On Island Read online

  They wanted to avoid being considered a “blow-in,” as her new friend, the Church Warden’s wife, called the Come-From-Away crowd—the part-time islanders who wintered in their RVs in some Arizona mobile home park and returned in the spring sporting their desert tans. Although the couple headed for the sun in January, as did every other island resident with bus fare to escape south, spending two weeks in Kauai at a bed and breakfast a few blocks from the beach.

  She didn’t demur when he suggested opening a shop down by the ferry landing, selling antiquarian and second-hand books, sheet music, local art, and even antiques mined from the furniture shops that littered the Big Island highways.

  But the shop was not a success. He bought a great many books during his forays, but nothing on his shelves seemed to be for sale. He preferred talking to potential customers than marketing his products. The customers, in turn, were not much interested in acquiring the entire collection of Patricia Cornwall murder mysteries or Dick Francis stories.

  With the exception of the odd musician, few people were interested in old sheet music anymore. And well-priced second-hand furniture couldn’t compete with free items from the Recycling Centre across from the medical clinic.

  But the Professor was a great raconteur, with a host of stories from his law practice about human foibles and people’s misbehaviour, and an audience willing to listen. Even the two visiting tax collectors from Ottawa, who were checking out the mystifying failure of island businesses to file annual tax returns, left his shop with a complimentary book on hiking trails but little information on bookshop revenues.

  Fitting in also included participating in the many activities offered by the marine environment. But she couldn’t manage a kayak, given her arthritis, and he was never a fisherman. He was a freshwater boater, accustomed to upcountry lakes and rivers, secretly afraid of the pull and churn of tides. His one attempt to run a second-hand powerboat ended when the ancient engine quit and he had to paddle the unruly sixteen-foot aluminum boat back to the government dock.

  Still in pursuit of outdoor activities, the couple examined the nature walks that threaded the island’s valleys and ridges. When spring rains melted the last vestiges of snow, they decided to tackle one of the easier trails that wound from the gravel road along the creek through flat terrain to the bottom of the waterfall that fell down the mountain from the creek’s source above.

  They parked the car by the roadside, put on their ponchos, picked up their walking sticks and headed down the trail through the ferns and cedars, breathing in the chilled air. It restores our souls, she thought, planting her stick in the weeds that edged the trail. It was a grey day, with the smell of rain.

  The trail grew muddy. Water filled the tire tracks that rutted the path. The Professor swung down the trail, sloshing through the silt in his high rubber boots. Behind him his wife, more modestly shod in rubber slip-ons, stepped on the ridge between the tire tracks, swung her other leg forward, and sank into a sludge-filled pothole. She straddled the trail, her arms stretched sideways for balance, until she retrieved her right leg with a sucking noise and wobbled forward.

  She was desperately afraid she would fall and lie in the mud like a great green slug, unable to pick herself up. There was no sign of her husband, who had disappeared around the corner through the branches. A songbird chirped derisively, stupid, stupid, stupid. She could hear the sound of someone hammering in the valley behind her, probably a volunteer building plant beds in the community garden near the baseball field.

  Would he hear her screams? Above her a woodpecker knocked his brains out on the trunk of a young hemlock. We are doing the same, she thought.

  She staggered through the silt, trying to keep to the higher ground at the edge of the trail, until she turned the corner and encountered her husband, mired in the mud, only the tops of his boots showing above the water. He was immobilized, like a tall fishing heron standing on stalk legs.

  Wordlessly she stuck out her walking stick to give him leverage. He grasped it and she slowly turned him around, pulling his boots out of the silt, towing him back toward her. They slogged their way back to the car in silence.

  They never made it to the waterfall in the woods.

  The Professor retired to his books and Sudoku puzzles. His wife gamely pressed on. She joined an Oyster Walk planned by the Park Guide to search for the mysterious native oyster—with its small, cupped shell instead of the larger, flatter Pacific species Europeans introduced—that the island’s Aboriginal people had harvested in the past.

