Marrow Island (15 page)

“The average age here is forty-two. So, it’s true, we don’t see a lot of diabetes or rheumatism or things like that. Flesh wounds, insect stings, strains, and sprains. There are almost a third more women here than men. So, migraines—yes. Menstrual irregularities.”

“Birth control?” I offered. “I notice there are couples here but no children.”

She paused and looked thoughtfully at me. “Yes. There’s a long tradition of wise women using herbs for birth control. You’ll want to drink lots of water, too. The tea’s diuretic and diaphoretic.” She gestured to my mug.

She poured off a jar of water for me from an old Tupperware pitcher, like the kind my mom made lemonade in when I was a kid. The water was perfectly clear, catching the light from the window. I took a drink, conscious for the first time that I was drinking well water, that I couldn’t taste anything but water. I held it up. I don’t know what I expected to see floating in it. Lead? Cadmium? Sulfur? Little skulls and crossbones?

Elle saw me.

“It’s as clean as water you get in the city. Probably cleaner.”

“How?”

“Filters, for drinking and cooking water.”

She showed me a lidded bucket with a spigot and a tube in the corner behind the door.

“Six layers: gravel, sand, charcoal; gravel, sand, charcoal. Muslin at the bottom.” She handed me the pitcher and gestured toward the end of the hose, turned the spigot. Water flowed into the pitcher.

“We probably don’t need to use them anymore—it’s been a while since everyone was religious about it. I boil, then filter twice. I don’t want to compromise the treatments.” She nodded at my tea. “It works best when it’s hot.”

I watched her work for a while, as I sipped the tea. Feeling it burn its way down my throat and into my head, my chest. Soon, I was sweating the headache out of me.

Katie came to collect me. The pain in my skull was waning, but my eyes were still sensitive to the light. I borrowed a straw hat from Elle, who told me to rest awhile and handed me a lidded jar of water with a sprig of mint in it. Katie walked me through the medicinal garden and out to the meadow. We made our way over a dirt and grass path through the trees to the central cluster of cottages. They had the look of a prewar summer camp, with a name for every house, painted in bright colors on a sign outside each door. The first colonists named the cottages, and though they must have been struggling in those early years just after the quake, they seemed to have brought a sense of whimsy to Marrow. There was Oysterville and The Pequod, Valhalla and Atlantis, The French Quarter and The Royal Fernery. My cottage, which was set aside for guests—visiting scientists, ecologists, family members—was called the Helix Nebula. There were flower beds and herb gardens around some; others had gone to seed with whatever would grow there—grasses and flowers and young trees, but with birdhouses rising out of them on stilts, or piles of wood alive with mason bees. It was all habitat, Katie said. The only requirement was that a conscious decision had been made by the inhabitants. There were laundry lines slung with sheets and underwear and jeans. Wind chimes answered every breeze.

The vault toilets were not like the typical outhouses of campgrounds. They had built them to look like regular buildings, little shacks and cabins made of salvaged wood and windows and doors. The inner walls were made of a clay composite—a perfectly insulated material that kept them warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Tuck was the one to innovate on the design, a model he perfected after studying at Yestermorrow in Vermont. It became an artistic challenge, improving on the toilets. A couple had retractable sunroofs so that you could shit under the open sky. Each was planted round with native herbs and wildflowers.

“Where did the salvage come from?”

“Some were from cottages here—the ones that collapsed after the earthquake—they took them down piece by piece and reused everything they could. In the time I’ve been here, we’ve had quite a few donations of materials, too. There’s a network of folks around the islands who keep us in mind when they have something taking up space. Like that, over there.” She pointed off through the trees.

“Is that a boat?” I peered through the trees to an open space where I could just make out the blue-and-white hull of a cruiser—probably a fifty-footer—the V-bottom buried in the dirt, like it was sailing through the forest. We were at least a mile from the dock. “That’s incredible. How did you get it up here?”

“Tractor. It took some doing, though.”

“Does someone live there?”

“It’s the lab.” Katie started walking again and I followed.

“That’s a lab? What kind of lab?”

“Soil and water stuff, mostly. It’s where they process the samples.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“Tuck and Aaron. Zadie and Jen. The occasional student—they come and go—you know the types. I was one of them once.”

“I’m surprised more of the students don’t stay, honestly.” I was taking in the view, the quaint cottages with the Salish Sea beyond, the gentle swaying of the trees. I looked at her, expecting agreement. But she looked troubled.

