The prisoner opens one eye. The cell block is dark, but there is a sound, a scraping. The turning of a key in a lock! The light is blinding as the warden shuffles in. “On your feet!” she orders. “You’re getting out of here.” The prisoner rises slowly, blinking in the realization that he is once again a free man. One slow step at a time, he begins to walk toward the noise and bustle of the outside world….

In other words, I am free once again to cover The Village.

Kate “What-We-Have-Here-Is-A-Failure-To-Communicate” Fisher, in a rare moment of weakness, has agreed to let me head southward once again and ply my journalistic trade amidst the flesh and sizzle of The Village. Of course, I had to make a few promises:

• I promise never to use this blog for unfounded venting and rants again.

• I promise to balance my coverage between The Town and The Village.

• I promise to remain equally objective and open-minded about each community.

• I promise to convert to Quakerism.

• I promise to spend the rest of the summer working as Henry Coffin’s personal manservant.

OK — a couple of those are still negotiable. But none of that mattered as I grabbed my khaki knapsack and my safari vest and spun the Island Car toward the Den of Iniquity that is my home away from Stump. I got there just in time to find Eliza and Bo staggering out of one of the cabins. Both were topless, and neither cared. Eliza stretched herself awake in the early-afternoon sunlight, and Bo wobbled his towering mahogany hulk down to the high-tide line to pee.

Eliza remains the most stunningly sexy woman ever built — spectacular body, stunning green eyes, wavy brown hair — and the fact that I have more denim on my fly than she had on her entire body didn’t dampen my estimation of her. I found myself instantly on the brink of proposing marriage, and I’m sure she would have accepted — except that she doesn’t believe in marriage, I am still way too mainstream and boring for her, and her boyfriend, who can hold an I-beam up with one hand while he welds it with the other, was coming back up the beach. I opted instead for a cheery “Good morning!”

Bad choice. Eliza bit her lip and looked at me like someone had just thrown a dead cat at her feet. “Shit,” she said, “is it still morning?”

I assured her that the sun was well on its way toward the horizon.

“Whatever,” she said. It was her turn to pee, so she headed for the great Oceanic Outhouse.

Bo told me that the Grand Plan for the day was to head over to the clay pit to dig some supplies for Eliza’s artistry. He didn’t really invite me along, at least not directly, but I decided to interpret his statement of fact as a welcoming gesture. “I’d love to go along,” I said.

Bo shrugged, scratching his square black beard. “Whatever.”

It was just two and a half hours later — after opening a few cans of lunch, swimming in the bay, downing a few beers, and welding the odd tire iron onto Bo’s latest creation — that we headed off to the clay pit. I then discovered that the clay pit is not on Grand Seal Island. It’s on a tiny little scrub-brush dot of greenery that the maps call the Midge Ledges and that The Villagers simply call The Midges. It’s about a ninety-minute trip by rough-hewn outrigger canoe.

As luck would have it, there was a rough-hewn outrigger canoe on The Village beach just then, so we climbed in. Bo took the stern, where he provided enough paddle power to push the QEII up the Kennebec River, and Eliza took the bow, where she stretched out and sagged into sleep. I crawled into the middle and tried not to tip anything over.

Paddling like a tribe of motivated Maori in the back, Bo explained that he had built this canoe one weekend — or month or something — when he was temporarily out of scrap metal for his sculpture. It’s made of the burned-and-scraped-out trunk of a large tree, and everyone in The Village uses it to pop back and forth to the mainland for Twinkies and stuff. He calls it “The Trunk Steamer,” which is the closest Bo has ever come to telling a joke.

We pulled up on The Midges with a thud, and Eliza woke up again. She climbed out — still topless, I might add — and reasonably enough I followed her. Bo jumped off the stern into ten feet of water, sank like a cinder block, and walked up onto the island, looking an awful lot like the movie version of that ocean-to-land evolution diagram.

We spent the afternoon — what was left of it — digging greasy gray-brown clay out of a depression in the ground the size of a large bed. We were, of course, swarmed by clouds of tiny midges, who did their best to remind us why this island was named for them. They drank blood like vampiric Red Cross nurses, and swatting at them did nothing but slow our clay-digging progress. I seemed to get the worst of it. I figured Eliza was too beautiful to be bothered by miniscule insects, and Bo was too damn tough. Mosquitoes are like bullies; they instinctively pick on the weak.

We filled twelve metal buckets with the wet, sticky clay, and with the sun setting slowly in the west, it was time for us to bid fond farewell to aching misery and head back to GSI. We loaded the buckets into my space in the canoe, and Eliza scrambled into the bow.

“Why don’t you paddle this time?” Bo asked in a decidedly non-rhetorical way. He clomped his way up to the bow to snuggle with his girl while I sat in the stern, the physics of see-saws putting it easily three feet out of the water even with me in it, and I attempted to reach the ocean from there. I was going to have to power this craft by myself.

But hey — I’m a product of the Eastern Maine University athletics program who very nearly lettered in Ultimate Frisbee for the Emus in each of my last three years. I put my back and legs into the challenge. Bo, after an initial period of making out with Eliza that seemed rather intense, given that they had an audience, finally broke free and began to pound out a rhythm on two empty, overturned metal pails. He thumped and chanted to give me a pace for my paddling, his dark-brown belly shaking with each blow and his booming bass voice sounding ancient and potent.

The ocean is our blood. Thump, thump.

The ocean is our blood. Thump, thump.

We paddle through our bloodstream.

The ocean is our blood. Thump, thump.

I don’t know what he meant by “we,” but the chant did seem to help a bit. He kept it up:

Saltwater is life. Thump, thump.

Saltwater is life. Thump, thump.

Without it we would dry and die.

Saltwater is life. Thump, thump.

The earth becomes our womb. Thump, thump.

The earth becomes our womb. Thump, thump.

In time it will become our tomb.

The earth becomes our womb. Thump, thump.

There once was a man from Nantucket.

Who liked to pound beats on a bucket.

But at this rate the sage

Just might die of old age,

So he put down the pails and said fuckit.

Bo stopped drumming and looked at me. I looked behind me. I had worked up a sweat paddling to Bo’s incessant beat, and I had taken the waves and the stiff breeze as a personal challenge to be overcome by muscle, determination, and grit. However, despite straining the tendons behind my knees and pulling so hard on the paddles that I was certain each of my vertebrae had parted company with its neighbors, I was astonished to discover that the stern of the boat looked like it had been tethered to the rocks on the shores of The Midges. We hadn’t moved fifty feet.

Bo took over and got us home in time for dinner.

— Donovan Graham, “The Shadowless Writer”

Comments:

Comment — SunTanDude: Cool, Van! Way to get back to The Village!

Comment — WomynFire982: what exactly do you see in eliza? it seems to me that you can’t see anything beyond her chest. one you grow up, you’ll discover that there’s a lot more to a woman than her mammary glands.

Comment — Gemstone: I agree wholeheartedly, Womyn.

Comment — UMOFratboy: Don’t listen to them, Van! Keep ’em coming!

Read previous blog entries in the Island Wars story by clicking here.

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