Vacation Travelogue
Pockets of knowledge for annual returns
There is a pocket of knowledge that lives in my brain whose contents I only pull out once a year. The angle at which to aim the bow of a small boat into oncoming waves in order to rock its contents minimally. How tie nautical knots, how to make the bow line lie neatly on a dock’s cleat. How to row a tiny dinghy from a moored boat to the dock while the wind is trying to blow it like an eggshell out onto the sea. How to walk shivering outside into the darkest part of the night to pee even though the rest of my body is screaming to stay in bed.
Every year I meet my parents and brother on a tiny island off the coast of Maine to spend some days in the house my grandparents bought in the 1970s. Vacation time and upkeep work are shared by my extended family - the families of my grandparents’ four children. The house sits next to the small church where my grandfather, a Presbyterian minister, preached in the summers.
The island was inhabited by a tiny community of white settlers year-round from the early 1600s until the 1960s, and while some of the houses have recently converted to solar power, ours and others still run a fridge and an oven on propane - no electricity, no running water. You poop in the outhouse, shower in the outdoor shower stall where you hang your sun-warmed bag of water from the cistern full of rain (Hopefully! You don’t shower if there’s a drought), and keep an eye on the pilot lights - sniffing frequently for a whiff of gas (maybe someday I will write about the summer I saw the island’s one-room schoolhouse get blown to high heaven when a propane leak caught the pilot light of the fridge…but needless to say some caution is warranted).
It takes some doing to get there from central Illinois: car to plane to rental car to boat to smaller boat to feet walking up the trail to the house and you hope the boat starts and the weather isn’t too bad and that you remember how to to tie the right knot - but then you get to be there. It is my definition of “rustic” and I feel extremely lucky and privileged to have grown up visiting such a place every year. I have written before about how this kind of vacationing has meant that there is a relatively small amount of typical amenities required for me to be comfortable.
My goal each year is to dunk my body in the ocean every single day I am there. Hiking down to the beach in the afternoon, snacking on the lowbush blueberries that grow along the paths, and walking into the sea up to my neck no matter how cold it feels. To become enveloped, to be held, to become a little lighter. To be small, rest a little more lightly, to be mothered in the quietest way.
Cold plunging has become trendy in “wellness culture” and I can see why - I feel incredible after each period of submersion. Back at home I am unable to bring myself to turn the shower knob all the way cold and put my body into the frigid stream, but in Maine I can’t get into the icy water fast enough. Every millimeter of my body is awake and it is brutal and it is also the fucking best.
Each day in the water feels completely different even though I go to the same place. Certain elements of the landscape come forward in their own ways.
Thursday: I notice a group of edible plants that have grown together right at the edge of the beach, intolerably sandy and salty and harsh conditions for many. I see orache and mustard and wrinkled rose and sumac together like a family photo, looking out onto the channel. On this trip I’ve brought along the collected works of the marine biologist Ed Ricketts who said, “Conflict has been thought to be the most dramatic thing in the world. I think that participation is, if not the most dramatic, at least the most deeply interesting thing in the world.” I see how these plants cohabit this space and think, Hey: participation.
Friday: From the helm of the fifteen-foot aluminum work boat that we drive between mainland and island I see the blue-black dorsal fins of porpoises close together, perhaps a mother and child. On the same trip I spot a bald eagle diving into the water in the hopes of bringing a fish into the sky and a seal leaning back to get some sun on its spotted belly. It is hot and sunny but windy - I get tossed around pretty violently while clinging to the bow of the boat and trying to tie a bowline to the mooring line. The sea feels like an adversary until I walk down to the beach and submerge myself in it completely - a dissolution and a relief.
Saturday: I am particularly obsessed this day with picking up cool rocks. The beach is partly sand, partly rocks of many sizes on their way to becoming sand. They all look impossibly beautiful right at the place where the ocean laps them gently, I pick up dozens of them one at a time to look at. I have a special affinity for the ones that have thick streaks of yellow or reddish quartz running through them like stripes of fat through a piece of meat. My family teases me for how my bag is always heavy with cool rocks. One time going through security at the Portland airport on the way home my bag got searched because of a massive rock I had taken with me. “That is a pretty cool rock,” the TSA agent said approvingly.
