“Carey,” he said. “We didn’t meet properly yesterday.”
“Lucie,” I said. His fingertips were cold, but I felt an urge to hold on to his hand. Tethered to him for that moment, my insides calmed, steadied by another body.
“You’re a park ranger?” I asked as I let go of him, hoping he hadn’t noticed my hesitation, the way my hand fell to the bench between us, bracing.
“Yeah,” he said. “What about you?”
“Journalist,” I answered, watching his expression. He seemed undeterred, which wasn’t always the case with government employees. “I write about the environment.”
He nodded. “What are you doing out here?”
“An old friend lives out here, at Marrow Colony,” I said. “Have you heard of it?”
“It’s a farm collective or something like that, right?”
“Something like that — we’ll see. This is my first time.”
“Strange place for a farm — given the history. I suppose the land came pretty cheap…?” He trailed off. He seemed to expect me to fill in the blanks.
“I guess so.” I shrugged, but I was thinking about it myself. How the Colony had ended up on Marrow, and how they had managed to live on the island for so long, after the devastation that occurred there.
Orwell was getting smaller and smaller in the wake behind us. My eyes started to tear up from the early morning chill, my cheeks and ears burning. I was wearing a wool sweater under my life jacket, and under my jeans and cotton T-shirt, an old pair of silk long underwear that had belonged to my mother. She had loaned me the long underwear for a camping trip in high school, and I had kept them, remembering how she used to wash them by hand and hang them to dry in our little bathroom on Orwell.
Coombs hollered something over his shoulder, but I couldn’t hear. Carey went to have a word and came back. He sat down and leaned down, closer to my ear.
“He said it might be rough ahead. Almost there.”
The swells hit. I felt it in my lungs first, in the cavity of my chest. A sudden vacancy, then a swift welling up. Empty, then full. Brimming. I broke a sweat and my vision perforated into thousands of pricks of colorful light, like pixels. I managed to turn and lean as far over the edge of the boat as I could to throw up. We hit another swell and I lurched forward. I felt Carey’s hands on my waist, holding me in the boat while I puked.
When I was empty and the worst passed, Carey helped me back to my seat and put his coat around me. He poured me more tea from Coombs’s thermos. Then he sat right up next to me and started talking, like a voluble stranger at a bar.
He was new to Washington, he told me. He had been in Montana before, at Glacier. I leaned over with my elbows on my knees, and he did the same, so that I could hear his voice, right next to me, over the motor. I sipped my tea and listened, tried to concentrate on what he was talking about: wildland firefighting, forestry school, working for the government. Chris Lelehalt had deputized him that day at the clerk’s office; most park rangers are deputized; many carried firearms.
“But not out here,” he said. “People love their public lands here. No anti-government fanatics shooting at rangers, setting tripwires and spikes on service roads.”
The state wanted to reopen Fort Union State Park, he told me, on the other side of the island from the Colony. I nodded that I knew where it was; Katie and I had gone to summer camp there. It was a decommissioned military base and historic site from the Pig War in the 1850s; the campers had all slept in the old barracks.
“How much do you know about what happened here?” I gestured to the ruins of the ArPac Refinery. We were coming up close to it. The docks were wasted; the charred, weathered cement of the remaining walls and smokestacks looked like a monument to something — a terrible war, maybe, something violent and manmade — not an earthquake. There were plants growing out of them now, taking root in the cracks, in the dust. I looked back to Carey.
“I know a lot about the disaster itself,” he said, “but not about what’s happened to the island in the last twenty years. That’s the reason I’m here.”
“Me, too,” I said. We looked at each other. I felt calmer. It felt uncomplicated, admitting it to him.
The boat had ripped past the ruins of the refinery at the southeast edge of the island, pulled north-northwest around a forested ridge where the Colony’s dock in the rocky harbor finally came into view. Coombs hollered back that he had radioed ahead to the Colony. He brought them mail and supplies when he was coming their way. There would be someone there to meet us.
We were seniors in college the last time we saw each other, but I knew the woman standing on the dock was Katie. I wiped my eyes and blinked into the wind to watch her getting closer, becoming real to me again. She was tall, taller than I was by two inches, slender, but with broad shoulders and long arms, a narrow neck, like a goose. She had never been graceful but had always seemed at ease with her body, confident and deliberate in her movements. She stood at the end of the dock, hands in her pockets, perfectly still, watching our approach. Or at least she looked serenely in our direction; maybe she was looking past us, over the water, to the islands, to the mainland. Her dark curly hair squiggled out from under a knit cap. She wore knee-high rubber boots with jeans tucked into them and a thick canvas jacket over a long wool sweater.
Behind her, small wooden houses were tucked into the hillside above the harbor, the occasional rounded roof of a yurt in the trees, almost camouflaged, and closer, at the pinnacle of the first rise above the dock, the pale weathered chapel with its steeple rising like a treetop. Against the landscape, Katie looked like an icon, a modern saint: she was beautiful and austere; she owned the landscape. I was almost terrified of her.
Carey and I looked to the shore silently as the boat neared the dock. He would disembark there and hike up to Fort Union and the old guard station. The park and the Colony were so close, the only signs of human intervention on the north side of Marrow, separated by a single paved road that ran down the center of the island.
There had once been a few residents — homesteaders, fishermen — and summer inhabitants of the rustic, roughing-it variety. Unmarked gravel and dirt roads passed between houses here and there. Some had private docks; others used the harbor near the chapel as moorage. The chapel dated back to the 1840s, to the Catholic missions. A village and trading post had sprung up near the chapel, for the white settlers, with a one-room schoolhouse for the settlers’ children and baptized children of the nearby Coast Salish tribes. My grandmother’s parents met at the schooclass="underline" a Lummi girl and an Irish boy who married when he was eighteen and she was sixteen. The schoolhouse was long gone, along with most of the other original buildings, in ruins or torn down by the 1920s and ’30s, replaced gradually by vacation cottages and rustic cabins. There had been a house or two on the western slope of the island, south of Fort Union, northwest of the refinery, but they were destroyed by a landslide after the quake. What was left of the makeshift village near the chapel to the northeast was now Marrow Colony.
After so many years, I didn’t know what to expect from Marrow. The refinery fire had burned for days, and its smoking ruins were all we could see from our shores. The communities on all the islands had been affected by the quake, but the petroleum and the flame retardants and oil-dispersing chemicals had toxified Marrow’s groundwater, its soil. Everyone living on the island had come to Orwell or gone to one of the other islands. There had been efforts at cleanup, then settlements with property owners, but when we moved away the following winter, Marrow Island had been abandoned.