Spoil holds a wild card of meanings that enmesh technical and aesthetic values. As the Latin spolium, spoil originally denoted the hide stripped from an animal; in its plural form, spolia were things taken from a defeated enemy, usually by violence. Spoil results when engineers, dredgers, and later yachtsmen seize a channel’s depth; but spoil technically refers not to this depth (an absence) but to the material (a presence) removed to make that depth. For Romans, at the end of their empire, civic connotations of spoil referred to sites at home, ruined by passing time and by dredging for materials to be used in new construction. Later, the Italian spoglie identified medieval components stripped from past buildings to commemorate a classical past. Much later, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped spoil islands in Biscayne Bay—Al Capone legendarily hid out on one, Elvis serenaded co-stars on sandy beaches of spoil, Robert Smithson made his own out of shards of glass.

A wooden door with rusted hinges presses into sand and rock as if it were a hatch to some underworld. I stand amid torn shutters; louvers warped and faded; lumber strewn like driftwood; stud walls with gray plastic outlets, their umbilical wires feeding a tangle of Brazilian pepper trees. Was this a torrent of eviction? Or a mainland life blown across dredged channels? I open the door, like a storm cellar. An albino boa twists past my flip-flops.

Here, there’s another order. You may have seen them from flyovers, from bridges, or even from a dock, gazing across water. A land that is like you!

I arrive by kayak today, but tomorrow you can come, too. This spoil island is one of hundreds along Florida’s east coast, one of thousands that ring the continent. By-products of dredging that deepened channels, cut inlets, and carved harbors, these islands form a linear archipelago—an unprecedented public commons that mixes dirt with paradise and debris with desire.

Who hasn’t wanted to live on their own island? Spoil islands reflect mainland truths as they invite self-revelation and re-valuation. D.H. Lawrence’s man who loved islands moved island to island but discovered the pitfalls of insular dreams. Not far from here, a dredge operator promised a newly born island to his fiancée. Opportunistic and anachronistic, these islands gain use and meaning over time. Some might see them as waste from before, others see future potential, and many make themselves at home. Officials have called them squatters; my collaborators call them spoilnauts.

Here, on your island—let’s call it that for now—a suction dredge cast shells, fossils, bones, glass, sediment, plastic, limestone, anchors, and coral onto a site that once held water. No more than five hundred feet across, this spoil forms a nearly perfect circle, not from any human directive but from the currents that surround it. It mixes agencies of spoil and people. This incubator island effectively hastens southward toward warmer latitudes and rising seas. Or does it float northward, a super-heated ark that hosts exotic pets, native and so-called invasive biota alike? Your island makes its own climate.

I beached the kayak, then stumbled through the island’s lush outer ring of mangroves to its interior—an arid desert carved from subtropical humidity, filled with sand and rocks, bunny rabbits and gopher tortoises (their burrows piling up spoil, too), fire ants and ant lions, flotsam and jetsam, all rising gently to a convex horizon. Gray and burnished with bright shadows. It felt like I’d landed on the moon. Time stopped but the spoil persists.

Charlie Hailey is an architect, writer, and professor. A Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of six books, including The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature, Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space, and Slab City: Dispatches from the Last Free Place. Hailey teaches design/build, studio, and theory at the University of Florida, where he was recently named Teacher/Scholar of the Year.