Bill Thompson is something of a legend in Washington D.C., known for the interviews he conducts with authors–his Eye On Books studio is a pilgrimage stop on every writer’s tour. Bill’s interview with me, about The Colony, can be heard here, or downloaded as a podcast for your iPod here.

Last week, while in San Francisco on a media tour, I did a satellite interview with Renee Montagne, of NPR. The piece broadcast Monday on Morning Edition. Take a listen.

I was on the radio this weekend with Peter Greenberg, the Today Show’s Travel Detective. As he explained during the interview, Peter has toured Kalaupapa. Like most people who enter the community, however, he first had to make his way down the immense cliff that seals off the colony. It’s a descent that has not become appreciably easier than it was in late 1800s, when this account was written:

“We were dropping, slipping, shambling down a sharp flank of the cliff, that cut the air like a flying buttress. By a series of irregular steps we descended, leaping from rock to rock when practicable, but often putting off our packs, sliding into the little ledge below, and then dragging the packs after us….On each side of us was a dense growth of brush, a kind of natural parapet, over which we could hurl a stone a thousand feet into the sheer depths, but could not hear it strike. Sea-birds soared above us and below us; sometimes they hovered just over our heads, and eyed us curiously; then with a stroke of their powerful wings they would soar away, with a cry that was half fearful, half defiant.”

The initial step of the journey, the visitor wrote, was “like plunging into space.”

Over the years hundreds of cattle, sheep, and horses tumbled from the cliff, bursting on the rocks at its base. Often a frightened or confused lead animal would bolt from the path and leap into the air, trailing a line of doomed followers. Of course, livestock were not the only fatalities—several residents also plummeted from the cliff, including one physician. These days, however, the path has been enlarged and made slightly safer. But winter storms still cause washouts, making the trail impassable and—once again—isolating the community.

So how did the Travel Detective navigate the trail? Simple—he rode a mule.

The H5N1 Avian Flu virus in Turkey has infected at least 14 people and killed at least two children (and probably a third, whose body was buried before testing). These are the first human cases to be reported outside of Southeast Asia and China.

The good news: So far there’s been no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the virus reported. Nearly all cases were in people who were in close contact to dead or diseased poultry, health officials have said. If the virus adapts to spread easily person to person, that’s when a pandemic could start.

The bad news: The world is now closer to another flu pandemic than at any other time since 1968, according to the World Health Organization.

Another round of radio interviews today, and in every instance people wanted to talk about quarantine—how it destroyed lives 140 years ago in the colony, and whether it might happen again today, with Avian Flu. You’d like to think that governments learn from past errors, though that’s often not the case. One sad example: during the early days of the AIDS epidemic, politicians proposed making Kalaupapa an AIDS colony.

Last November, the Department of Health and Human Services announced the national Pandemic Influenza Plan. The document says that a variety of disease-containment strategies on a state and local level may be used in case of a pandemic. Measures range from community-wide, enforced quarantine to less restrictive actions, including asking people to stay home from work or school to help slow disease spread, restrictions on gatherings, and cancellation of public events.

Since influenza is on the list of federally quarantinable diseases–a list that used to include leprosy–the HHS secretary can make and enforce regulations to prevent the spread of flu from foreign countries into the United States or between states. HHS can also aid local jurisdictions in enforcing their quarantines. Here’s a snippet from the HHS’s “Key Pandemic Response Components and Legal Authorities”:

Individuals may be denied admission to the U.S. if thought to have a communicable disease of public health significance, as defined in CDC regulations. Individuals also may be isolated or quarantined by the Federal Government, or restricted from moving within or between states, if thought to have been exposed to or to be a source of infections to others of a communicable disease listed in an executive order signed by the President.

The specific details of what kind of quarantine would be implemented—if any—and how it would be enforced during flu pandemic have not been announced. Last fall, however, President Bush suggested using the military to control people’s movements during an avian flu outbreak.

This afternoon I did an in-studio interview with Leonard Lopate, at WNYC. (The NPR station in Manhattan.) What surprised me was the degree to which Leonard was interested in the possible parallels between the government response to leprosy 140 years ago, and the current administration’s potential reaction to an Avian Flu pandemic. As it happens, that’s the very subject of my piece, “If The Flu Becomes a Crime”, in the current Men’s Health.

Elsewhere on this site I’ve written about the colony as a tourist destination. (Visiting sites of national tragedies is nothing new—there’s even a slightly-sinister phrase that’s employed to describe such jaunts: “dark tourism.”) Kalaupapa is less than thirty minutes by air from Waikiki, but it feels a century or more removed. The brutal isolation that made the peninsula so appealing as a prison served to protect it from the rampant development that has marred much of Hawaii. In a story rich with ironies, this is yet another: the colony was founded as one of the worst places in the world; it’s now one of the last unspoiled places in America. As such, Kalaupapa holds a powerful attraction for travelers. Last year, one of the 10,000 outsiders who were able to visit Kalaupapa was the New York Times’ Adam Nagourney. Here’s a snippet from his travelogue:

However you get there, you will find yourself in a place that was chosen because it so hard to get to - or, more precisely, to escape - as becomes clear when you hear the tales about how lepers 100 years ago were deposited into the churning ocean waters just offshore and told, in effect, to sink or swim. About 30 people still live there today, along with some employees, though they are there by choice and they call themselves residents rather than lepers.

These striking geographical features contribute to a place that is at once very beautiful, if a little disconcerting, and absolutely compelling, particularly if you are lucky enough to draw Richard Marks, who has lived most of his life there, as your guide.

Stopping frequently to catch his breath, speaking so quietly that our group nestled as close as it could to try to catch every word and tale, Mr. Marks told us the story of the colony, a searing indictment made all the more powerful by his understated tone. He drove us on an old school bus to the small cottages that he and the other residents call home, and to the church with holes drilled in the floor that allowed lepers to spit during services without having to leave.