“We attract a certain type of person, for sure. Young, interested in environmental issues, social justice, minimalist living. But there’s usually a point, after six months or so . . . Either it’s something you can give yourself to, or it’s not.”

“But you stayed. Tuck, Jen, Elle—?”

“We were the last newcomers. We had a little cohort—along with Andrew and Tom, who had been at Yestermorrow, in Vermont; Carly and Angela, the sisters from Alaska who run our fishing boat now; Zadie and Luke, who were part of the organic farms exchange. We were all looking for something meaningful that we couldn’t find out there.” She gestured toward the mainland. “We were all in it for the long haul, from the beginning, so with Sister’s blessing, we started making the Colony ours. Most of us never had the chance to make homes for ourselves out there. It wasn’t this trendy thing yet, to be raising goats and bees, and fermenting vegetables or whatever, you know?”

We sat on the hillside in the breeze and looked out at the water.

“I can’t explain it. Things have changed. For a while after the earthquake, when we were teenagers and going into college, it seemed like there was energy around dealing with big problems. Reconstruction, earthquake mitigation, energy efficiency, affordability, and quality-of-life issues. There were people willing to do the work. But something shifted in the consciousness a few years ago. It was like people had reached this level of comfort and didn’t want to give it up. They stopped wanting to fight and started to accept that we would never win the fight. That the forces against us were too great, the problems too out of control. People smart enough and caring enough to see the danger the planet was in, but too—I don’t know—too overwhelmed? too complacent? to do anything about it. We started losing benefactors.”

“What do you mean by ‘benefactors’? Jen mentioned them, too.”

“There were some liberal Catholic supporters of Sister’s mission who donated supplies—solar panels, yurts, goats, farm equipment, money for mycelium spawn—which doesn’t come cheap when you’re cultivating them large scale like this. Everything, at first, came either from benefactors, bartering, salvage, or voluntary labor. It hasn’t been easy, keeping this level of support for the last decade. There are sexier movements out there.”

“Maybe,” I said, thinking about my ex and his orchards. “But I’d write about it.”

Katie looked at me like she was measuring the distance between my eyebrows.

“How does a nun get into mushrooms?” I asked.

Katie left me at my cabin to rest while she finished her chores for the day. Of all the houses, all the buildings I had seen so far, this one was most like an old summer cabin. Logs for walls, stone fireplace, one room with a kitchen at the far end and a door out to the privy and shower. The door to the left off the living room led to a small bedroom, a door on the right to a screened-in porch just wide enough for a twin bedstead, no curtains. It was simply furnished, like all of the buildings I had seen so far. A rug in the main room, but otherwise bare floors, swept clean, a love seat, and a coffee table. In the kitchen, a wooden table and two mismatched chairs, a ceramic jug of fireweed and meadow rue in the center. I leaned down to smell them and saw that pollen and black aphids had fallen all over the table. An earwig shimmied under the pottery.

I plugged my phone into my solar charger and put it in the window. I had a message I couldn’t retrieve because of the shaky signal. Chris Lelehalt, maybe, with news about Jacob Swenson.

I opened the windows of the sleeping porch, took off my shoes, and laid myself down on the bed. The sun was low in the sky. I hadn’t felt so weary in a long time. My body sank into the soft mattress; the heat sank into the room. The breeze lifting the thin muslin curtains, a bee throwing its body at the screen.
Hum-tap. Hum-tap-tap. Hum.

I should let it out,
I thought. But I felt weighted to the bed, wooden-limbed. What was in that tea?

Training my eyes on the trees outside, the way they seemed to bend over the cabin, over the bed itself. I thought my eyes were open, but the way my thoughts turned, I knew I was starting to dream. I was falling backward through the day, details large and small, floating forward. I was searching the cabin’s kitchen for a jar, a cup to capture the bee. I was at the window, cupping it in my hands. When I opened my hands at the back door, it was gone. I walked into a field of fireweed, listening to a lecture by a famous ecologist—I knew she was famous—on the first plants to return after a fire.
That’s why it’s called fireweed
. It looks like a fire on the hillside, those waist-high red fronds licking at the wind; it’s the ghost of what came before it.
It brings the bees back, and they make the best honey from it,
Katie was saying to me, holding a stem of it up to my face even though the bees were all over it. I was trying to take notes for an article or a book—a book I was going to write about Marrow Island resurrected. I could see my hand scrawling notes, but the words made no sense. I tried again:
furweed, friarweed, friendweed
. I can’t get the
fire
. I write it over and over again. My hand numb, my letters loopy, drunk. In the pictures I’ve taken, the lens is buttery soft.
Is it the camera or my eyes?
Muscles twitched, my hand reaching, but only my fingers lifting, and I was aware, for a moment, that I was still lying on the bed and the sun was lower in the sky. I heard singing somewhere nearby, like a choir, that sent goose bumps along my arms.
But I’m dreaming,
I told myself. The distant conversation of ravens, harmonizing with the wind chimes. I pulled the blanket over me and sank, again, into the bed. An unkindness of wind chimes.

