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Excerpts
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Image: Art, Faith, Mystery
Issue #38. Spring 2003
Short Essay
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A Voice In the Wilderness
I write about the virtues of working in
isolation because I must. In a few weeks, I will pack up
house and children and make the flight out to our distant
island. I will always long for community in this place, and
in my winter island home as well, and will read journals and
join conferences and workshops whenever possible, but I am
reconciled to the boundaries set around me. I am learning
not to fear isolation and need. Indeed, as a writer, I am
fed by the tensions that define my life. Perhaps these are
the same tensions that define the lives of believers
everywhere-who stand every day with their two feet in
oppositional worlds.
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Messages Worth the Waiting
Three
years ago, a bush plane circled and swooped, landing on the
beach at our Alaskan fish camp. A man stepped out, toolbox
in hand, and set us to work. Together, over the next day and
night, he helped us anchor an antenna on our corrugated
aluminum roof, wire the linkage box, connect a mass of
coiling wires to outlets and extension cords, alter the
settings, re-adjust the antenna, until the magic moment: he
hit the key, the light went green and it was Go.
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The
Atlantic Monthly
(audio recording) |
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Our First Telephone
Click
Here to
Listen |
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Surprise Child
Four years ago I walked into the
bathroom, hand clenched around a white cellophane-wrapped stick. Three
minutes later the bathroom door opened, and my face was white. In a tiny centimetered window no bigger than my fingernail a faint line slowly
emerged, then solidified. It was the face of another human being—one I had
not asked for. Surely my life was over.
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Out On The Deep Blue
This morning, before I leave our loft for breakfast, I do
not check the calendar. I know what day it is: July 26–put-out day. This is
the day we load our nets from the mending racks on the beach and drop them
back into the water. I am grim. I have done this four times by now in this,
my first season, which makes me still a nervous greenhorn, since Duncan, his
two brothers and his father have been fishing for more than twenty years,
yet I know exactly what will happen in the day and night ahead.
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Surviving the Island of
Grace
We are going
hunting today. It is early, just light, the fog
still threads the air,
lisping over the calm waters. It is hard to get up, and the
two of us, my husband, Duncan, and I briefly reconsider,
knowing we could go tomorrow or the next day or the next,
but this morning is calm, and we will need meat soon.
There’s not much preparation, just dress warmly, pull on hip
boots and life jackets over our coats, check the gas tank,
get the rifle, pull the skiff in, start the engine, and we
will be hunting. It is hunting mostly in the sense of
looking very carefully as we parallel the shoreline, eyes
skinning the beach for the stray deer or two who have
wandered down to munch on kelp and sea-greens. Or sometimes
we will see whole herds, huge bachelor packs of thirty to
seventy that rove the long beaches, ganglike, moving from
island to lagoon to the mainland over to the other side of
the bay.
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The Entangling Net |
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The Water Under Fish |
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