I sleep in the tent and get up early to retrieve the food, light a fire and make coffee.  Fog remains, we pack slowly and head up the beach, more than ever appreciating its variety of terrain and choice of routes and the continual activity of the water.  Offshore, humpback whales and dolphins cavort.

Back in the woods, Steve and I continue our conversation.  He describes a five-day Warrior-Sage workshop he attended last year.  He says this is the time of life to get it together, get the whole picture. Alone again, I pass through an unsettling sequence of thoughts about marriage and home life which predictably resolves itself in eagerness to return.  The fog has lifted but low overcast remains .

At 1:30 we set up camp at the Darling River campsite, aware of the proximity of the trail’s end.  Peter and Paul nap.  I meditate on my Thermarest, keyed in to the wave rhythm.   Steve and I head to the river to fill our Camelbacks and see two women with bathing suits and towels heading upstream.  We follow and come upon a gorgeous waterfall unmarked on the map—a loud steady flow through a dramatic cleft in rocks surrounded by higher cliffs from which tall spruces rise, their tops lost in cloud.  The pool below is clear and deep.

The women jump in and scream and come out and wash their hair.

In the chilly weather at first I’m not inclined to swim, but I tell them they’re shaming me.  They’re proud of their ages, 55 says one, here with friends from West Vancouver who’ve never backpacked but decided in a bar to do this.  As they leave, I strip and test the water.  About the same temp as the ocean, not requiring long acclimating.  The aerated and circling water produce an intense adrenaline rush.

Back at camp I look at shots of Jan at the wedding in Oregon, still on the camera.  Steve and I figure that if we move to the next campsite and can rearrange our reservations on the bus back to the trailhead, we’d prefer to come out a day early.  Awake now, Paul agrees enthusiastically. My cellphone barely has enough juice to make the connection, but it works and they reschedule.  Peter wakes up refreshed and also agrees.  We cook dinner, pack up, hike an hour and a half further down the trail to Michigan beach where we pitch our last camp.

Wednesday August 18

Wind blew last night, sexy dreams.  Black bear roaming on the beach.  Early departure, 12K to the parking lot. I hang back alone for most of the hike.  Elegaic mood, farewell to forest and ocean.  A great trip, with a piece of driftwood, photos and journal as souvenirs.

The last section of trail winds through old growth forest devastated by recent storms.  Huge trunks crisscross it, unblocked by the Indian trail maintenance crew, but the spectacle of destruction remains. 2000 ancient trees went down here.

Centuries of growth, building upward and buttressing below, structures and systems strong enough to move tons of water hundreds of feet high every day, to hold immense weight aloft and to withstand storm and strain for centuries suddenly smashed and shattered.

But already the great upended rootballs are growing ferns and salal and new trees on their vertical exposed surfaces, replacement plants that will take root in the ground as their hosts decompose into a new forest floor.

We emerge from the last stretch of forest onto the beach at Pachena Bay.  Three people are walking their dogs. They’re from a world different from the one we’ve inhabited for the last nine days.  A man asks if we’d like a final group portrait.

He’s the mayor of Bamfield, the nearby town.  As we’re about to get on the Shuttle in the parking lot, the women from the waterfall and their friends go to their pickup truck and shout Oh no!  It’s been broken into, their phones, wallets and gear stolen, the dashboard and interior trashed. Our bus leaves as they come to grips with the situation.

[Full set of 196 pictures, slideshow and all sizes]

My sleeping bag is wet in the morning fog.  I’m up early and with the help of a chunk of paraffin found in the sand, build a fire to dry it out and get warm.

We break camp late in the morning realizing that unless we slow down, at the present rate, we’ll be at the end of the trail a day early.  The fog remains, erasing the long vistas of previous days’ walks and intensifying sights and sounds close by.

I fall behind my companions, trying a walking meditation, linking the muffled sound of the waves moving in and out with inhale and exhale and with the right-left movement of limbs.  The line of foam at the margin of each wave snakes sinuously, a white bead that thickens and then quickly dissolves as the water drains backward and percolates down through the porous grains, leaving a shimmering curtain of radiance that disappears from the smooth slope as soon as it’s seen.  At the bottom, a gaping throat opens in which pebbles dance during the instant before the next wave moves forward and swallows them.

One beach is strewn with bright purple sea urchins on which crows leisurely feast.

