Back in the 1970s my mother and I made regular pilgrimages to the Georgia coast during my spring vacations. From the port of Brunswick, we'd cross a causeway to an island that, with its sand, sea, spartina grass, and motley year-round residents, seemed to me, at age 15 or 20, a quietly funky heaven. The idea of an island linked to the mainland was almost perfect - there were all the usual advantages and few of the customary difficulties. It was easy to imagine coming back when I was older, maybe settling in for several months to write.

But I never did. My life took me to New York and overseas for many years, then finally to New England. Yet fantasies have a way of coming up in casual conversation, and after moving up north, I was always surprised at how few snowbirds had heard of the barrier islands that hug virtually the entire 90 miles of Georgia's coast.

Eight are large enough to be named on maps. To the north, Ossabaw, St. Catherines, and Blackbeard are state nature preserves, home only to a few researchers and unknown to casual visitors. To the south lie the more familiar isles: Sapelo, Sea Island, St. Simons, Jekyll, and Cumberland. I hadn't visited all of them - and could not be sure which Technicolor fragment of teenage memory belonged where - but I decided to find out if the decades had been kind to a part of the world that was sacred to me.

Many of my beginnings as a writer were there, and my second novel, never published, was set along the Georgia coast. I still held an acute memory of the islands as a unique incarnation of the South, a place characterized by salt marshes, beaches as fine and as protected as any in the country, a gentle attitude toward life, and an otherworldly poetry all its own. So I flew to Sa-vannah, drove south to Brunswick, and crossed the first bridge.

St. Simons, where my mother and I had always stayed, was the only island with a significant population (about 18,000) and plenty of motels. There, once again, was the dense scent of pines I remembered, the same coastal breeze. The road across the island looked far more commercial than before; swank new malls and gated communities had sprung up alongside the much more satisfying anarchy of the Georgia woods.

I headed for The Village, the island's compact hub, with its fishing pier, clustered shops, lackadaisical bygone air, and elegant 19th-century lighthouse. I was glad to see that so little had changed; you couldn't get a designer coffee, though you could find 1950s-style flip-flops.

"No Butchering of Large Fish On Pier" read a sign. Fat kids in swimsuits were leaping into the lapping water, and a few regulars were fiddling with a spigot for cleaning fish on the wood-railed pier. For my mother and me, a walk here had always rounded off a fish dinner. I saw now that for her, being English, this spot would have held echoes of a small-scale British seaside resort.

Here, too, in The Village was our changeless motel, the Queen's Court, with its serene gardens set around a modest pool, where at age 18 I wrote a chunk of my first novel and, on instinct alone, solidified a lifelong work pattern: black pen, yellow legal pad. I remembered scribbling in the drowsy heat, a few kids splashing away and, paradoxically, helping my concentration, as I nursed a vague sensation that there were many more books in me and wondered what they might be.

In a used bookstore a block away I began talking about those old days. Bill Baxter, a hefty man who helped run the shop, heard me out and said, "You bet St. Simons has changed a lot in two decades. Now we're busy year-round."

"I suppose the shopkeepers like that."

"Well, some do. Personally, I don't like all the money here now - a lot of folks who work here have to live over in Brunswick, on the mainland. I wish they wouldn't keep cutting trees down for all the new shopping centers. It makes me mad when they do that."

And for someone returning after years away, it seemed a betrayal of those beloved Georgia woods.

I had one more pilgrimage to make here. Just up the road, at Fort Frederica, I realized again how little there was to see of Georgia's original military town - a barracks tower, the odd house foundation, the tabby-and-brick remains of the fort's magazine. But the flat site was still superb, with a strategic view across the marsh. A few cannons made it evident why Oglethorpe, who had founded Georgia in 1733, chose this spot for his settlement, which would survive barely 20 years. Here, in 1742, 900 souls held back and ultimately defeated a Spanish force coming from Florida. Once the Spanish were no longer a threat, however, Fort Frederica had outlived its usefulness.

