Marrow Island (11 page)

“Is this where you make the cheese?” I asked.

“The cheese?”

“That they sell at the co-op on Orwell.”

“Yes. We do it all here. Cheese, yogurt, kefir, butter . . .”

The room looked like an ordinary kitchen, but there was a long worktable down the middle with a sink at one end that drained into a tub below.

Katie saw me examining the sink and explained, “It’s for catching the whey. We use it for drinks and baking.”

“We don’t waste anything, if we can help it,” Maggie said.

She showed me around, pointing out an old metal suitcase with a few holes drilled in it, wires emerging from the holes. She opened the top of the suitcase to reveal jars of yogurt nestled in wool hats, with heating pads beneath.

“We don’t actually use the refrigerator much, since most of our dairy is cultured and consumed quickly,” Maggie told me.

“The electricity—it’s all solar?” I asked.

“It is. We have to regulate temperature, for culturing, mostly in the winter months. When we first started out here, I was making yogurt near the wood stoves, the pellet stoves. We tried constructing a special cupboard above the cookstoves—which did
not
work, smoked yogurt, can you imagine?—consistency was much harder then.”

She led me to the farthest corner of the north wall and opened a heavy wooden door revealing a long, low, cave-like storage area for the cheese, dug directly into the hill. The shelves were full of cheeses in various stages of ripeness; the smell bloomed into the room, yeasty and acidic, with notes of hay and shit, like the barn. I whistled and Maggie smiled.

“The magic of microbes. Where would the human race be without them?”

“I know some food writers who would crawl all over each other to see this place. It’s very Old World, very European. You’ve never had anyone come out to write a profile?”

Maggie chuckled. “I’m sure they don’t know we exist. Do they, Kate?”

Katie joined us. “Food writers? No, not in my time.”

“How long have you been selling at the co-ops and farmers’ markets?”

“Only a few years now,” Maggie said. “We used to barter with it, but Kate convinced us to start selling, too.”

“It’s useful to have cash” was all Katie said.

“But”—I was thinking of the fields, the gardens we had passed, the bread and butter I had eaten earlier—“how are you able to raise food and animals here, without risk of contamination from the refinery site?”

“That’s why you’re here, is it?” Katie asked, head cocked, half smiling. “To find out how we did all this?”

She didn’t sound upset, but I felt accused of something.

“You invited me. I came to see you
and
the island.” We looked at each other for a moment.

“Yeah,” she said. “Of course.” She looked away.

Maggie ducked into the cave, hunched slightly to avoid hitting her head, and returned with three small wheels of ripe cheese. She took them to the table and wrapped them in squares of striped cloth that looked like they had been cut from a men’s dress shirt. Katie pulled a basket from a wall hook.

“It’ll be first meal soon,” she said. “The food is safe, don’t worry. And there’s solid science behind it. But it’s complicated. I want to show you.”

She pulled four quart jars of yogurt from the fridge and put them in the basket, along with the cheese, and handed it to me.

We walked a long path through the trees and along the bluff. I asked Maggie how long she had been on Marrow.

“Since the beginning,” she said. “I met Janet—Sister J.—after the earthquake. I lost my house in West Seattle—slid right down the hill and into the house below. Two years later I was still living in temporary housing. I was working for the county at the time, as a public health nurse, working with mothers and babies. I’d met Janet at a community meeting and we’d become friends. She asked if I wanted to help with this project on an island in the San Juans. I thought I had seen it all, at that point. The city was noisy, dirty, traffic worse than ever, and people in need, everywhere you looked . . .” She stopped, breathing heavily (the hill was quite steep), looked around, took the basket on her other arm. “An abandoned island sounded like paradise.”

“Weren’t you worried about being exposed? You’re a nurse—did you ask what you were exposing yourself to?” I was remembering the days after the quake when the fire just kept burning, its soot everywhere, the chemicals they dropped from planes over the trees, dumped into the water to disperse the oil slicks. Marrow was a smudge on the horizon that burned our eyes.