  The day of the walk was dark and drizzly with a surly sea. The beach revealed one of the lowest tides of the year. But after an hour she abandoned the motley group of tourists in their T-shirts and short pants and flip-flops, stranded on the uneven stones and tidal mud slippery with wet kelp, afraid she would twist her ankle, or worse. Later she learned from the Park Guide that no native oysters were found.

  She skipped the Park’s advertised Activity Day examination of owl pellets, a popular event attracting leggy children who whooped through the forest exploring for clues about what owls ate by poking sticks at their pellets scattered on the forest floor.

  The Berry Bonanza walk was more appetizing. She was beginning to get the hang of a nature lover’s apparel, and arrived wearing sturdy shoes, a floppy green hat, and a rain jacket, with a walking stick in hand and a small notebook and pen stuffed in a pocket.

  As they hiked down the paths away from the Aboriginal middens, the Park Guide shrilled the usual admonition, “Don’t pick the berries—look, but don’t touch,” while she hunted for culprits whose chins were smeared with evidence of consuming the forbidden salal berries and wild blueberries harvested from the abundant bushes lining the path.

  Discouraged, secretly afraid she would never fit in with the ebb and flow of island life, she read the poster on the General Store door announcing a guided walk in the Park for novice birdwatchers. Bravely, she signed up.

  It was a cloudy, sun-spattered morning when the island birdwatchers gathered in the gravel parking lot near the beach at the appointed time.

  The group included the Park Guide, in her official green shorts and khaki shirt and Smoky the Bear hat, the lanky island amateur bird expert, and a gaggle of islanders, dressed in flip-flops and boots and shorts and outdoor gear, cameras swinging from their necks. Some wore headgear as protection against encounters with nettles, scratchy bushes and tree branches. The wife adjusted her floppy hat.

  The island expert scratched his lean legs and gave a short talk on what birds they were likely to see. The Park Guide pulled her Blackberry device from her pocket and played some recorded bird calls they were likely to hear.

  The group moved down the trail, while they discussed what the bird calls in the forest around them sounded like.

  “That one is saying, ‘cheeseburger, cheeseburger,’” said one woman, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. “But I can’t remember its name.”

  A man wearing a Tilley hat loosely fastened below his Adam’s apple announced, “That’s an Olive-sided flycatcher. It is saying, ‘free beer, free beer.’”

  A senior, squinting through his spectacles and leaning on his stick said, “That call sounds like someone hailing a taxi from the curb in town.”

  The wife realized that the only sounds her city-raised colleagues could relate to were urban ones. They rarely heard the melodies sung by birds in the countryside.

  The island expert instructed, “The American robin and the western tanager sound alike. See if you can tell the difference.” The group cocked their collective ears and listened. There was a deep drone. “That’s a Beaver,” said the island expert, pointing to a small float plane skipping like a dragonfly over the water.

  “A bird of sorts,” said the bespectacled senior dryly.

  A house finch trilled from the top of a tree in the parking lot. The Park Guide said the birdwatchers would likely hear the common yellowthroat, and a Wilson’s warbler. What they mostly heard was t
he gargling and gabbing of Canada geese.

  “Sounds like barking dogs penned in a backyard,” said a teenager derisively, who clearly would rather be at the cabin playing video games instead of being dragged outdoors by his parents.

  The group set off single file down the Park’s new gravel path, which replaced the old woodland path down by the water, deemed by the culturally sensitive bureaucrats as located too near the Aboriginal middens for access by the public. The crunch, crunch of hiking boots over the gravel obliterated any bird sounds.

  When they stopped at the sound of a bird call, people tilted their head and adopted the glazed expression of birdwatchers everywhere. They listened for the “teet” of a Pacific-slope flycatcher. Or the trill of a thrush. “The First Nations call the thrush a salmonberry bird because it trills when salmonberries are out,” said the Park Guide as the group approached a marshy area of willows and bulrushes.