I was staying on Sea Island, smallest of the isles, which is linked to St. Simons by a bridge even I could throw a stone across. Sea Island has some of the most expensive residences in the country, which have grown up around The Cloister, a classic hotel that Addison Mizner, the master architect of many of Florida's grand villas, designed in the 1920s. For decades The Cloister has remained a honeymoon destination of choice among southern families with money, who like the golf courses over on St. Simons, the hotel's faithful staff, and the aura of a private island. The beach was still legally public, but now it appeared to be more awkward for interlopers to come over from St. Simons - as my mother and I used to do - and enjoy it for the day.

There wasn't much to Sea Island: just the resort and a systematic avenue of houses crisscrossed by brief streets leading either to the marsh or the Atlantic beach. At noon I went for a walk in stupefying heat and, pouring sweat and swatting bugs, I ran into a gar-dener who gave me the lowdown on prices, since - the literary life being uncertain - I am always in the market for prime real estate.

"You want something on the beach? Five to ten million. You don't have to be on the beach, you can get away with four million."

I said I absolutely had to be on the beach, but perhaps I might rent for a while first.

"You're looking at six, seven thousand a week. There's so much money now that people are lined up to buy. And all these new houses keep going up."

More new houses? It looked impossible to build more on Sea Island. I had memories of plenty of open space, but most lots, all the way to the end of the island, have now been built on. People were paying a great deal to be part of a community whose appeal was based on a quaintness that was now gone, and it seemed to me that few of the new houses had much aesthetic appeal.

One beautiful exception - at first I thought I was hallucinating - was the house of the renowned hotel architect John Portman. It stood on 26th Street, by the beach, partly hidden by an ivied wall: a playful towering white concrete-and-glass fantasy ten times the size of the low ordinary houses around it. Designed as a series of squiggles, commas, and stacked cubes, lined with immense windows and marked by walk- ways and audacious white beams - with (so I was told) a helipad on the roof - it could have been a modern art museum in some major city.

A writer who'd had the right idea long before me was Eugene O'Neill, who built Casa Genotta with his wife, Carlotta, in 1931. Though the house was closed to the public, I could just see it from the beach at 18th Street. O'Neill's second-floor study had been designed to resemble a captain's quarters at the stern of a ship, with tilted windows and a view of the beach. There he had tried out his version

of the island writer fantasy, producing Days Without End, a religious play, and Ah, Wilderness, his lightest. Apparently O'Neill was reclusive - he rarely went out. Imagining the view from his study, I found this easy to understand; the sea would have filled the horizon above his typewriter.

An hour's drive north, at a dock in the sleepy, well-preserved mainland port of Meridian, I barely made the small, modern ferry that runs punctually three times a day to Sapelo. As we crossed the calm waters of an immense salt marsh, my fellow passengers, all surrounded by boxes of food, made it clear that this was another world.

Sapelo is the only Georgia island with a predominantly black population, descendants of ex-slaves who have owned their own land, in a community called Hog Hammock, since the Civil War.

Formerly the property of millionaires and now mostly of the state, Sapelo - eleven miles long, four miles wide at most, with seven miles of beaches - is managed (using federal funds) by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, which provides free water, road repairs, and a ferry pass at a nominal fee

for Hog Hammock's resi-dents. There's just one docking facility (for locals), and

the state runs a reservations-only campground where no bicycles are allowed.

Anyone who wants to spend the night can camp out, stay with a resident, or find lodging at the University of Georgia Marine Institute. Most of Sapelo's 10,000 annual visitors come over for the day and sign on for a three-hour DNR tour that takes them to a beach, the old lighthouse, the Reynolds Mansion (an estate that belonged to the former island owner), and Hog Hammock, where a few residents sell their dolls, quilts, grapevine wreaths, and baskets. But the day-trippers are usually gone by around lunchtime, so they get little idea of island life.

