It is pleasant to embark on a voyage, if only for a short excursion, the boat to be your home for the day, especially if it is neat and dry. A sort of moving studio it becomes, you can carry so many things with you. It is almost as if you put oars out at your windows and moved your house along. Thoreau, Journal, 8/31/52
Here: sunrise – 6:28 a.m.; sunset – 6:34 p.m. A few days away, light’s six-month reign will give way to night’s rise.
Getting there on another such day.
Floatation off the north end of Birch Island – languid, sun-on sentences punctuated by falling acorns, some of which land with a plop in the water, while others rattle the leaves, and a few pinball among the branches, making hollow comment. On the way here, I have seen nuts afloat, colonizers headed for some far shore, whole paragraphs of leaves bundled in little darkness.
A lightest breeze riffles the water, and it pushes my boat into the shore grass, which scrapes and sighs along its sides. We – my boat and I – lodge there, 6 inches above the mud, and the sun catches in the southside folds of my shirt; my northside cools. It is, except for the arrhythmic marimba of the acorns, utterly quiet. Except also, now that I am so still, or still so, for the tiny splashes of two-inch-long fish that hurry and leap around me. It could be celebration of this day, but it is not – a larger splash tells me a larger fish is fishing these shallows. Getting on with it.
Later, halfway up in a pine, I see a single white egret…mid-migration? just setting out? Once, in the same season, we saw 16 egrets in the same white pine; they looked like the flung towels of some giant, maybe summer, who had stalked off after bathing in the bay.
Empty, mostly, these islands…though from White an eagle lumps into the air, pretends to soar, lumps his wings some more, feigns a dive and turns back to his tree. So much, he seems to say, for all this work at motion; I’ll wait for something still to float by. Which I do.
It is that sort of day.
Green water, white rock – floatation.