I listened to this incredible podcast episode from The Emerald called Animism is Normative Consciousness that talked at length about the living quality of stone. I won’t paraphrase it too much because if that interests you at all you should just listen to it yourself. But one tidbit that I’ve been carrying with me from it has been the fact that the National Park Service in Hawaii receives hundreds of “sorry rocks” in the mail every year - people sneak lava rocks illegally out of the Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park and then believe that they have become victims of Pele’s curse, which brings bad luck to those who take the rocks that belong there. So they mail them back apologetically.
I do not believe that my rock collection is cursed, but I have felt that certain rocks have opinions about where they should be. A few years ago I found the most powerful rock I’ve ever seen on this same beach - it was a little big for my hand, a thick chunk of blood-red quartz shot through with a gray-white quartz. It shone wetly, just plucked from the sea, and seemed to pulse - a heart for an animal bigger than a human. I felt elated with this gorgeous find, sure to have pride of place on a shelf at home.
But the more I carried it around the more I felt that it would be fucked up to take this rock away; that is definitively belonged here. It was too much to take from a place that has already fed me in so many ways. It would be wrong. So I apologetically put the rock back, right about where I had picked it up. Sorry, rock.
Sunday: We get down to the beach at low tide, which is a whole different kind of adventure. To dunk one’s body into the ocean here at low tide is to enter the kingdom of the crabs. There is incentive to get your feet up fast and to float so you don’t get your toes pinched. There are hermit crabs by the thousands, acting out their depraved savagery on one another. I know there is a cute internet thing about hermit crabs lining up to switch shells as they grow, but I have only ever seen them be tiny cannibals.
There are green crabs and rock (also called “peekytoe”) crabs underfoot as well. Green crabs are wildly invasive, and every year my brother and I talk about different ways to eat them in huge quantities - for the ecosystem! Our favorite idea so far is boiling a large amount of green crabs for several hours into a stock, and then using the stock to make risotto.1 Maybe next year we will get our shit together and buy a real trap, or a net (we say every year).
Every year I see things that I’ve never seen before - or perhaps more accurately, never consciously noticed. This year: droves of white admiral butterflies, a rock crab with only half its limbs, all on one side, a dark brown raptor carrying dead mice in its talons over the yard at dusk every night. The thing I loved about the last one is that everyone ran for the bird field guide; nobody took their phone out of airplane mode.
Monday: I see monotropa uniflora, more commonly known as ghost pipe, for only the second time ever. Ghost pipe is an ephemeral plant that doesn’t photosynthesize but lives by parasitizing mycorrhizal fungi in coniferous forests. Though it’s a plant (in the same family as the blueberry! What???), it contains no chlorophyll (“plant blood”) and like many fungi it spends most of its life underground because it doesn’t need the sun to live. Its flower at the end of the stalk becomes a seed pod within a few days, and this is how it propagates when the conditions are exactly right.
Last year I came upon this strange friend after some days alone, writing and reading about writing, starting to really think about what it would mean to put my own words out into the world. When I saw the flush of ghost pipe then it felt like the universe saying Yes - this is what you must do. What’s been kept hidden must emerge aboveground every now and then, one way or another. In the intervening year I started this newsletter, which has been a deeply life-affirming practice of intention and devotion. Seeing ghost pipe again felt like an encouragement: keep going, it seemed to say.
So with that, thank you for being here.
Garden Designer for Hire
I am available for hire for new garden designs in August. My services may be helpful to you if:
You want less lawn and more native plants but don’t know where to start
You want to support your local ecosystem but don’t want your neighbors or HOA to get mad at you
You want an edible yard that feeds humans, birds, butterflies, and soil microbes (and everyone in between on the food chain!)
You don’t want to spend an arm and a leg on landscapers but you’re not sure how to put your yard dreams into action
Just respond to this email if you’d like more information and we can see if it’s a good fit!
See ya next time.
Tons of excellent recipes and ideas can be found through greencrab.org if you are interested in the culinary possibilities of eating green crabs. Additionally, the limitations of eating invasives as an ecological silver bullet have been noted eloquently in this essay by Nicholas Gill.
Trying to remember now...who was it chose that color yellow, and who stood around that above ground sewer pile to paint it?
Wow--thoes pictures are stunning. & that's a distinctly Wes Andersen outhouse!!