DRIFT
Drift. 712/24. Read at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art 7/13/24
Hello Summerers,
I wrote this for my talk at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art 7/13/24. Projected behind me was DRIFT (July image of my 2024 calendar). I wrote these words just before the presentation so it is raw, only time to type it for easier legibility from a darkened podium. I cast off my shoes to read. I suggest you do the same.
July 12, 2024
Blake Island to Bainbridge Island
DRIFT
Raccoons roll over rocks as the tide creeps up and I don’t need to look at a clock to know it is morning on this island.
Islands are thought of as solitary, independent, but this island has stories tangled and torn, and not fully mended. This place is not separate, it is part of a longer story than this one— my pink toes feeling for a path free of barnacles up this beach. We carry a boat that is light enough to make carrying a boat thinkable, to in a place high amongst toppled tree roots, for this clear water will rise.
The raccoons will disappear into the forest edge to nap and digest and plan their next found meal. And we will wander our legs and minds, pondering pioneer history, culture as entertainment or as exchange or as economics. Wondering what this forest really was, full of ancient trees. Before before.
We’ll find some berries and then even more on trails too hilly for most. And we will walk and wonder together, lost in time on the edge of summer, the endless days of sun and shade.
And we will get lost. No sign or map or patteran to guide, just crashing waves and the wind above to give direction. Up and down. Red Trail. Blue Trail. Lost but not lost as the beach is all around.
We stumble out from forested shade to bright light and piles of hot driftwood. Water just touches the rocks. We cast off our shoes and dive in. Fingers tingle to the cold, the burning hot of a refreshing deep chill. We’d swim forever, but there is no forever. Summer is finite. There is only now. So we swim now and now and now—and now again, until wrists stop working and still I swim in this clear salt water. It’s why I am here, this moment now. I swim until the last possiblity, feeling the warm layer deepen as fathoms become inches and I pop up, now only ankle deep.
Then we wobble to the shady edge and look out on summer. The heat expands the distant horizon, stretches and distorts what we see. And we drift off into no-thinking until the boat that brought us here so long ago begins to bob and would drift away if not tethered for this future need.
The tide is high. It is July 12, 2024 and it it is time to sail to another island, itself complicated and entangled. To Bainbridge. To Suquamish’s clear salt water.
I am thankful for being here today with you on this island under this sky, surrounded by these waters to drift and wonder with you.
Blake Island
Bainbridge Island
The conversation was recorded. The museum will have it posted sometime somewhere in this interconnected world.