She trailed off, out of breath, as we crested the hill and met the full view of the bluff and Bone Cove, named for the bleached logs the tide carried in and left scattered over the shore. I set my basket down and stepped closer to the rocky embankment that spilled down to the shore.
“An orca washed up down there that first summer,” Maggie said.
“Washed up — dead?”
“Nearly dead. We couldn’t do anything for it. I got used to dead birds washing up, the fish, the crabs, the sea stars, even seals. But that whale, she did us all in. We had a goddamn funeral for her.”
“That seems reasonable to me. Did you send her back out with the tide or…?”
“Oh, we sent her home.” She patted my back and picked up the baskets. “We hauled her up to the field with a tractor and let her rot. She’s still fertilizing our crops, that one.”
I must have looked dubious, but Maggie just smiled. “Her bones are still up there.”
“Did you ever find any human remains?” I asked. They both stopped short. “Washed ashore or on the island?”
Maggie looked at Katie, then back to me.
“No, we never did,” she said, her smile gone. “I’ll take these on up to the tables.” She hobbled a little as she walked, and I called after her.
“Do you want some help?”
“No thank you. You girls take your time.”
I looked at Katie.
“She never tells me those stories,” she said.
“No?”
“Not often. Must be your gift for getting the scoop.” She raised an eyebrow at me and smiled.
“I don’t know about that.” I leaned into her. “I got fired.”
“What?”
“Laid off, technically, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t do it anymore. Or, I’m not working right now. I’m sort of — adrift, at the moment.”
She didn’t say anything, just watched me sidelong while I stared out at the sea. The sunlight off the water made it look like it was on fire. Pain angled through my eye, and I could feel myself tightening around it. A gust of wind hit me, and I took in a lungful of it, closed my eyes. Arrows of light burned inside my eyelids. I felt Kate taking my hand. My body relaxed, a conditioned response to her that should have been lost years ago. The memory of a younger Katie next to me. The way our sweaty hair stuck together as we huddled under a blanket, the peaked tent it made stretched between our heads and our drawn-up knees. The way I could feel both of our hearts beat through the aftershocks. The way we listened to the waves reaching up and out of the sea. We had heard them all, the cold fists of water pounding the shore. We had counted them under our breaths.
We stood like this for a few silent minutes, and I was sure Katie was there with me — not there on the bluff, but there, under the blanket on our classroom floor.
“Kate.” A man’s voice came from behind us, and she dropped my hand as she turned to answer. Maggie had moved on up the path, and a tall man stood in her place. He was our age, with a patchy red beard and dirty blond hair, face scuffed with dirt from work. Katie met him and they spoke softly, his head bowed to hers. She looked into his eyes and kissed him, then took his arm, leading him my way.
We ate at a long picnic table under the open-air lodge-pole structure that served as both dining hall and outdoor kitchen. There was one straw-bale wall that buffered the prevailing southwesterly winds and protected the cooking and prepping areas. A rain barrel full of potable water, a stainless-steel worktable that looked like it had been lifted from a morgue, with two women working away at peeling potatoes for dinner. The solar ovens, three cubic feet of Mylar and wood that looked like little satellites, were out from under the trees against a whitewashed straw-bale wall that reflected more light back into them. Under cover in the kitchen were three rocket stoves made from repurposed beer kegs. Tucker told me these were fairly new — the kegs donated by a brewery in Friday Harbor — inspired by the prototype of a Scottish guy who had been living off the grid for several years and blogging about it.
“So he’s not completely off the grid,” I said. “If he’s blogging, he must plug in sometimes.”
Tuck and I were sitting across from each other at a long picnic table, bowls of a thick amaranth porridge steaming between us. He was thoughtful, well-spoken, with a sadness in his eyes and a smile that was disarming, like he hadn’t always been handsome or smart or well-spoken but had earned it over time, after years of not giving a damn. He had taken my hand like a vise when Katie introduced us, and I found myself wondering what she had told him about me. The way they all looked at me — curious, not unkind, but not exactly warm — I had the unsettled certainty of someone who knows less about everyone than they know about her.
“It’s not what it used to be, ‘going off the grid,’” Tuck said, setting his spoon back in his bowl. He spoke softly, a languid Pacific coast lilt, with gravel underneath. “Everything’s on the grid. Or under it,” he said, gesturing to the sky. “It’s longitude and latitude. It’s radio waves and cell signals and drones. The grid is us. Everything on the planet touches everything else. There’s no such thing as ‘off the grid.’”
“You’re the one who used the term,” I said. Katie was sitting next to him with her hand on his leg under the table. She didn’t say anything.
“You’re right,” he said, taking a bite and wiping his mouth with a bandanna from his pocket. “I meant something else by it. It means living as far off the industrial food supply chain as possible. Avoiding fossil fuel consumption…” He went on, but I tuned him out. I made eye contact and nodded occasionally, but I didn’t hear what he was saying. I had heard it all before. Even men who should’ve known better — overeducated, progressive types who probably considered themselves feminists — had no compunction explaining things to me. I learned early on to use their inclinations against them when I was reporting. I got the best quotes from men like this; they loved to tell me how it is—whatever the subject was, as if I didn’t live in the world, didn’t do research or even read. They wouldn’t even know they had said something damning until it was in the paper.
Women were different; women told me as much with their silences as their words.
I glanced at Katie; she was devouring a bowl of greens while Tuck made his point. She looked up at him as if she were listening, but her gaze was glassy and distant. Her brow furrowed when she looked into her bowl of kale, like she was divining the leaves, then stabbed and carefully inserted a bushy forkful into her mouth, chewing thoughtfully, thoroughly. Tuck seemed about done, spooned porridge into his mouth.
Folks around us at the table had been listening. I could feel them, tuned to our conversation. I waited for someone to say something, to offer some other thought. A few toward the ends chatted with each other, but those near us kept eating, quietly, watching the two of us. They were watching me, waiting for my response.
“That sounds about right,” I offered. I added a thoughtful nod for good measure.
Tuck leaned back, looked up the table to Maggie. They made eye contact for what seemed like an awkward amount of time.
“You should try these.” Katie passed a bowl of greens across the table to me. “So good this time of year,” she said.
I had finished my amaranth, so I scooped the greens into my bowl. They were wilted and glistening, dressed with something tart and pungent. I passed the bowl to Jen, the woman next to me, thirty-something and covered in tattoos, her short hair almost completely gray. Katie had introduced us and I had liked her instantly.