“All the islands and the coastline, the waterways, everything was contaminated with something. Everything the water touched. You were probably scared; and your mom, too, after seeing it happen. She did the right thing, taking you away. But—” Maggie stopped short and squinted into the sun to look at me. She opened her mouth to answer but reconsidered, looking away. “No, I wasn’t scared. I could see what needed to be done,” she said, and walked on, a determined smile on her face.

I let her go ahead a few paces and reached out for Katie’s arm.

“How did she know about my mom?” I asked.

“Nobody just shows up here. I knew you were coming. I told them you were coming.”

“Told who? Everyone?”

“There are only thirty-six of us; word gets around.”

Most of these thirty-six souls were headed to the Gathering Place on the bluff north of the chapel. The sun was full in the sky now, midday bright, warming the higher elevations of the island. We filed past the whitewashed chapel, gleaming with sunlight, more lighthouse than church. Some walked together, chatting; others were solo. From all directions, in the clothes they had been working in, some of them looking weary, others bright-eyed. It reminded me of lunch hour on a college campus, how the bodies travel worn grooves, in rhythm. There’s an orchestration of movement when everyone follows the exact same clock, day after day.

In decent weather, the first meal was usually served on the bluff. Up the slope I could see the roof of the outdoor kitchen. I asked Maggie more about the early days.

“It was just like camping for a long time. There were about fifteen of us at first, with a few interns Janet picked up at Evergreen who came and went. We cooked everything over wood fires for a year or two, knowing it wasn’t sustainable in any way but not knowing what else to do—until we heard about a man in Oregon who was building solar ovens. This was before you could look up everything on the Internet—or at least, we couldn’t, you know, because we’d have to go to the library in Friday Harbor to do it—so a couple of the students we had then went down to Oregon to find out how to do it. They came back with the man himself. He wanted to see what we were doing here—wanted to see how we were managing . . .”

She trailed off, out of breath, as we crested the hill and met the full view of the bluff and Bone Cove, named for the bleached logs the tide carried in and left scattered over the shore. I set my basket down and stepped closer to the rocky embankment that spilled down to the shore.

“An orca washed up down there that first summer,” Maggie said.

“Washed up—dead?”

“Nearly dead. We couldn’t do anything for it. I got used to dead birds washing up, the fish, the crabs, the sea stars, even seals. But that whale, she did us all in. We had a goddamn funeral for her.”

“That seems reasonable to me. Did you send her back out with the tide or . . . ?”

“Oh, we sent her home.” She patted my back and picked up the baskets. “We hauled her up to the field with a tractor and let her rot. She’s still fertilizing our crops, that one.”

I must have looked dubious, but Maggie just smiled. “Her bones are still up there.”

“Did you ever find any human remains?” I asked. They both stopped short. “Washed ashore or on the island?”

Maggie looked at Katie, then back to me.

“No, we never did,” she said, her smile gone. “I’ll take these on up to the tables.” She hobbled a little as she walked, and I called after her.

“Do you want some help?”

“No thank you. You girls take your time.”

I looked at Katie.

“She never tells me those stories,” she said.

“No?”

“Not often. Must be your gift for getting the scoop.” She raised an eyebrow at me and smiled.

“I don’t know about that.” I leaned into her. “I got fired.”

“What?”

“Laid off, technically, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t do it anymore. Or, I’m not working right now. I’m sort of—adrift, at the moment.”

She didn’t say anything, just watched me sidelong while I stared out at the sea. The sunlight off the water made it look like it was on fire. Pain angled through my eye, and I could feel myself tightening around it. A gust of wind hit me, and I took in a lungful of it, closed my eyes. Arrows of light burned inside my eyelids. I felt Kate taking my hand. My body relaxed, a conditioned response to her that should have been lost years ago. The memory of a younger Katie next to me. The way our sweaty hair stuck together as we huddled under a blanket, the peaked tent it made stretched between our heads and our drawn-up knees. The way I could feel both of our hearts beat through the aftershocks. The way we listened to the waves reaching up and out of the sea. We had heard them all, the cold fists of water pounding the shore. We had counted them under our breaths.

We stood like this for a few silent minutes, and I was sure Katie was there with me—not there on the bluff, but
there,
under the blanket on our classroom floor.

