September 15, 2023
Landing
It’s just me and a woodpecker at dawn.
On the road, the cars are out in force, even at 7:30 a.m.
Gross.
I stock up in the village at Eastsound and then hustle the last mile to the dock. Ten minutes later, a 25-foot double-hulled boat flies out of the harbor headed due north with me and all my gear tucked in the back.
It’s only half an hour to Sucia. At the dock I throw my stuff off the boat and moments after I’m riding. The island has many miles of trails, but only a couple of roads down its middle that allow bikes, so it doesn't take long before I reach the isthmus between Echo and Shallow bays and finish up my cycling for the day.
I set up the tent in a shaded site a few dozen feet from the edge of Shallow Bay, then set out on foot. The woods fill with some sweet smell I can’t place and the faint but ever-present hum of the wings of yellow jackets. Dragonflies look for bugs in the rocky coves at low tide and I duck under the trunk of a fallen juniper tree on a trail padded with soft dirt and fallen pine needles.
I have the cliffs and bluffs all to myself, so I take great care not to slip on the loose surface of the trail and fall to my death. More than once my foot lands on a soft patch, a hint that the ground below isn’t stable and will some day soon find its way into the sea.
I often wonder if my mind logs places as more vivid and alive than they really are. Yet today I walk through a world richer in texture and color than the all the hundreds of times I’ve looped through this landscape in my head in the five years since I was last here.
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