We reach the most popular camping spot on the trail, Tsuishat Falls, but the falls are almost dry and the beach camping area is full of litter.  We decide to press on.

Back up in the forest I try to maintain focus on the breath to the exclusion of other thoughts by counting exhales up to ten and then starting over, following suggestions from several sources. Later I cease counting and attend to the full range of each breath. On the boardwalks where little attention is required to navigate the trail, I drink in the green of salal and fern and skunk cabbage.

After an amusement-park ride in the self-propelled cable car across Klanawa River we stop to camp.

In the thickening fog, the grove of spruces by the outhouse and bear cache feels spooky.  Mist rises from the flat lagoon of the river and the ocean is still.  More people here might be welcome.  My darkening mood is dispelled by the chance to get into the sleeping bag with all my clothes on and catch up with the journal while Peter prepares dinner and Steve creates a driftwood sculpture.

The sun appears for the first time today in melancholy grandeur. The fog luminesces above the towering headland to the north backlit by a brilliant ray descending diagonally into the ocean. Then its white disk is sharply defined, but only as bright as the full moon behind a light mist. The disk moves slowly behind the trees along the ridge sillouetting their pointed tops and branches.  The oblique ray shifts hue from white to orange and  its source dissolves into a burst of radiance, then slides below the horizon.

[Full set of 196 pictures, slideshow and all sizes]

Slow morning to enjoy the sunshine and instant coffee.

Next time it will be fine ground beans. Hike is partway on beach, partway on forest trail facilitated by boardwalks, ladders, suspension bridge, steel bridge and cable trolleys.  Views of water and rock and little coves below alternate with deep forest, ancient bogs and a beaver pond bypass.

Arrive at Nitinat Narrows ferry in time for another Indian Reserve restaurant lunch.  We benefit from the assertion of First Nation rights.

A four year old girl, strong Indian features but with blond-brown hair cavorts around the dock.  Her Daddy runs the little ferry and the family enterprise. He pulls a rope up to the dock and lifts out the crab ordered by Peter, tears it apart for cooking by his son and throws some scraps into the water where a large school of salmon fry clean them up.

I get salmon caught off Bonilla Point, which we walked by yesterday, Paul gets halibut.

At the next table two strapping women who passed us at intimidating speed are having lunch.  We chat.  They are carrying three bottles of booze and will finish the trail in four not our 8 days.  One with a French accent is from Montreal, has just finished school and earlier in the summer cycled down the coast to San Francisco.  Steve and she compare notes about the roads.  He did it with his son 20 years ago.

The dock where we sit is anchored at the edge of Nitinat narrows, which drains and fills a huge saltwater lake (lake not inlet because it also has freshwater that flows into the ocean).  The deep green water heads upstream at an astonishing rate, the surface curled by whirlpools.  After lunch Daddy ferries us across to the trailhead.

Late in the afternoon we find a beach access. Paul and I search for water while Peter and Steve wait, refusing to go on further.  A spring is found hidden in the brush at an unmarked spot south of Tsushiat point where we set up for the night.

Wind has shifted onshore and we see the fog approaching.  Noone else in sight in all directions.  I listen to the gravelly rumble of pebbles pushed and pulled by the waves rolling against one another .

[Full set of 196 pictures, slideshow and all sizes]

Today is shoreline hike. 9km of beauty and easy travel.  Sandstone shelves, crescent beaches, otters, eagles, laughter.

Lunch at Chez Monique next to Carmanah lighthouse, on Indian Reserve Land.  Eating freshly prepared hamburger, halibut burger, salmon burger, with cooscoos and salad.

Three WOOFIE workers, two of them young twins from France working as waitress and cook in tarp covered driftwood kitchen:”wood you like ahliboot?”

Loud dogs.  Monique is gruff and loud and forthcoming with a flow of fascinating information.  She’s 70 years old, taking MS in horticulture during the Winter in the Fraser Valley.  Strong French Canadian accent.

Her husband is pureblood member of local Indian Band.   She talks to him on cell phone as he’s bringing in daily food order for the restaurant on a Zodiac. She chronicles her battles over the decades with the Provincial and Federal Governments and the Canadian Park Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the neighboring lighthouse keepers and the other Indian groups that have reserve land along the coast.  She’s maintained this business, hated by all of them, because she knows her legal rights and shows an impressive mastery of local anthropology.  In addition to lunches and big breakfasts, she caters dinners for fishermen parties and backpacker tours which include the organic vegetables and flowers she grows in front of her house by the beach.  Gas is provided by bottled propane, power by solar and a small wind turbine and stored in car batteries.  The big storm of 2007 wiped her out but she rebuilt again.