  They heard “beet beet.” “Nuthatch,” said one person with a French accent. “It sounds like a truck backing up.” They heard a varied thrush. “Sounds like a cell phone,” said the teenager.

  A blackbird, which could actually be seen in a hawthorn bush beside the path, called cheap, cheap. As different bird calls broke the morning silence the group argued over the source of the sounds. Wilson’s warbler! Chickadee! Robin! In the sky above a vulture with huge V-shaped wings circled the marsh where the group debated amiably among themselves.

  They clanged their way over the metal-meshed boardwalk that edged the marsh. There was a great warbling crescendo of melodious sound. “Warblers,” said the wife, delighted. She never remembered the names of the birds and could never hear anything over the caw of the crows, the barking of the geese.

  “Frogs,” said everybody else. The frogs created a wave of sound that then died away as the watchers stared at the still, stagnant brown waters of the marsh. Birds flitted over the bulrushes. Bees and insects hummed in the marsh like city traffic heard at a distance.

  They returned to the gravel path, covered in needles and fallen leaves, and headed down to the beach, pebbled with stones and oyster shells, at a safe distance from the middens, and listened to the squabbling of the gulls. A heron fished from the point of land that curved into the Gulf. Offshore, a kayak glided by, a limp windsock hanging from a mast rigged in the bow.

  A powerboat zigzagged expertly through the pass between the island and a rocky reef. The driver obviously knew where the hidden rock, which smashed so many island propellers, lay underwater below the clashing currents.

  Pointing to the black birds lined up on the reef, the island expert described the sloppy dives of cormorants. “They stand so straight backed, but when they fly and dive to land on the water, it looks like a disaster is going to happen,” he said.

  Someone kicked at a rock where past visitors had painted graffiti, which was gradually being eroded by the tides. The birdwatchers looked at a black oystercatcher walking along the beach, fishing for food at the tide line. It was a large, black shorebird with a reddish beak and orange feet. “When I see someone walking in town with orange clogs, I say, ‘You are wearing oystercatchers,’” said the woman with the ponytail, smiling.

  The wife sat gratefully on a bench, breathing in the cool, fresh breeze from the sea, and observed the scene before her. The rocks below the bench were robed in seaweed, sequined with barnacles, tasseled with kelp bulbs floating on the silky sea.

  The urban touchstones of a walk in the wilderness, she thought, rising from the bench and joining the group headed for breakfast and coffee at the island’s café.

  She was fitting in with the best of them. Maybe she might become an islander herself. One day.

  PRIESTS AND PAGANS

  THE CHURCH WARDEN NOTICED THE church sign was missing when he was on his weekly mouse patrol. The sign stood on the church grounds at the juncture of the island’s two main gravel roads. It proclaimed the church to be Anglican, but there was no other church on island, so it was known simply as the Church.

  Now the sign was missing. The wooden stand that framed it stood empty, the chains swinging aimlessly in the sea breeze. Kids, thought the Warden. Damn island kids again, not enough to do except vandalize private property.

  The Church Warden was a large man, with the complacent countenance of a cream-fed cat, and he took his duties seriously. A retired forestry engineer, he favoured long-term solutions, consistent with his experience in planning logging roads for forests that would be harvested years later.

  He normally wore khaki pants and shirts from the Three Vets Army Surplus Store and selected his shoes from the Free Store at the Recycling Centre, snaring a spiffy set of oxfords when the local doctor died. On Remembrance Day and other special occasions, he wore a white shirt, a navy blazer, and slacks that he believed to be grey but were actually a greenish tint; he was colour blind.

  His only real vice was a fondness for Copenhagen chewing tobacco, common in his time among men who couldn’t smoke on the job in the woods, as he told his wife when she complained about the plugs of tobacco she found in the bathroom sink.

  He whacked his cane at the blackberry bushes surrounding the church, looking for the sign. The church itself was built by island pioneers with money scrimped from the Mission Fund, designed to bring religion to the pagans in some foreign land. The island was neither foreign nor pagan, but it was as far from the Mainland as one could be without sailing into American waters half a nautical mile offshore.

