Newland (standard:travel stories, 552 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Oct 18 2008	Views/Reads: 3449/0	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Just imagine: You're rowing this little boat all the way up Puget Sound and ... Don't feel so sad. Keep repeating "It's only a story, it's only a story"

NEWLAND 

It was a long pull in this leaky old rowboat,  all the way up Puget
Sound to the island. . . the mysterious, tiny island in this Northwest 
waterway that somehow missed the opportunity to appear on the maps.    
A new land!! The thought of a warm cabin and dry clothes helped him to 
stave off the exhaustion that was dragging down his arms.  Finally,  
hours later, the bottom scraped on sand and gravel.  He stepped out, 
hauled the boat up onto the beach and looked around. It was really 
cold. 

Hot sunshine bored through the translucent mist billowing up from the
fir-studded mountain slopes.  A full rainbow arched out of the bay and 
anchored firmly behind a large rock.  The rain stopped; then started 
again; then stopped for a while.  Each band of arco iris was sharp,  
clear, fluorescent,  transparent.  Blue sky-patches bled together 
forming a sky-lake that drowned the rainbow, washed its colors clean. 

Rocks and trees, hills humping up from the water, mountains, stones,
columns of granite, blocky gravel shore, fir-stands, fallen trunks, 
scattered, barren slopes, strands of saplings, Douglas fir branches, 
needled green, coarse pebbles black/white diorite,  epidote,  cubes of 
quartz, jasper,  sheets of micaceous feldspar,  pyroxenes,  knobs and 
buttes,  peaks black/white, firred valleys,  firred slopes,  firry 
rumpled foothills, bear-ful,  wolfy,  eagled and ravened,  creased 
peaks harboring snow white/black, bold white trunks stripped of bark 
and branches, thin blackened trunks stripped of bark and branches 
peeking up above young firs; beyond the sandy beach amid the two-green 
transplants, reforesting the barren turf, beside the vales, beneath the 
crests, below the snowpeaks white/black under rain-blue sky, ice fog 
full of cloud-wisps overcast with fluff, heavy lowering clouds misting 
on the trees, drizzling on the snow, shining on the garnet pebbles, 
jade-green pebbles, jade-green trees, dark firs: needled olive green 
with spring-green tips and crisp brown seed cones, shading the black 
and red berries, shading the dandelions that poke among the 
rock-pockets, streaked with aquamarine and cinnabar. 

Hollows and peaks,  cusped by rockslides,  tallused by gravel, shadowed
by frost and drenched year after year,  wind-polished onyx and 
fractured kyanite,  glacier-scored feldspar and horneblend;  sheltering 
the leeward stands of pine, the fragile hazels, the aspens;  shielding 
the snowdrops and the black-eyed  susans in the summertime,  
fog-shrouded mornings when ice-worms emerged,  cavy havens for 
wildlife,  foodless terraces. 

Shoreside,  the tide drifted past prehistoric pilings, gravelly  red
sand, old nets, mussel-mountains, bleached driftwood, weed-rags 
dripping sea. Wiry scrub bushes cringed, swept by flashes of spray, 
their icicled branches shuddering under the burden of frozen bay.  
Big-beaked birds squatted obscenely on guano-rocks.  Here and there,  a 
titanic trunk, shorn of leaves,  projected from a gash in the forest, 
reaching out over the bay to snare ships or guide them.  Wavelets 
applauded, slapping at the rocks, dissolving in the sand.  Seagull 
cries skewered on the wind. Deep sadness hung from the fog. 

The sun and rain dwindled and it was growing dark as he tromped up the
steep pathway to the cabin.  Its door hung askew and the roof had 
collapsed.  It was damp and dirty inside.  What a disappointment! He 
faced the challenge:  tomorrow, he would have to row all the way back.  
So . . . this was the new land. 

Seattle, October 16, 2008 --  Gerald X. Diamond  --  copyright 1989


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