After luxurious lunch we pass lighthouse, move further through forest up the coast and come back to the beach at Cribs Creek.

Another lagoon and freshwater swim.  An eagle lands on a log and tears at a seagull it’s caught, then takes off as I approach.

Peter body surfs and Steve and I try unsuccessfully to launch a raft through the breakers.

We build a sunshade and kitchen area with driftwood and raise our own bear cache in a secluded campsite several hundred yards down the beach from the central one, which again is crowded.

Paul was given a wallet left behind at Monique’s by one of the Ontario women and he leaves it for her at her campsite.  She comes to the lagoon with word that her sister is carrying too much and got some sunstroke but is recovering.  She’s an eighth grade science teacher.  We talk pedagogy.

Sleep under stars again. Sunset and crescent moon over water.  Milky Way bright.  A satellite moving overhead brightens like an outsized shooting star. I wonder if it’s a landing spaceship.  But it dims and continues its smooth silent progress.  Probably caught the sun after it set here down below. Meditations on the sand last two nights accompanied by rhythmic sound of the gently breaking waves.

[Full set of 196 pictures, slideshow and all sizes]

Eight hours hiking, lots of ladders, less vertical elevation change than first day and no terrible boulders to negotiate. Feeling stronger due to conditioning.  Most of the time in the woods.  Boardwalks in rough shape.  We’re thankful it’s not muddy and slimy as it must be most of the time here in the rainforest.  Lots of conversation, especially between Steve and me who hang back. Hemlock needles falling like snow; sunlight in patches.

Arrive at Walbran Creek campsite, grateful to be back on the  shoreline. A large lagoon and expanse of beach.  Many people here, but no crowding.  Cloudless skies.  Swim in big lagoon under an outcrop gripped by a large spruce growing vertically from under its overhang.

The sea here warmer than at Thrasher Cove.  Peter swims in it and rests.

Fog and cloud gone.  Wide ocean vistas, Cape Flattery in Washington to the South.  A constant parade of container ships entering Juan de Fuca Straight bound for Vancouver and Seattle and China.  Here’s where our camping gear enters the country on its way to REI and MEC.  Steve says they carry Treasury Bills back. Paul and Peter work with neighboring Swiss couple to string our bear caches up in a tree.

Steve cooks excellent Pad Thai, complemented by Chanterelles found on the trail.

Sleep under the stars.  Sunset and moonlight on water.

[Full set of 196 pictures, slideshow and all sizes]

First two hours this morning were brutal.  Climbing over house-sized, sharp, slippery boulders and huge piles of logs with heavy packs.

Steve fell twice.  I watched him go down and get back up.  Each could have been the end of his trip, adding to this summer’s 62 evacuations.

Paul, eager and strong, always in the lead.

I enjoy approaching my limit.  Pain, sweat, fatigue, and breathing hard focus the mind on here and now.

Scenery gains beauty as we approach sea stacks on the point.  Once around it, the beach flattens, the broken granite and basalt now blanketed with a wide sandstone shelf. We enter a dark network of softly sculptured channels that reflect rainbow-colored bands of algae growing on walls supporting the ancient forest above.  Views are framed by sculpted arches and windows opening inward on a labyrinth of caves and outward on offshore islands covered with the rounded bodies of basking sea lions.

We put down packs and wander through this wonderland, then sit and munch crackers and salami.  Two young women I’d greeted at Thrasher Cover come round the point carrying packs larger than ours. We share relief at the change in topography and excitement at the splendor of the caves. They set down packs and the blond removes her sweater revealing a nicely rounded belly.

A walk on the flat beach, skirting the surge channels impassable at any but low tides and then back up to the bush trail with more steepness, ladders, wooden walkways.

The history of the trail as a rescue route for shipwrecked mariners is evidenced in telegraph wire insulators embedded in tree bark.

A few old logging sites are marked by “derelict donkey” and cable.