  The church was built in the form of an upside-down boat. The pioneer builders didn’t know how to build a church, but they knew how to build a fishboat. The handcrafted arches that supported the roof were similar to the ribs cradling a ship’s hull. It was named after the patron saint of sailors and those who travel by water.

  The islanders had an ambiguous relationship with the church, which was available to all for weddings, funerals, and all-too-occasional baptisms. People who rarely attended services mowed the lawn, cleaned the gutters, replaced the splintered doors, and planted the maple tree in the sunlit clearing in the surrounding forest. The local quilting circle contributed the quilts for the altar.

  Islanders sporadically patronized the Fair Trade shop, which the Altar Guild ladies operated in the church basement, where one could buy bamboo salad bowls from Vietnam and colourful African dolls. A cupboard housed a jar of instant coffee, teabags, sugar cubes and creamers, some cups, and an electric kettle for the use of various groups, including local members of Alcoholics Anonymous, and a social justice group that gathered occasionally to discuss spousal abuse and violence against women and valued the anonymity of the shop in an island community of snoops and gossips.

  When a new organ was needed, the music fund was oversubscribed by islanders who enjoyed the Christmas carol services. And when the community choir, which sometimes rehearsed in the building, needed a piano, the church’s music director found one on Craigslist and had it trucked to the island and tuned.

  The church scheduled Holy Communion services twice a month, but in fact it accommodated a variety of religious practices. The retired United Church minister held regular meditation sessions, attended by the local Buddhist. An American theologian who was a part-time resident held occasional interdenominational services, lecturing on popular subjects like “Sin and Scriptures” and “Who Wrote the Bible?” A mildly evangelical pastor held joyful services with songs and prayers and candles.

  Not everyone felt comfortable in the wooden pews circled below the large red glass cross, however. Quaker services scheduled for the church were later moved to the plainly decorated Community Hall.

  The church sign, decorated with a ship’s bell from a sunken American naval ship, proclaimed ALL ARE WELCOME. Who would take issue with that? Obviously someone did, muttered the Warden as he attacked the blackberry bushes.

  The assault on the blackberry bushes did not produce any sign. He checked under the porch where the Christmas Nativity scene figures were stored, but his search did not bea
r fruit. He made a note to call the priest, who resided on another island, and resumed his mouse patrol in the Fair Trade shop in the church basement.

  The Church Warden was a confirmed and communicant Anglican, who studied his catechism and ate the wafer and sipped the wine from the cup at Holy Communion services. He had the irritating habit of chanting the prayers slightly in advance of his fellow worshipers. “Our Father who art in Heaven” . . .

  “In Heaven . . . ,” murmured the others.

  “Hallowed be Thy Name . . .”

  “Thy Name . . . ,” echoed the others.

  At least it irritated the priest.

  When first appointed to his post by the Bishop, the Church Warden unearthed copies of the Canon Law from the diocesan archives, which set out the responsibilities assigned Church Wardens since the sixteenth century. The main duties listed were to support the priest and control the vermin.

  He did his best for the priest but pursued the latter assignment religiously, baiting mousetraps with peanut butter and setting them out on the worn linoleum floor in the church basement each Sunday night, returning to dispose of the dead mice before the Altar Guild ladies turned up on Wednesday to plug in their ancient electric kettle and make their tea.

  Returning home after his fruitless search, the Church Warden discussed the sign’s mysterious disappearance with his wife, an angular woman with anxious eyes whom he met and married in a mid-coast logging community where she taught elementary school students. Secretly the Warden’s wife was relieved; she did not care for the church sign, which had been finished with an orange-tinted varnish, giving it a Halloween-like aspect.

  He then phoned the priest, who sounded uninterested and vague. The priest did not allow such earthly matters to distract him from his main interest, the study of scripture. He once told the Warden’s wife that he read philosophy at university and turned to the church because it was the only profession that paid him to read. He was currently absorbed in the study of the Gospel of John.