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Breathing New Life Into Old Stories
In his beautiful braided essay “Last Boat to the San Juan Islands,” achieves the impossible: He makes me miss the ferry.
Reading about his ride with a dying woman and her family was, for me, a sensory experience: I could taste the salt-licked wind, the desperation of watching your cell service decline, the joy and terror of leaving solid ground with a boatful of strangers. Remember strangers? Chance encounters that weren’t planned or even necessarily desired, spontaneous conversations and connections with people who, as far as we were concerned, didn’t exist when we woke up that morning?
I’m mostly projecting here; Hill’s essay is about a lot of things, and that’s the magic of it. Though largely a snapshot of his past, woven throughout are winks to our current context. It’s difficult to write something that feels relevant in 2020 without accounting for its major themes; Hill does not feign ignorance of them. But his nods to 2020 — the pandemic, racism, employment, fear — are mostly subtle. They suggest more than tell readers that this story from his past is one we need in the present:
They’re pouring out their hearts to a stranger because maybe the people they…
