It doesn’t really matter where I was going or why I was there. What matters is that the lobster boat’s engine hummed and sometimes roared, the sky and the ocean were almost the same steely color, and that the rolling swells bore us up and then down their fronts and backs. But I take that back; it does matter where I was going because I was going to an island, and it always matters when you're going to an island. The shingles of island houses are splintered and salt-crusted, the trees of islands are bent to one side, the pinecone-and-stick-studded moss of islands is thick underneath your feet (more after the jump).
There’s a crunch when you walk around a wooded island barefoot, have you noticed? It’s different from walking barefoot in the woods on the mainland. Forest floors of Maine islands snap and spring with your step; layers and layers of winters and summers and rotting wood and heavy underbrush. Sometimes you sink through scraggly grass into swampy leaves and mud, and you often step on sharp thistles or stub your toe on blunt, buried rocks. If you leave an island without a new scar on your foot it’s not time to go yet.
I have three new scars on my feet so I think it’s been a good summer.
Some pictures:
Also, a poem, just because:
The Abandoned Valley
Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?
-Jack Gilbert