is the kind of blue that only Merlin could conjure.

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I soon found myself walking through a forest of Kentia palm and thick-trunked banyan trees, about three steps behind Ian Hutton. Ian is the world’s expert on the flora and fauna of Lord Howe and is a gatekeeper of sorts for the island. If you want to truly see Lord Howe, I’d been told, Ian can show you more in 20 feet than you could ever observe in a lifetime on your own. The way he talks, it’s as if he was around when the island was discovered in 1788, maybe since the first bird landed on the shoreline. He knows, literally, everything about this 6.2-mile-long island.

As we walked past the lagoon, Ian was able to name every fish. On the other side of us, a cloud-hushed banyan forest climbed the steep hillside to the summit a thousand feet above us. We stopped and Ian started clapping as if we’d passed through some border crossing and it was time for impromptu applause. I circled around 360 degrees, looking for the audience.

It’s like that with Ian: About 10 minutes earlier, we’d been chatting about how the locals all go barefoot when he suddenly stopped, reached into a hole along the side of the path and pulled out a gray ball of fur with a beak — a baby shearwater.

“Its mum won’t be back for about three days, so she digs a big hole for the chicks to wait in,” Ian had said. “It’s pretty easy access, which is why we don’t allow cats on the island. Cats are like furry little demons on Lord Howe.”

It was quiet, that chick. Never peeped.

“No good calling for its mum. She’s a hundred miles out to sea. It’s better off keeping quiet, hoping I’ll go away.”

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