Friday, August 22, 2008

Orcas Island: The Last Day

Our last day on the island… We hung around the bungalow for a good part of the morning, much as we did yesterday. Gave George a much-needed bath.


I wrote the next episode of Travels with George and got it posted, with pictures; then spent a while with Barack Obama. More on his book at a later date. In the meanwhile, Ellie busier herself once again with her chalk pastels, fully absorbed for a good two hours in the creation of another masterpiece. No, joking aside, she has a really good eye for composition and a great sense of color—the result of many years looking at art made by others. A neophyte, herself, in the making of it, she brings all that experience with her, so that even her earliest efforts are remarkably good.

Time, now, to get ourselves ready to leave. We had some laundry to do, so we headed for the laundromat at the nearby gas station complex, and ventured into the new territory of card-operated machines—with plenty of help from our more experienced neighbors. Whilst we were waiting outside with our books, clean George attracted the attention of a man who had arrived to deliver cases of wine to the wine shop next door to the laundromat—an encounter that result in the gift of a nice bottle of wine. Thanks, George! I slipped into the store while the clothes were drying, and added a couple of other bottles to our collection.

Back at the bungalow, we began the process of reorganizing and packing all our gear—no small task, but one which we got finished with time to spare for a last drive in to East Sound for a few essentials, a taco for lunch, and a stroll around the town. Stopped to admired one of the many vegetable gardens...



and an apple tree....



Otherwise, not a great deal of excitement to report…

We had booked an early table at the Ship Bay Inn—supposedly the best restaurant on the island. And what a view!





We enjoyed an excellent, leisurely dinner, sharing a gravlox salad appetizer, a pork chop with a somewhat scant portion of vegetables, and a truly delicious nectarine tart with vanilla bean ice cream. The food, though, was trumped by the sight of a brood of young bald eagles practicing their flight skills right outside the restaurant window. (Sorry, no pictures of the eaglets: our table was poorly placed for playing the photographer during dinner. But here's their playground...)


The women at the adjacent table, closer to the window, pointed out the parent, perched atop a nearby pine tree and patiently supervising the efforts of her young. The performance continued for the entire dinner hour, almost as though staged for the exclusive entertainment of the restaurant patrons—all of whom seemed as fascinated by the experience as we were. It’s always gratifying, to me, to see how humans respond to creatures of the wild. We are so urbanized, these days, that such sights come to seem extraordinary, magical.

There is something magical, I have always believed, about islands. At one time, during my academic career, that I thought about a book-length study of islands in the history of literature, and their metaphorical associations. It never got written, of course. Those were days of “publish or perish,” and I perished anyway—despite the books of poetry I had published. I still think it’s a wonderful idea—for someone else, someone with fresher literary credentials than my own. My peculiar attachment is rooted, surely, in my own island origins: being surrounded by water brings with it a certain feeling of safety and protection—during my own lifetime, despite his worst efforts and his air assaults, Hitler never managed to breach England’s island defenses during World War II—as well as a certain insularity. And many of my childhood literary delights—Enid Blyton’s “Island of Adventure,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island”—must have contributed to my sense of the special quality of a small piece of land with water on all sides.

Orcas Island, anyway, has a good measure of this magic, and I shall be sad to have to return to the “real world” of the mainland. In some sense, it will seem to me like waking from a dream, and resuming the mantle of the responsible adult who has to drive on the freeway, pay the mortgage and, yes, soon, vote…

After-dinner contentment...


... and home to bed.

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