We stop at Camper Bay, appropriately named since its every inch of beach and forest margin is packed with tents, despite the strictly limited number of permits issued.  One of the two compost toilets is filled to capacity and despite our fatigue and the beauty of the location, we’re grossed out by the smell and the traffic.  Everyone who has come here for wilderness and solitude shares the same distaste, but it’s overcome by affability.  We schmooze with the two young women, who hail from Ontario, a couple from Saskatoon who’ve taken the hike seven times before with their six children and who sit by their campfire drinking tea out of china cups and saucers they packed in, and members of an all female guided group of civil servants from Victoria.  I swim in the clear water of the lagoon created by a rock dam of the creek along the beach, and Paul cooks supper of beans, rice and bacon bits.  Afterwards I find quiet around the point now exposed by low tide.

[Full set of 196 pictures, slideshow and all sizes]

The trip concluded a long summer holiday which involved Jan and my driving from San Luis Obispo to Knoll House in Lund B.C., spending ten days there with children and grandchildren, driving to Eastern Oregon for the wedding of a relative, driving to Portland, from where Jan and the dog flew back to San Luis in time for her City Council meeting, and my driving from Portland to Port Angeles, where I left the car and ferried to Victoria to meet Peter on the way to the trailhead.

August 9 Heart of the Hills Campground, Olympic National Park WA

Inside a cloud, dark and grey under the old-growth spruces and cedars. The campground quiet and underpopulated.

A family pulls up to the neighboring campsite: 2 parents, black and white, and their five-year old boy.  His high, loud voice echoes in the forest stillness.  His parents are patient, loving, full of instruction and rule.

I used my senior passport to get in free and pay only 6$ to camp. Sinus pressure and cough just returned. Will I need more antibiotics before the hike?

I repack my backpack for the third time on the picnic table, always subtracting. I’m worried about the weight.

August 10

Awake at 6 AM, no sign of illness. But the threat remains, increasing desire to keep trying limits while I can.  I’ll see what the weight is like on a trail this morning.

Two and a half hours later I return, glad to set the pack down, but not exhausted or in pain.  No Aleve needed now for the knees. The trekking poles work wonderfully—absorbing shock and adding forward momentum, allowing  me to walk like a quadruped.

More sorting and packing: what goes in the hike pack, what in the Victoria pack, what stays in the car. In my journalette, I map what’s where in the pack. I’ll look up those locations instead of searching for things.  Mindfulness.  I’m reading “Buddha’s Brain.”  I practise on the trail: attention to breathing, movement of feet, the quiet.

Why do this? Expend the time and money, take on the preparation, discomfort, and risks?  To encounter simple necessity, to escape family and state, to find friendship and solitude, to return with pictures and words.  For adventure, a venture, face the unknown, experience engagement, not detachment.  Jan prefers different ventures: running for mayor, facing opponents, managing organizations.

August 11

Peter picks me up at 6:00 A.M. in front of Ann’s house, where I crashed after ferrying by foot from Port Angeles.  I feel royally accommodated. At Port Renfrew we eat a big breakfast at fisherman’s restaurant and drive to the trail information center located on an Indian Reserve strewn with garbage and half-wrecked houses. The mandatory orientation lecture a fast paced forty minute Powerpoint detailing dangers and challenges to a room full of people who’ve succeeded in getting one of a limited number of reservations, eager to get going.

A tiny ferry ride, then five and a half hours walk through dappled first-growth forest, steep verticals, the rough trail made somewhat easier by long ladders leading into and out of deep gullies gouging impassable headlands.

It’s the shakedown experience alternating between challenge and ordeal. I’m bathed in sweat and drink 3 litres of water.

The last section descends 200 rungs to the beach at Thrasher Cove, where we share the campsite with about 30 others.  I cook quinoa and lentil curry and chocolate pudding from Trader Joes for appreciative mouths, lightening my pack 4 lbs.

[Full set of 196 pictures, slideshow and all sizes]

At the 2009 ASLE Conference in Victoria B.C. the plenary speaker at the final banquet, Ruth Ozeki, suggested that members of the Association make room for the practise of contemplative meditation in their activities of meeting, writing and teaching.  Ozeki is the author of two influential novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003), which dramatized issues of industrial agriculture, animal welfare, genetically engineered crops, and malnutrition which have taken center stage in recent discussions about sustainability and the food system.

Lately, in essays and poems and in her role as editor of Everydayzen.org, the website of her mentor Norman Fischer, Ozeki has been promoting the practice of Zen meditation. From June 5-9 Ozeki and her colleague Kate McCandless, a poet and ordained Zen priest, conducted a workshop on writing and meditation at the Hollyhock Learning Center that provided compelling support for the value of adding contemplative practice to the mix of analytic, creative, scientific, political and recreational activities associated with Literature and the Environment.

