Words To Live By

Officially off duty from traffic control, the two goats were set out to pasture to chew through their boredom when I rolled past their unoccupied barricade on my motorcycle. They watched unbothered as I breeched the passage between them and the campground below. Rolling down the hill, rocks popped under my tires, while the ocean breeze salted my exposed skin like a poor man’s facial. It was off-season at the campground, and I was the only person who had signed up to spend the night at the bottom of the hill in a tent. I tucked into a space in the corner, protected by a knoll covered in partridgeberry while a grey rocky outcrop stretched along the shore to serve as my rampart against the ocean.

I lit a fire to warm my return and left for a stumble across the rocky barrier in search of anything to help me forget everything going on. This motorcycle trip was an escape, a chance to spend some time alone and make sense of a major lifestyle shift. The storm at home had raged for 3 years and left me unanchored, but here, on this lonely outcrop, a lighthouse stood, signalling that there was always light, even at 3 a.m., when I didn’t want to see it sweep by.

Shallow waterbeds of seaweed and barnacles filled the space between the rocky low points, and in the middle of the slimy tangle of mixed greens, a bottle of wine buoyed on the surface. I thought twice about picking it up. Was it cursed? Someone’s stash? Once you pluck something from the ocean, who knows what you’re dragging with you back to shore.

My curiosity and a long stick reached out for the bottle, and I carried the experiment over to my picnic table to unearth its secret. Whoever packaged this treasure in its protective case was an expert with zip ties, and I was glad my motorcycle kit had plenty so I could later restore it to its original condition.

With each twist of the hesitant corkscrew, my mind leapt around absurd outcomes. What was I hoping to receive from this message in a bottle? Was it a plea from a sailor stranded at sea? A love letter, chain mail, a curse? I unrolled the scroll, and the text revealed typed scriptures, copied and tossed into an infinite ocean six years previously by an American couple. Their salvation message had already been received and returned by five other recipients before me, who responded like a roll call with their name, location and date. I pulled out a pen, hummed a tune, added my name, sealed it and set it aside to release it from another location. My work was complete as the night sky dropped into grey tones, eventually settling into a soft black transparency around me. A blast of cold air crept in with the tide, and I crawled into my tent to drape myself in any wool clothing I had stashed in my bags. All night I shivered awake like an exhausted mummy who hadn’t found sufficient wraps to satisfy my rest.

That first night wasn’t the coldest of the journey, but it set the tone for the rest of the weekend. Evening campfires became an essential part of the trip, while daytime warm-ups meant classic hand hovering over the cylinder heads. I tore down camp earlier than usual the next morning and was struck with the sudden realization that I didn’t have a home to go back to this time around. Camping was instantly and inadvertently transformed from an activity into a lifestyle. Though the pegged accommodations would turn out to be temporary, they altered my perspective on the pleasure of sleeping in a tent. The trip was a brief intermission in life, but also the start of a new one, built again from the ground up. During teardown, one of my tent poles snapped in two, but a stretch of electrical tape held everything together. A minor setback for a short trip, and I found comfort in the view of a world that is always moving forward.

Below me, a lone coastal forager crouched along the rocks, pausing to collect trapped specimens from the tidal pools. Draped in high-vis clothing, he hauled a white bucket for his catch behind him. It was a very Maritime scene, and I took it in with a scalding cup of tea, the extreme warm-up I’d been looking for all night delivered in one swift swig. Directly in front of me, and within running distance of his master, a motionless dog sat like a quizzical statue on the rocks, keeping a keen eye on me as I packed up camp and climbed back over the hill toward the main road.

There was only one way out of this place, the way I had come in, but there was one more lighthouse to inspect before leaving the island. Straight ahead, along a rocky gravel path, I pushed my bike past potholes and bumps and parked in an empty lot. Weathered Adirondack chairs sat beside the lighthouse, and a transparent bag hung from the side of one, holding a notebook. A message instructed visitors to sit and share their thoughts with the former lighthouse keepers by contributing to the book. The pages were ink-smudged, full of scribbles, and swollen from the salty weather, so I opted to say a few thoughts out loud and let the wind carry them wherever they needed to go. Since the lighthouse keepers were deceased, I figured if they were still around in spirit, maybe they were more likely to hear my words than read them.

The traffic leaving the lighthouse was represented by a solitary biker who had stopped in the middle of the road for repairs. I don’t have much mechanical insight to share, but I felt like showing up for support was an easy offer. A hanging backpack strap had twisted into his chain, and he’d managed the hard work of untangling before I arrived. With another person in my party and two heads to tackle future trouble, we set out for the ferry and waited in line. We split a cookie he had brought with him as we watched the first boat fill up and leave us behind. There was nothing to do but wait. Looking ahead at the car in front of us, an arm reached out the rolled-down window and beckoned me forward. I walked toward the invitation and leaned in for a spell.