Asleep in the broad window seat at Rookwood, the one that looked out on the wraparound porch, on the lawn, and the view of the sea. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there this time. Someone would find me and I’d be in trouble. They couldn’t know that I knew. But I was so tired I couldn’t move. I forced my eyes open, and out the window there’s a man, walking down the steps, across the yard. I could see everything beyond him: Marrow, ArPac, the cottage, the Salish Sea, rising in huge waves under a bright sky. And there was Jacob Swenson, getting into a boat as the tsunami approached. He couldn’t see it. I dragged myself up from the window seat. One leg wouldn’t move; my voice was muted, a whisper though I knew I was screaming. My eyes dropped shut like curtains—I ran my hands along furniture and walls to get to the door.
I’m dreaming
—I knew I was dreaming—but I had to make it to the door. I had to stop him.
What happens if I stop him?
I wanted to see what happens when I save a life. So I say to myself:
You’re dreaming. You can fly, you’re a ghost
. So I willed myself to fly through the wall to the porch and around to the other side—but he was so much farther away than he seemed. I was floating over the lawn, over the drive, down to the shore, but slower, slower.
But I’ll never save us both
. The wave rose; it washed over everything.
Breathe!
so I did. And the wave washed away. There he was at my feet, beached, like a seal; he was dead. More than dead. He was leftovers for the rooks. And I wrapped my arms around him and wept because it wasn’t Jacob Swenson; it was my dad. My dad’s face, falling apart all over the beach. I clutched at his clothes as his body dissolved.

I jerked awake, sweating, hair stuck to my face. The day outside was almost unchanged, the sun still bright gold, angled low through the trees, casting shadows on the walls of the sleeping porch. I heard the creaking of the front door—I had left it open wide for the air.

I took my phone from the charger and checked the time. I had slept for less than two hours. Why did I feel like I was clawing myself out of a season of hibernation? My eyes wouldn’t adjust to the light, my insides felt drained. I was parched and ravenous. A breeze rustled through the trees outside and through the screens. The air smelled like everything—wilderness and the sea and life and decay. It was almost enough to revive me. I kicked off the blanket and let the air through the screens blow over me, let my eyes adjust to the light outside, stretched out between the trees. I listened to a bird calling in the trees, a long, complicated refrain, trying to pick out its different parts. I slowly became more conscious, forcing the synapses to spark, feeling different parts of my brain waking. The bee was on its side on the window ledge, dead.

Dinner was oysters, greens and roasted potatoes, and loaves of sourdough. I hadn’t enjoyed oysters as a girl, no matter how fresh, but my hunger made them delicious to me now, steamed at the fire pit, a dollop of butter dropped in the shell and chased with dry herbed mead.

We ate outside, on the bluff, like we had earlier in the day. Talk circulated about the indicator clouds streaking across the radiant sunset; rain would come soon. Without water, there are no mushrooms. I was becoming aware of how much of the colonists’ conversation revolved around water and the paucity of it, the drought that was descending on the West. It was difficult to imagine, looking out at the sea, that there could ever be an absolute end to the rain in the Northwest, even with all the stories I had written about the subject. I sucked oysters from their hot, calcified bowls while one of the old-timers, Jack, told me about the oyster, its importance to the wild waters it lives in, the way it filters and diversifies the ecosystem, how their populations have increased as their natural predators have dwindled, especially after the sea star wasting disease that swept through the year before. No one knew why the sea stars had died, only that their limbs had begun to shed, then become palsied. Then they detached themselves one by one, creeping away, leaving their bodies to die. Jack said they had to thin the oyster beds off Marrow’s shores every now and then, for an oyster bake like this. And they would smoke and jar them for the winter, too. The cooks brought more oysters from the fire, every table steaming with heaps of them, their shells burst open from the heat of the wood coals.