The setting was appropriate.  Hollyhock is located in a spectacular wilderness on the coast of remote Cortes Island in the Straight of Georgia, within view of peaks and glaciers on Vancouver Island and the mainland Coast Range. The island’s sparse population includes indigenous peoples, loggers and fishermen, hippies, artists, and environmental activists, including Ozeki and her husband.  The site was originally developed during the 1970’s as Cold Mountain Institute by Richard Weaver and served as a gathering place for Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, Alan Ginsberg, r.d. laing, among others.  The facility was sold to a consortium of artists and activists in the 1980’s and since then has developed as a model of local organic food production and home-built sustainable architecture offering hundreds of educational and outdoor recreational programs to the public.

The five-day workshop featured guided meditations directing attention to posture and breathing, to the impressions on the five senses, to memories of childhood, to the four elements shared by the body and the natural world, to the consciousness of emotions and to empathy with others.  Emphasizing the complementary aspects of sitting and writing, each of the meditation exercises was coupled with prompts and time for composing, presenting and listening to others’ work. The many opportunities for exploration—kayaking, a boat trip to a world heritage bird sanctuary, hiking the inland trails—were forsaken in favor of the contemplative practices, which were however heightened by the surrounding presence of forest, sea and sky and to which connection was intensified by silence and concentration.

The workshop reinforced the importance of frequently ignored components of the ecoliterary tradition: the pastoral of solitude and the pastoral of contemplation celebrated in  Chinese and Japanese nature writing as well as by European and American authors like Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau. It led participants to the place in Andrew Marvell’s Garden where

the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
…
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

With winks of shade and light the slovenly bush
From off the beaten path calls me to turn
I stomp on brittle twigs and logs of mush
I stroke slow swaying fronds of unfurled fern.

Up and down the dance of feed and kill
To music of the robin, jay and gnat
Warble, squawk and buzz. Then all is still
Till shattered by woodpeckers’ rattatat.

Summoned to return, as from a dream
My offering left: a sparkling golden stream.

Before breakfast I call Jan to hear news and report in.  She says, “you went for that workshop like an arrow to a target.”

The theme of the morning session is awakening the senses. Kate guides the group meditation.  “Move your attention now from posture and breathing to sound: sounds of the body, the room, the outdoors, the silence surrounding the outdoors, and then back step-by-step to the body.”  Then we write:

Breathing quiet after settling, throb of heartbeat in the temples, the room silent, distant woodpecker rattles outside, then speakers on inside my head: a buzz, like soft, high pitched crickets, steady current, ringing.  Spare me from tinnitus.

Kate says that the senses are the gates to awakening and being present; meditation is about awakening, being present.  We can train ourselves to extend that presence and awareness to the rest of the world.

Ruth says that the sense gates are the interpenetration of the self and the world.  Breathing involves taking in and putting out to the world; so does writing.  Open the sense gates; ground yourself. Move from meditation into writing; when you’re confused or tight while writing, move back into meditation.  Sound is essential to writing. Read what you write aloud to make sure it works. Sound bridges the gap between what I think I said and what I really said.

I’m stirred by the teacher’s presence, flickering between girl and wise woman.

The next exercise: let the memory of a sound be the trigger of what you write. Make a list of sounds, choose the most vivid, try to recall it, its beginning, middle and end, the effect on your heart rate. My list: chanting on acid in 1970, her cry, “So Strong,” Appleton Creek Waterfalls, chainsaw and falling tree. The writing:

He pulled the ripcord on the old Homelite. It sputtered and fizzled.  Once again, this time harder, still nothing.  “Flooded,” he said the to the child from the city who wanted to help with firewood.  He pushed back the choke and waited. Then he yanked again. Now the roar filled his ears with pleasure: the fury of a lion he held in submission with bare hands.

Not enough time to tell the rest of the story: his directing her to take the weight off a branch he was sawing from below, the bar lifting as the branch fell, the moving chain touching her soft forearm, the scar still there.