I was met at the dock by Ceaser Banks, a grizzled gentleman of great humor and considerable presence, who with his wife, Nancy, ran The Weekender guest house, where I was staying. We climbed into his van, then rattled over the only road (Sapelonians called it the autobahn) to Hog Hammock - 400-plus acres of neat houses, trailer homes, vegetable patches, and cornfields set among pines, palmetto, and live oaks.

"At this very moment," he announced, "we have 67 residents, 1 bar, and 2 churches that swap from week to week. Seventeen kids go to school on the mainland by morning ferry."

"So what are you missing, Ceaser?"

"Well, we have no McDonald's. And no crime," he said with a burly grin.

There are limitations. Gas stations are open only for one hour on Tuesday, and one hour on Friday. Grocery orders arrive by ferry once a week; the alternative, in the heart of Hog Hammock, is B. J.'s Confectionery, open daily.

It was more than a store. Besides the shelves of staples, I saw framed pictures of FDR, as well as a TV, sofas, family sports trophies, and a photo of B. J. himself with Jimmy Carter, who liked visiting Sapelo. The store was run by B. J.'s grandson, Tracy Alexander, a soft-spoken man in his 40s, who had gentle eyes and a tolerant smile. He'd been a trucker in California before coming back to Sapelo.

I bought a couple of cold drinks and got him to reminisce. "It must seem pretty quiet here after spending time on the West Coast."

"Well, we've never had anybody sue anybody else," Alexander murmured genially. "The biggest crime around here is gossip and slander."

"That makes it unique already."

"Not really. You can look through America and find plenty of rural communities like this one. The Mayberries and the Hootervilles. What makes Sapelo special is water - the ordeal of water. The water we have to go across to get here or to get off. It makes neighborliness different, it makes race relations different, because we don't have a choice. When we know we're all in this together, I don't take advantage of you, and you don't take advantage of me."

To another longtime resident, Cornelia Bailey - who was cleaning her kitchen as she spoke with me - the crux of the matter was a fast-dwindling population. Many who left for work simply didn't move back.

"Once there were five communities," she said. "Now there's just this one. In 1974 there was one school; now there's none. If we don't make a decisive plan we're in trouble." She shook her head. "Success don't always come in the form of a dollar sign."

A woman of tremendous dyna-mism, she had just published God, Doctor Buzzard, and the Bolito Man, a Sapelo memoir.

"As children here we lived by the signs of nature; the old folks still do," she told me. "I could tell the tides from how the marsh hens laughed. That's my station in life - to remember these things."

much of the rest of the sapelo story was contained in a single building. The Reynolds Mansion, shaded by palms and live oaks, turned out to be the most graceful and elegant home I saw on these islands. Originally built by the planter who owned Sapelo, it was renovated in the 1920s by Howard Coffin, who received guests like Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Charles Lindbergh before selling the estate to R. J. Reynolds, the tobacco millionaire. In 1969 Reynolds's widow sold the mansion and most of Sapelo, this time to the state.

The out-buildings adjoining the mansion grounds are now occupied by the Marine Institute and its resident research scientists, postdocs, grad students, technicians, and interns, who conduct research in ecology, biology, biochemistry, geology, and hydrology. There I met Jon Garbisch, a shaggy, amiable geologist who made time to walk with me beside the marsh before meeting his wife and small son at the last ferry. His job was to be a liaison for researchers and college instructors who want to make use of the institute.

"And after three years here," he said, "I'm just barely starting to figure out the island. It's a complex place that seems simple only on the surface."

I wondered aloud if many scientists stayed here long with their families,

expecting several seasons at most.

"Some faculty have lived here for over 20 years. There's plenty to study - close to 900 papers have been written about Sapelo, in all the various sciences. The majority of research is geared to asking the big, basic questions: How do the marsh grass, the animals in the marsh, and the people who live off the island all interact? And how does each group affect the others? The lab is the whole island."

