Limning a day on an island
Everything that happens will happen today
I am on an island. Although far from the bustle of daily life I am not entirely alone. There are three people nearby that I can reach out to. I am not lonely, I am not seeking solace or solitude. I have no expectations from day to day. In other words, and I will borrow from the title of the last Byrne/Eno album here, “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.”
On the sixth day I can already attest to the truth of that.
The days begin with a cursory pretense of dawn as they snap to light. At days’ end dusk is a misnomer; the Earth tips so quickly away from the sun dusk is simply the light snapping off. As John Cheever wrote: “The darkness would come as thickly in the soft air as silt.” I enjoy the completeness of the dark. At home I sleep six hours a night, here I average ten, the last hour being rooster-broken slumber.
I am not secluded. I am closer to nature here but I am not undertaking some Thoreau-ian exercise. I am certainly less distracted as I have scant access to the internet.
It is often declared that by any measure seclusion leads to focus and, some may say, productivity; I’ve always been suspicious of that idea. What is seclusion if not a self-imposed enforcement? Focus is a result of mindfulness; stay on point, don’t be distracted.
Seclusion, like simplicity, is hard to achieve. “All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.” wrote Blaise Pascal, yet the idea of solitude is a mixed bag. In Walden; or Life In The Woods, Thoreau wrote “… about how he enjoys companionship (despite his love for solitude) and always leaves three chairs ready for visitors. The entire chapter focuses on the coming and going of visitors, and how he has more comers in Walden than he did in the city.”
I also have three chairs ready but only three people know I’m here; strangers don’t come by.
This was my day yesterday:
I peered out of this house: I saw paddle boarders making their way languidly across the bay. I saw surfers who have mapped the breaks, using their muscle-memory to contort their bodies and boards across an ever-shifting terrain riddled with sprawling curls. I saw speeding Catamarans with human ballast in their bow nets, skimming and crowning the swells with sails fit to burst, bustled by cannons of unforgiving winds.
The surf was grayer, heavier. The azure, aquatic tints to the waves that I see on my summer stays are gone for the season. The waves smacked into, not onto, the steep-angled shore, their landing thumps echoing like the recoiling of ghostly mortars while their retreats back toward the undertow crackled like glass and sea shells ricocheting off the blades of a blender.
This is noise; the operatic cacophony of the sea meeting land. This is not Walden…
Still at the shoreline I watched Sandpipers snag sand crabs. To my rear in the gardens of the house mosquitos danced in the air and mango trees soaked up the humidity. The backdrop (as if one were even necessary,) was of lush spires ghosted by mist. It was hard to imagine that anything existed beyond those spires.
Walking I saw swollen waterfalls the undulating fauna the fruits the chickens the roosters the flattened toads in the road the blackest of gleaming indigo rocks the red dirt. Ponds. I heard and saw chattering birds with exotic plumes and finery. Geckos jerked amongst long grasses wary of hungry Egrets. A butterfly. A three-legged dog. The river that runs under the one lane bridge, overflowing, lapping at lush lawns; the colour of dried blood.
In town the tourists gazed at a loss. The tropical drizzle had them off kilter as unlike the locals they couldn’t ignore the rain; it ate into their perception of time on the island; this wasn’t supposed to happen — “This is my vacation time!” The large man wearing a T-shirt declaiming ‘Chevron = Human Energy’ looked sad. A cat slept under an eave.
120 miles South Southeast Hurricane Ana continued on a heading toward the island; moving slower, tigerish, stalking.
After a night of dangerous winds, the electricity browning and then outing for a while, fingers of surf testing the beachhead, palm leaves scything the air, the river widening its mouth rebuilding the spit into the sea, the morning brought calm.
Nothing ever happens without a witness.