Ruth lectures now from a three-hole binder with typed notes for each session separated by dividers. “If you get bogged down or bored with where the writing is going, stage an intervention.  Say ‘What I really want to say is…’.”  Not my problem, I just want to get back to the writing.  She moves on to an explanation of synaesthesia, a way to make sensations sound fresher and reads us a poem by Donald Lawler, “With Amy, Listening to the forest.”  Very appropriate, but I’m thinking about how to convert my little four elements project into a sonnet.  Her talk is interrupted several times by the noise of a rat rapping in the wall.  I feel unsettled by the sense that she is struggling to stay in character, no longer priestess but vulnerable colleague.  This frees me from a thrall but heightens my empathy.  I recall the flush of fatherly love I experienced for her two novels’ pained protagonists.

The next exercise is to go back outdoors and this time write in situ. I’m relieved. My own immediate task is to plausibly describe the growing ends of cedar branches, the destination of water sucked up from roots in the ground. There’s a large boulder just outside Kiakum surrounded by saplings. I scramble up it and find what I’m looking for, “tough top tips.” I sit on the rock and start arranging the sentences on my yellow pad into quatrains, discarding material, redoing lines from the rhyme end backward.

The hours after lunch are unscheduled. I walk to the Sanctuary back behind the orchard.

[picture credit]

From the outside it looks like an awkwardly designed set for a hobbit house, but the interior space feels sacred.  The thick walls are contoured white plaster, the window frames and beams irregular unmilled wood. The light descends from a transparent cupola at the top of a dome that’s both circular and tilted, creating two focal points–one at the center, the other at an altar extending from the perimeter wall, above which a small window opens on dense forest.  I’m here alone.  A dozen round pillows and mats are arranged in a circle on the carpeted stone floor.  I sit on one for half an hour. This is how it’s supposed to feel.

I walk back through the blooming orchard to the library in the lodge and grapple with the sonnet.  By three p.m. it’s finished, the couplet almost writing itself, and in the last minute, an epigram popping out of nowhere.  A voice inside says “These could be published!”  With beating heart, I walk downstairs and see Ruth in the dining room still in a consult with another workshop member. I imagine she must by now really need a break. Nevertheless I wait until she heads back to her quarters and thrust the yellow pad in her way.  She reads the poem and asks me for a copy to post on the workshop website she’s in the process of assembling.  Placing my arm around her shoulder, I declare “You’re my inspiration.” She makes her escape, and as I walk down the path to the shore, I’m stopped by the fragrance of wild roses.

I could paddle back to Lund now, I tell myself, trophies in hand.  As a reward, I’ll break my five-day computer fast.  In the basement of the lodge is an ugly cinderblock cubicle known as the Chat Room.  It’s equipped with a few older machines and high speed internet. When I enter, a woman on one of them asks for my help.  She can’t download a Word document that she tells me contains some divorce papers that she came here to try to get away from.  After I succeed she strokes my arm. I log in to my blog’s posting page and copy out the sonnet, but when I press “publish,” the machine crashes.

I arrive early in Kiakum for our workshop and find Ruth and Kate conferring about their presentation at the upcoming evening program that’s been advertised all over the island. The session begins with reading the products of our afternoon’s labors. The response to my sonnet is muted. The topic moves to publication strategies. Ruth says that blogging is easy to do and a good idea, and that these days self-publishing in hard copy with a company like Lulu or Trafford no longer has the stigma it used to.  She reads “Berryman,” a tribute to the suicidal alcoholic poet written by his healthy disciple W.S. Merwin.

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips …

I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write.

After dinner, Kiakum fills with “Islanders,” the residents of Cortes. Some settled here when we did in Lund, during the late sixties and early seventies. Others are later immigrants of succeeding generations. A number are Hollyhock staff.  They seem like invaders to the space we’ve claimed for two days, but of course we are the outsiders and Ruth is more theirs than ours—a celebrity member of a remote community of artists, environmental activists, and back-to-the-landers, akin to the one I belong to peripherally over on the mainland.

Ruth appears energized by the crowd that packs the room. She and Kate are introduced by Dana along with the editor of the island’s arts and ecology magazine, Howl, who thanks her for contributing a poem headlined in the current issue. They explain the format of our workshop and lead everyone in a meditation. Dressed in her monk’s robe, Kate reads some of her own poems—reminiscences of an alienated childhood in New Jersey and elegies for a lost sister—and Ruth presents a section of her powerful essay on Writing and Death that I’d read twice before arriving.  The audience is invited to participate in a writing exercise of the kind that we’ve been doing, and most people seem deeply engaged, but I’m pleased that my appointed partner wants to talk about kayaking instead.