“Kate.” A man’s voice came from behind us, and she dropped my hand as she turned to answer. Maggie had moved on up the path, and a tall man stood in her place. He was our age, with a patchy red beard and dirty blond hair, face scuffed with dirt from work. Katie met him and they spoke softly, his head bowed to hers. She looked into his eyes and kissed him, then took his arm, leading him my way.

We ate at a long picnic table under the open-air lodge-pole structure that served as both dining hall and outdoor kitchen. There was one straw-bale wall that buffered the prevailing southwesterly winds and protected the cooking and prepping areas. A rain barrel full of potable water, a stainless-steel worktable that looked like it had been lifted from a morgue, with two women working away at peeling potatoes for dinner. The solar ovens, three cubic feet of Mylar and wood that looked like little satellites, were out from under the trees against a whitewashed straw-bale wall that reflected more light back into them. Under cover in the kitchen were three rocket stoves made from repurposed beer kegs. Tucker told me these were fairly new—the kegs donated by a brewery in Friday Harbor—inspired by the prototype of a Scottish guy who had been living off the grid for several years and blogging about it.

“So he’s not completely off the grid,” I said. “If he’s blogging, he must plug in sometimes.”

Tuck and I were sitting across from each other at a long picnic table, bowls of a thick amaranth porridge steaming between us. He was thoughtful, well-spoken, with a sadness in his eyes and a smile that was disarming, like he hadn’t always been handsome or smart or well-spoken but had earned it over time, after years of not giving a damn. He had taken my hand like a vise when Katie introduced us, and I found myself wondering what she had told him about me. The way they all looked at me—curious, not unkind, but not exactly warm—I had the unsettled certainty of someone who knows less about everyone than they know about her.

“It’s not what it used to be, ‘going off the grid,’” Tuck said, setting his spoon back in his bowl. He spoke softly, a languid Pacific coast lilt, with gravel underneath. “Everything’s on the grid. Or
under
it,” he said, gesturing to the sky. “It’s longitude and latitude. It’s radio waves and cell signals and drones. The grid is
us
. Everything on the planet touches everything else. There’s no such thing as ‘off the grid.’”

“You’re the one who used the term,” I said. Katie was sitting next to him with her hand on his leg under the table. She didn’t say anything.

“You’re right,” he said, taking a bite and wiping his mouth with a bandanna from his pocket. “I meant something else by it. It means living as far off the industrial food supply chain as possible. Avoiding fossil fuel consumption . . .” He went on, but I tuned him out. I made eye contact and nodded occasionally, but I didn’t hear what he was saying. I had heard it all before. Even men who should’ve known better—overeducated, progressive types who probably considered themselves feminists—had no compunction explaining things to me. I learned early on to use their inclinations against them when I was reporting. I got the best quotes from men like this; they loved to tell me
how it is
—whatever the subject was, as if I didn’t live in the world, didn’t do research or even read. They wouldn’t even know they had said something damning until it was in the paper.

Women were different; women told me as much with their silences as their words.

I glanced at Katie; she was devouring a bowl of greens while Tuck made his point. She looked up at him as if she were listening, but her gaze was glassy and distant. Her brow furrowed when she looked into her bowl of kale, like she was divining the leaves, then stabbed and carefully inserted a bushy forkful into her mouth, chewing thoughtfully, thoroughly. Tuck seemed about done, spooned porridge into his mouth.

Folks around us at the table had been listening. I could feel them, tuned to our conversation. I waited for someone to say something, to offer some other thought. A few toward the ends chatted with each other, but those near us kept eating, quietly, watching the two of us. They were watching me, waiting for my response.

“That sounds about right,” I offered. I added a thoughtful nod for good measure.

Tuck leaned back, looked up the table to Maggie. They made eye contact for what seemed like an awkward amount of time.

“You should try these.” Katie passed a bowl of greens across the table to me. “So good this time of year,” she said.

I had finished my amaranth, so I scooped the greens into my bowl. They were wilted and glistening, dressed with something tart and pungent. I passed the bowl to Jen, the woman next to me, thirty-something and covered in tattoos, her short hair almost completely gray. Katie had introduced us and I had liked her instantly.