A number of people have asked if I’m this John Tayman. I am not. I am, however, this John Tayman.

One question that I find myself answering a lot these days is, How did you come to write this story? I’ll answer it again, here. Some years ago, when I was working for Outside magazine, I went to Hawaii to write about Daryl Haley, a six-foot-five, 300-pound former offensive lineman for the New England Patriots, who was attempting to become the largest man ever to complete the Hawaiian Ironman triathlon. (Did he? You can find out here.) During one of the inter-island flights I took, the small prop plane navigated along the northern coast of Molokai, which is a solid green wall of towering cliffs. Midway along this rugged coastline emerged a small triangle of land, which the pilot announced was the site of a former leprosy colony. Everyone moved to the window for a glimpse, but the plane sped past too quickly.

I later went hiking along this same coast, and soon reached an overlook from which the entire peninsula was visible. The morning was cool and misty, and far down on the plain a wisp of smoke snaked upward from a cottage—one of the remaining residents was cooking breakfast. I watched for a time, until the mists closed in and suddenly sealed off the view. The moment was powerfully poignant, and I carried it back to the mainland.

At Outside I worked as an editor on all manner of survival and adventure narratives, including Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, and I soon recognized that the story of the colony was, foremost, a survival tale—complete with shipwrecks, tsunamis, murders, thrilling escapes, heartbreaking loss, and enduring love. Leprosy simply happened to be what set this story in motion.

At the time what I knew about leprosy was almost nothing, gleaned mostly from several viewings of Papillon. In the film, Steve McQueen—playing the French criminal Henri Charriere, who has been sent to the French prison on Devil’s Island—hopes to escape by securing a boat from the leader of a leprosy colony which occupies the opposite side of the island. The leader of the community, played by Anthony Zerbe, emerges from his cave of a hut, his disfigured face partially hidden behind a cloud of cigar smoke. Testing McQueen’s character, he offers him the cigar, which McQueen takes and smokes. “How did you know I had dry leprosy?” he asks, using an antiquated term for the non-communicable form of the disease. “I didn’t,” McQueen replies, puffing away.

The intense shorthand of the scene—McQueen’s apparently suicidal leap of faith, Zerbe’s wearied attempt to gain simple respect—stayed with me, and at the outset of my research for the book I suppose I expected the colony on Molokai to be not unlike that from the movies: a grim, frightening, otherworldly place of single dimension. But as I learned more about the community and the people who comprise its remarkable history, both good and bad, I came to realize that the truth was something much greater, and more affecting. The colony is unique in American history, a dark stain that has not been fully addressed even today. Perhaps the only vaguely similar episode in the country’s past is the treatment of Japanese-Americans in the days after March 21, 1942, when the concentration camp at Manzanar, California, opened in response to wartime hysteria. The impetus behind its creation—prejudice, fear, and a lack of understanding—certainly echoes the factors that birthed Molokai some eight decades earlier. But while the treatment of the innocents incarcerated in these camps is abhorrent, their months of hardship pale beside the century of torment suffered on Molokai. And while the nation has, at times, attempted to reconcile its conscience over the wartime internment camps, it has yet to even acknowledge the lives lost and damaged unnecessarily in the colony. Several years ago, the Japanese government agreed to pay $15 million to 127 persons exiled to a leprosy colony that was modeled after Kalaupapa, but in America the more than 8,000 people who lived and died in the colony had been mostly forgotten. Their story remained largely untold. I decided to try and tell it.

The Colony is, in essence, a character-driven narrative of a small American town. Granted, the population of that town over the years included brigands, murderers, corrupt lawmen, feckless bureaucrats, and a number of very unscrupulous physicians. Yet persons of immense grace and strength also made their home in the colony, including one extraordinary man and one remarkable woman who, having already been beatified, are on track to be sanctified by the Catholic Church—thereby making this tiny spot the only place in the nation where two saints labored and died.

One character I write about in the book is William P. Ragsdale, a lawyer and government translator who caught the disease and booked his own passage to the colony. Ragsdale’s tale inspired a Jack London short story, and his life also obsessed Mark Twain, who had earlier met and wrote about the colorful Ragsdale while reporting a series of travel dispatches for the Sacramento Union. Here’s Twain on the young Ragsdale at work in the legislature:

“His tongue is in constant motion from eleven in the forenoon till four in the afternoon, and why it does not wear out is the affair if Providence, not mine. There is a spice of deviltry in the fellow’s nature, and it crops out every now and then when he is translating the speeches of slow Kanakas who do not understand English. Without departing from the spirit of a member’s remarks, he will, with apparent unconsciousness, drop in a little voluntary contribution occasionally in the way of a word or two that will make the gravest speech utterly ridiculous.”

Ragsdale was the son of an American lawyer and plantation owner who had migrated to Hawaii from Virginia and wed a Hawaiian chiefess. The couple had three children, who were raised, as Twain imagined, “in the midst of the ancient idolatrous system.” Twain began to jot an outline for a Hawaiian novel, with Ragsdale as its protagonist. The work was never finished—you’ll have to read The Colony to find out why—but Twain’s deep love for the islands crept into a series of prose poems he published, including this ode to Hawaii:

“For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surf is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I can feel the spirit of its woody solitudes, I hear the plashing of the brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.”

Such passages by Twain, which he repeated in countless public readings, helped launch what would eventually become Hawaii’s leading industry: tourism. So there’s some irony to the fact that that industry was nearly derailed by the simple existence of the colony. That story—the rise and near-fall of Hawaii’s tourism industry—is the subject of this excerpt of the book, which ran in Conde Nast Traveler.