As I stood with him at sunset, looking over a shimmer of green spartina grass, the Marine Institute seemed to promise a life of serenity - assuming you got along well with your neighbors and your colleagues. I told Jon I'd read how Sapelo's marsh was as pristine as a coastal marsh could be. It didn't seem possible, I said; surely the mainland was too close.

"Not at all. The last major development in the area was Darien," he said, "a timber port back in the 1880s. We get two extremely high tides here daily that wash out the entire marsh with fresh oxygen and new nutrients. The result is that things grow twice as fast as in the Carolinas. See, nothing is static here. Everything is changing, but everything is adapted to change."

The next day I took a long walk on Nanny Goat, which Jon had called "as pristine a beach as we have on this coast." It was a wide expanse where a stiff breeze was sending wisps of sand scurrying in jet trails. There was mild surf, and a wind-agitated sea farther out; the horizon was dotted with shrimp boats, wings extended. But they kept their distance, and after an hour I decided this was as majestic and peaceful a beach as this country has to offer. It was irrelevant that I'd never seen it as a child; I doubted it would've been any different back then.

I must have visited Jekyll in the old days, though I had no memory of it. The island was just a few minutes' ride over a marsh causeway from Brunswick, near St. Simons. What I recalled instead was that in Macon, where I grew up, I had schoolmates whose families would rent houses on Jekyll for the entire summer; thus, I imagined it an exclusive place.

In early photographs the millionaires posed here on horseback, for a century ago Jekyll was a club, a private island that a few industrialists bought in 1886 from the original French planters. Today, Jekyll is a state park, and the place feels remarkably innocent.

I came expecting a stodgy nostalgia for a privileged yesteryear but instead found a quiet island of no pretensions, a place that is home to a mix of relaxed year-rounders, campers there to fish, and vacationers touring the preserved honor guard of mansions or biking on trails amid live oaks, trumpet vines, jasmine, and wisteria.

The island's epicenter is a recently restored hotel - complete with a circular tower and wraparound porches - that was once the Jekyll Island Club. Completed in 1887, the exclusive enclave included a din-ing room, reading room, billiards room, ladies' parlor, and card room.

The nearby shingle-style mansions were built during the '20s and owned by the very wealthy - Pulitzers and Vanderbilts among them - who came for the three-month winter season.

I particularly liked Mrs. William Rockefeller's house, which featured a lift in her bedroom, so that servants could pull her up and down.

"It was a Who's Who of the industrial world of the late 19th century," June McCash said to me one afternoon on the hotel's porch, where we sat in rocking chairs, sipping lemonade. A professor of French in Tennessee, she has authored two books of local history since buying a home here 15 years ago.

I told her how hard it was to imagine this place empty and abandoned - as I'd read it had been - after so much money had gone into setting it up in the first place.

She shrugged. "Many of the affluent and powerful went through hard times in the Depression. Jekyll Club membership kept falling, and the last original member died in '38. Their kids found this a Victorian, musty place. People just wanted something more jet-set. So the club closed in '42 and hoped to reopen a year later. But that never happened."

In 1947 the state bought Jekyll and its mansions for $675,000; many of

the properties had already reverted to the club for nonpayment of dues. Now there are about a thousand residents on the isle, including out-of-state part-timers who turn into islanders as soon as they open their shutters.

At the hotel I asked Joseph Ferrari about them. An Italian gentleman with a courtly manner, he was a 30-year veteran of the Plaza in New York, who helped oversee the Jekyll dining room.

He laughed and said, "The residents come sit around the pool like Roman senators, you know. They gossip and decide whom to like and whom to kill. Thumbs up or thumbs down."

Yet even on Memorial Day weekend Jekyll still felt uncrowded, and the beach was so long and wide that there was no need for all the joggers, shellers, honeymooners, and kids to avoid each other. Jekyll was protected, and huge tracts were kept wild, yet you could buy The New York Times every morning and get off-island in minutes. In the end, Jekyll was the only island where my youthful fantasy still felt fully viable, where - with an adjusted income - I could actually imagine settling.

