I've lived on islands much of my life, my first eighteen years on Oahu, my latest twenty two on Whidbey Island, and, more than anything else, to me it means a subtle, ever-present awareness of two worlds so different that they often seem in opposition.
The core experience, for me, is that of walking on the beach, walking a fine line between the fluidity, the expanse of the sea hidden by the mirror of the surface and the seemingly solid land. The beach itself is littered with physical remains of what has lived and is now gone, shells, bones, seaweed fronds, feathers. It has a starkness, a blunt challenge to life in either world.
At one time, after an intensive marine biology course, I could name just about any species of animal or plant you might find there, and those who can endure the drought and heat or chill of air alternating with the flood of salt water are relatively few, compared to the richness of both land and sea. They're tough, often relying on solid shell houses to guard themselves. Or they move easily up and down through the sand, hiding their soft bodies from the air.
The sea itself is mystery, a blue or gray green expanse broken by a fin, or the head of a seal, watching with huge dark eyes. Strange shapes come out of it, pulled up on the end of a fishing line, or tangled in a net. There's part of me that wants to dive into it, to live there, at least for a while.
I remember some scuba diving lessons that ended with a descent to 100 feet in the clear Hawaiian water, the bright colors and intricate shapes surrounding me. And I remember diving in other, darker waters, the sensation of sinking down, away from the brilliance of the surface into a place without boundaries of any kind, where it seemed that anything could come out of the dim distance.
I wouldn't want to be without that world, in its literal form as sea, and in its mythic and spiritual form as a surrounding reality that is much larger that this physical life. And I like living here, in smallness and ordinariness.
But most of all, I like walking within the tide zone, where sea washes over sands that shift to erase every footprint, giving a sort of anonymity to the journey. This feels like home.
