The chance to see this striking juxtaposition is just one reason to explore Bumpkin or any of the other 33 islands and peninsulas that make up the 12-year-old Boston Harbor Islands National Park.
The islands — which range from windswept rock piles to sprawling masses of meadows and woods — can be savored as a tactile guidebook of the region’s history.
Garbage dumps, orphanages, poorhouses and prisons have given way to campgrounds, hiking trails, beaches and museums, though traces of the old uses are never that far away.
The military, too, had a huge presence there, even if actual combat never really took place as expected. The long wall by Bumpkin’s farmhouse, for example, is all that remains of a World War I mess hall that once fed 1,800.
But the best part of visiting the islands — by ferry, kayak, canoe or yacht — may be the ability to step onto rugged terrain within, or just outside of, city limits.
“You see the world, but you’re not part of it,” said Gary Conley, a Weymouth resident, who with two friends aboard had piloted his motorboat to Bumpkin. “You can travel 15 minutes and be completely away from the world.”
On pristine Grape Island, for example, where I first stopped in my kayak, civilization consisted of a wooden platform for tents and a few benches. A green canopy of aspens and birches sheltered wide, grassy paths.
Grape, like other islands, is a drumlin, a knob formed by glaciers that plowed clay against bedrock. (Beacon and Bunker Hills in Boston are more famous versions.)
Unlike many other drumlins nationwide, though, these are separated by water. On the drumlin known as Peddocks Island, visitors are greeted at the harbor by what remains of Fort Andrews, which was begun on the eve of the Spanish-American War and which today must be one of the eerier ghost towns on this side of the Rocky Mountains.
A rusted children’s bike lies at the pier’s base. Beyond loom red-brick Georgian-style buildings, with porches and Palladian windows — a collection worthy of a New England liberal arts college campus — though many are crumbling.