Cumberland is a third larger than Manhattan, roughly the same shape but otherwise its antithesis: a nature island that mostly belongs to the nation, thanks to the park service, which made 90 percent of it a national seashore. Barely in Georgia, the island is reached by ferry across a strait from north Florida. You can come for the day or hike to a campsite if you're willing to lug everything you need. Or stay, as I did, at an inn called Greyfield, built as a mansion at the turn of the century by the Carnegies - who once owned nearly the entire island - and run by family descendants.

Cumberland is Georgia's largest island, with a great diversity of plant and animal life. There's a furious profusion here, an explosive sense of dynamic life everywhere - evident in the feral horses wandering a beach, an armadillo patiently detouring around a few unexpected humans, the squadrons of butterflies flicking through the branches of a mimosa tree at dusk.

On the porch at the Greyfield Inn, I met a couple who were rewarding themselves after having spent five days camping a few miles away. All that time, Kelly, a beginning law student, and her husband, Andy, a chemical engineer, had been under siege by mosquitoes, so they were glad to be staying at this turn-of-the-century house, with its informal grandeur, its wood-paneled libraries, its sim-

ple rooms, and its generous porch outfitted with rocking chairs.

The couple had enjoyed both extremes of the island, and, as Kelly said, "Once we realized it was all right, we'd hike from our campsite and spend every afternoon reading in a swing on the porch of Plum Orchard, an old abandoned Carnegie mansion. Every now and then someone would stop by, look around, stare at us, then move on."

One morning I joined Fred Whitehead, a former park ranger who gave tours for Greyfield, and we raced in a Land Rover down the 18-mile beach, with low grassy dunes on our left and a few shrimp boats riding the Atlantic on our right. At the water's edge were pelicans surrounded by smaller royal terns, a support system only half watching for danger. Many animals here were unexpectedly tame; they treated people not as a threat but rather as a petty annoyance.

Miles down the beach, turning inland, we reached Halfmoon Bluff, near a settlement bought by several families of ex-slaves after the Civil

War. Only a few ramshackle houses, the community was centered on the African Baptist Church. Worn white planks and painted-over windows kept it cool. It was no longer used, though JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette had been married here.

I pushed open the church door; inside were only a threadbare rug, a broom standing upside-down in a corner, and a small cross made of rough branches.

Farther on we came to Plum Orchard, a flaking, rotting white colossus framed by royal palms and shut tight. I peered through grimy windows at a tiled swimming pool, fine floors, dark-wood furniture.

Later that day, at the other end of the island, I visited another Carnegie mansion, Dungeness, which had once included 40 out-buildings and been served by a staff of 300. Dungeness had burned down in the '50s and was now an overgrown stone ruin, where wild horses grazed along the drive. On Cumberland, at a remove of a century, it felt unbelievable that millionaires had once owned these islands and built sumptuous mansions against their wildness. Nature, on this hot June day, looked highly efficient.

In my two weeks on Georgia's isles, it struck me repeatedly how very few places there are in the world that you can return to a quarter-century later without feeling dislocated or cheated. These islands were actually improving, and, in a curious way, the ones I'd never visited began to feel as familiar as the ones I'd thought about all these years. I hadn't realized the islands'

natural beauty had left such a strong imprint on me; I'd have guessed it was the people. Now I realized I liked the places better empty.

It was soothing to bike along a road of sand and crushed oyster shells

beneath the arcade of live oaks that runs the length of Cumberland, to take a path through dense woods whiskered with Spanish moss and engulfed by the fierce humming of cicadas in the heat, to see the path eventually open onto mile after mile of deserted beach. Back then I hadn't seen enough of the world to realize how unusual these islands were, to appreciate the irony of great fortunes surrendering, giving way to wildness again. Of that complex history, it was only the natural beauty here that I'd remembered right. All my years away merely made that beauty seem more powerful, and I knew it would endure.