The Thousand Foot Cut

An interesting story as told to me by one of my survival group members , though I do wonder about some of its accuracies . The guy telling me this worked on tow boats for many years . - Along the gulf coastal area is a island where a channel cuts it off from the mainland . The Island is about 1000 feet long " thus its name " and 3 or 4 hundred yards wide . One day a millionaire found himself standing on the bank looking at the island . This guy had no challenge in life as he had the money to buy anything he wanted . He was completely bored with life . He dove into the water and swam about three hundred yards to the island . There he lived for over a year . His hair was unkept , a long scruffy beard and his clothes in tatters . Tow boats would occasionally tie up at the island and share some food with him . One day he was simply gone .

 

I can see it happening

 

Whether the guy on the island was really rich in money or was this simply a story he told to the boatmen , I don't know . But I did have a somewhat wealthy guy tell me one day . He thought it would be fun to try to see with how little money he could survive on , as he had never experienced having to struggle with money issues .

 

There are all sorts of interesting and sometimes true tales about near and inshore islands. there was an island in the Sabine river between texas and Louisiana that had an interesting history. the river split and went on both sides. Neither side was dependably the dominant flow of the river so there was an ongoing debate about which state the island was a part of. This problem was mostly ignored until someone decided that it would be a great place to build a casino and whore house. This became a VERY successful business and suddenly both states declared it to be theirs. Basically Louisianna wanted to tax it and Texas wanted to shut it down. Neither side was willing to force the issue and the lawyers for the people making a ton of money on the island made sure that any effort to declare it one way of the other was tied up in courts forever. From what I read this went on for several decades until WW2. The military somehow decided that they needed it and that was it. I know that for many years after the war there was a huge mothballed fleet kept there.