Pleasure Island

I bailed the stern of the Speedwagon with a milk carton cut in half, felt the bounce of hull against the dock, the black tie ropes keeping the boat from drifting off. I’d come down early, ahead of my two companions, to get the boat ready for our outing.

It had been a few weeks since I last came down to the marina where I kept my 12’ aluminum. I live on an island about the size of Manhattan, in the middle of the Salish Sea, and though to urbanites it might seem a short drive from my home to the pier, island geography stretches distances in interesting ways, and it felt like a very different place here. A place to visit, somehow separate from the other half.

I thought about the Japanese family that had once owned this marina. No trace now, not since World War II, when the Dominion of Canada had cleared the coast of all the Japanese immigrants and their families, in the name of security. The Dominion has always reserved the right to do to the unthinkable once they declare an emergency. Call in the enforcers. Set up camps. Deliver evictions, gather fishing boats as if they were toys, to be sold to help finance the whole operation.

Such are the black thoughts that constantly companioned me those pandemic days, and I was glad to escape the Dominion for a night. My two chums appeared further down the dock. I’d invited them to spend an evening offshore with me, in celebration of the summer, and out of my admiration and appreciation for both of them.

My dog assistant greeted my friends as they hopped in, with a sniff and a wag and an invitation to touch. The engine purred to life, that sweet auto-start four-stroke that was worth way more than the boat itself, a Yammie 9.9, my first boat engine. 

We made our way out among the collection of small islets, touring this part of the archipelago. We headed to Pleasure Island, a hump of rock and grass that you could circumference in less than 5 minutes on foot. A freer place. 

On our way, we saw seals lounging on a flat rock that had almost succumbed to the high tide, among the highest of the year, from the August full moon that would ripen later that evening. We watched from a distance with our binoculars. I imagined the spray hitting their flippers, admired the lolling, barking, canine hedonism of their seal-ness. 

I killed the engine 20 feet out of our destination, cautious of the rocks around the island, and paddled the rest of the way. 

Once ashore, my friends headed over the island’s crest, while I tied to a solid driftwood anchor, and fussed over my boat’s metal hull scraping on the sandstone below.

I joined my friends, me sitting atop a bucket I’d brought to carry firewood, them on saris in the dry yellow grass. Friend on my left-hand side, a milliner of fine hats meant to be thrown in the air. Friend to my right, a renowned lullabyist and tinker toy collector. Artist-comrades. Fellow lovers of nature, my curious epicurean kin. 

We considered the sea, panorama-ed before us, from one corner of the eye to the other. It was almost possible to see both shores of the sea by looking straight north, though it required a feat of peripheral vision. Good practice, anyway, in these times when it’s hard to take in all that is before us.

A quartet of oyster catchers mirrored our party of three humans and a dog, their orange beaks like trombones emerging from their small heads. One of the birds broke into hysterical laughter – peepeepeepeepeepeep – and we laughed along with them. 

The dog, thirsty, tried unsuccessfully to pass as a human in his quest for a drink, getting into the middle of our triangle, knocking over plastic glasses of plum wine, made that summer by the hatmaker and the lullabyist. They lived on a beloved chunk of land perhaps half the size of Pleasure Island, where they had built magic shacks and sheds of many sizes, and they talked to chickens and cats and squashes and flowers, sang them songs, showed them tricks.

We chattered, and dreamed, and spoke freely. We burned the incense, invoked the green spirit. The sun was three fingers above the western shore, two fingers, one. 

I felt the shock of living in a state-declared emergency strongly there, watching the waves. We tried to make some sense of it together. “Human beings are being altered,” said the hatmaker. “So many lovers are splitting apart,” said the lullabyist. We talked of playing with the gods and spirits, both old and new.

The sun set. Without thinking, I began to tell my friends one of my ancestral myths. Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, hid in a cave, ashamed of the actions of her brother, Sunsanoo, God of the Seas, who had destroyed much of heaven and earth after a disagreement. She refused to come out, and the world was cold with darkness. The other Gods tried everything, coaxing, demanding, pleading. It was only when they threw a great party, and Ame-no-Uzume, Goddess of the Dawn and Performance, threw off her clothes and sexy danced through the night, that the Sun Goddess came out again, to join the fun.

Red Clouds appeared. We said goodbye to the sun. The white light still filled the western sky, which graduated to the deep twilight blue in the east, that is only seen at this magic in-between moment, this liminal space, an instance of freedom to savour like plum wine.

We lingered, considered lighting a fire. How could we not? Instead we made a neat pile of the firewood we had brought, on a flat sandstone lookout, as an offering. We walked over the crest and crunched over the shell beach to the Speedwagon. 

As we neared the sheltered bay, crowded with every kind of boat from rubber dinghys to floating mansions, the hatmaker looked up from a handheld Know-It-All, and advised us that the moon would rise in exactly one minute. Immediately, I gunned the engine towards the final gap in the islets, where we could look east across the sea one last time. 

Right on schedule, a glimmer of orange appeared over the farthest shore. 

Engine off. 

Out there, bobbing in the wake of a passing fishing boat, darkness seeping into the final bit of light, swaying with that oceanic sense of both danger and possibility, the orange sliver expanded to its full circle. The cosmic blood orange rose into the sky, a zenith moment, the height of a several cycles at once. I may have gasped.

“Moon” comes from the same word as “month” in English, traced back to through its Germanic past to the root, -me*, meaning “measure”. As in meter. As in menstrual. As in meal. Outside of civilization, the moon is part of our deep experience of time, among the oldest of measurements.

Tsukuyomi, glorious crimson Rising Moon, the One who sets the Earth’s pulses, the rhythm of our bodies, the rise and fall of water, the circulation of the seasons, gratitude. Haych’qa, Arigato.

As the Moon lifted off from the earth, my heart filled. We sat for a minute more, quiet, in love. I turned the motor back on, and spun the throttle arm hard to starboard. We crept among the mooring lines and sleepaboards, squinting at the shore for the gap in the docks that would take us back to my slip. 

The dog, usually shaky with the vibrating metal, had snuggled in against the lullabyist’s warm side, and stopped shivering. The hatmaker knew how to be still in the right moments, and faced back, not speaking. I glanced back to see what he saw, and caught one more glimpse of Pleasure Island; now a dark shape, in the darker dark of the sea.

written by Maji