September 15, 2023
On Foot
Other bike trips I’ve taken have focused on some distant end point. The goal was to travel, to move, not to linger and take in the details of the landscape through which I pedaled. It’s not like that this time around.
A trail not shown on any map follows the edge of Shallow Bay and I follow it, slow and steady, nowhere to be. I walk beneath madrona trees with branches growing at wild angles as they search for the sun with loose bits of bark flapping in the wind.
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A couple of hours on, I loop back to my campsite on the road that runs down the middle of the island. I don’t see anyone else.
In the early evening I head toward Ewing Cove. It’s almost five miles of hiking round trip and I’m tired when I set out but still I decide to go. I've waited so many years to get back to this place — there's no reason to spend my precious time here alone in the tent, smelling my awful farts.
The setting sun is warm and the wind is dead, except every so often the smallest hint of a breeze comes up and sends with it a wave of cool that washes over me in a moment of pure stillness and joy that feels as if it's gently touching my soul itself. I cross paths with more herons than people on my walk to the east.
At the end of the trail I start walking under short aspens with leaves turning orange and red. Sea lions bark and growl on a rock off the north end of the island, only a sliver of land with the tide nearly all the way up.
I drag ass on the way back. I’ve hiked ten miles so far today and I start to feel it. I stop a lot. I talk to ants that have likely never seen a person before. During one break, I hear a madrona not a hundred feet away crack and crash as it falls toward the earth, stopped only by the well-placed trunk of one of its neighbors. I keep a close eye on the edge of the trail, with its steep rocky drop offs only a few feet away. This is an easy place to get yourself hurt, or worse.
Back at camp, I stare up into the tent mesh for an hour, too tired to do something else. When the owls start singing, I kill the light and call it a day.
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