Soon...

In a few days, I will be leaving on my drive to the island. In a few weeks, my new book, Here and Away: Discovering Home on an Island in Maine, will be launched.  As my book makes clear from its very first pages, the drive that takes me home is not a new one. After seventeen years, I feel imprinted by the route, the way birds might by their migratory fly-ways.

As I write in my book's Prologue: "Each year, in my cyclical journey of return and leave, I travel from the center of this country to one of its outer edges. But rather than teetering at the edge, I feel grounded. At an edge, I've found my center." On the island, I've come to recognize my need for an identity rooted in a place where I feel the greatest affinity and the strongest connection. There, and as I hope my book successfully explores, I understand the difference between being from somewhere and of a deeply-loved and intimately-known place.

Days from now, I will approach the ramped, narrowing road to the island's arching suspension bridge, and, with a small lurch in my stomach, I'll ascend, my car's hood pointing skyward, tires humming against reinforced deck. Until, in the descent on the other side of an 1100 foot span, and as if I've come by way of the sky, I'll feel I've landed as efficiently and with as much grace as a loon. A bird that, in spite of it's laboriously clumsy and noisy wing-whapping take-off, returns to the water with hardly a ripple. As if it had never left.

And then at last, mid-island, I'll turn down our road. And recognize once more, I'm almost home. Because I know now in body and head how it goes. Like this. From the first chapter of Here and Away:

HOW IT GOES

It goes like this:

Near the end of this quiet, mile-and-a-half long dead-end road on which nothing could pass as a curve and only a few gentle rises pose any challenge to the driver, a generally good road too for walking or biking except for the black flies wicked in early summer and the mosquitoes just about any other time, past the stretch of woods threatening to encroach upon the road, past the few cleared meadows that brighten with lupines in June, past the two art galleries, the chair caner’s workshop, a lobsterman’s dooryard of stacked traps and freshly painted buoys, past the rental house where a woman walked out on her husband and young son and past a tidy Cape’s front yard table where many summer mornings it’s possible to buy cinnamon doughnuts and whoopee pies made by a retired island baker, the hum of pavement becomes the crunch of hard packed gravel. By sound alone, I know I’m almost home.

Closing in, the gravel the tires kick up ping against the car. Overhead, chickadees and wrens natter among the spruce and balsam. Startled, a white-tail deer bolts. In the boggy stream bottom nudged deeper by an unusually wet spring, ferns uncoil and colonies of skunk cabbages throw back their cowls. Bunchberries carpeting the forest floor beam their small white stars among glacial erratics cloaked with moss. Beneath the branches of a few young maples, I follow the sun’s late afternoon path of tossed gold coins and at last turn into a narrow lane that, making a small bend, ends at an expanse of water.

Here then is the island on an island. A small clearing of house, yard, an old wide-armed sheltering oak, a bordering garden. And just beyond, a wind-scoured bluff.

Here is where the land falls away.

At an edge at the edge of an island. A meeting place of earth, water, sky. Where sculpted cumuli balloon against the horizon’s thin and seemingly porous rim. Where distant spruce-capped islands anchor and, closer in, granite ridges and outcroppings corset. Where rock has no plan to be sand.

The making of this island and this bluff spans a brain-synapse-busting number of years. Of cyclical heave and collapse. Of rocks extruded, thrust, heated and cooled. Pulverized by glacial weight, compressed by ice, drowned by ice melt, gnawed by lichen, pelted by rain. Scraped, polished, ground. Each residing within the energy of stillness and quietude. Of holding up, holding on.

Here is where I arrive. Or, perhaps more accurately, return.