Interior

I believe in traveling light.
- Matsuo Basho, “The Knapsack Notebook”

After a late start and a little over four hours of driving in Andrew’s unnervingly clean RAV4 (this won’t last, I know), here I am at Juniper Springs—the spring, I think, which is so clear I can see the fine texture of pebble and algae pock-marking the bottom. The little minnows are frantic licks of ink, dark articulations against the sun-bright bottom. The great wheel on the mill house isn’t sure where it’s going, gushing heaps of water over itself, and although it is too cold to swim, the people here have gathered shirtless on a great concrete slab to dip their feet in. Some concrete cures indefinitely. I feel myself slowly dehydrating in this early spring cold snap.

I’ve stopped here, on my way upstate to meet friends, for a night of solo camping, as though this is something I’ve done all the time, or at least often, or at least once before. I think of standing over a pile of sticks in the backyard of Andrew’s buddy’s house up north, striking match after match in the still air while everyone else looks on, eyebrows raised. I feel a new sense of urgency, now, to examine my self-sufficiency, while my body is still mine: will I gather the kindling, will I start the fire, will I pitch the tent, will I mother myself to sleep in a synthetic down bedroll I picked out myself.

We’ve been talking ad nauseam about it for years, Andrew and I. I had thought “ready” was a destination upstream, that I would struggle toward it invisibly like the scrambling feet of a mallard hen ferrying herself against the current. Turns out it’s like a switch flipping on, a revolution. Over and over the mill wheel scoops up the spring water as though it is searching for something under the cool sun. Every handful, somehow different. I don’t know if I am the wheel or the water, but something has changed.

*

Above the mill house, live oak on the opposite side of the swimming hole—

Late sun
Skeins of moss
Even your shadows are reaching in

*

Back at my campsite, I do indeed build a fire. I cook a bratwurst over the flame—it takes longer than expected, still fleshy pink inside when I puncture its casing and pry open the meat, but I am in love with myself for feeding my body on this cold, bright evening in spring under the towering pine. I laugh at myself because there’s nothing back country about this and I know I’ll forgive myself if I allow a niggling fear of my neighbors—white-haired men with Harley jackets, beers, and a restless guitar—to drive me to fantasies of relocating to locked car in the middle of the night, where I have written down my own description, itinerary, and Andrew’s number sealed waterproof inside a Ziploc bag in the glove compartment. But still. Bratwurst, avocado, cucumber, and the rest of the apple slices.

The night is cooling and the birds are talking about me. All afternoon two brilliant cardinals have been tussling around the outskirts of my camp, until just a moment ago one of the pair and a mourning dove crept beside me, underneath the table I struggled to slide across the sand and pine needles, closer to the fire, digging my heels into the ground. I read that cardinals live within a mile of where they are born. Somewhere above me the female cardinal is preparing to brood, watching her mate’s scrimmage below, my negotiations with the picnic table and effort to set my camp. Someone who knew what to look for could probably find her quickly in the trees, but not me. Her warm body and rosy beak will be nothing more than a broken off bit of sunset filtering down through the pine.

*

I toss the rest of my food into the fire, and the curious birds flee in a panic when I turn from the flames to look at them.

Birds a few feet from me
I, too, forgot
That I was here.

*

I gather my pals at the airport and after declining to give a few bearded men a ride to anywhere we shoot right past midnight into Fernandina Beach for a day and a night, pleasantly tipsy on the brisk beach. Drinks at the local—murals, a stray ping pong ball blasting our little corner while we exorcise our demons with gin-and-tonics and second-hand smoke, good fish and wine. We pile into bed in beach rental and comfort each other, as we have done for the last decade. My friend wipes her cheeks and stares at the ceiling. She tells us her uncertainties about her marriage, her family, her job while I press my face into the side of her arm. None of us seems to know how we’ve arrived here, scattered like stars straining against the shape of their constellation. Graduations, weddings, deaths, muggings, moves, somatic anxieties, incorrectly interpreted emails, broken glasses, self-inflicted wounds, bad jokes, bad jobs, bad men. I don’t even know who I am talking about anymore.

Earlier, walking into town, I took a picture of one naked tree reaching, windswept, toward another, as though the first would completely subsume the other into its vascular network, sharing water and minerals and memories. I realize this is all I’ve been avoiding and everything I now want. I laugh into the wind coming off the salty water. I cry with my friends into our hands.

*

How to explain what it is, the lines between us blurring.

What about—
Our arms across each other’s stomachs
Quarter moon returning

*

In the morning we pack our camping bags and take the ferry to Cumberland Island, sitting now on Stafford Beach to talk about nothing in the finest sand I have ever touched. The seashells are so sweet, their pearlescent sheen studding the sea oats. After three-and-a-half mile walk I am deeply concerned about ticks. Already I’ve found one crawling on my shirt and across the shadow my torso makes in the sand and I make my friends swear to inspect my body before we sleep. I’ve never been able to abide the idea of anything on me, in me, taking from me. I think of reaching back to scratch my neck in church, peeling something sticky off my hairline only to find a tiny, wiggling insect in my fingers. Sweet blood, my mother used to say. Jokes about parasites flit through my mind like gnarls of dried seaweed across the dunes.

*

Windblown beach under the sun;
In my shadow, the sand
Is already cold

Past the beauty berry and wax myrtle, the croton and sea oats, the beach is deep and flat and the sand has been burnished into shiny ribbons by the persistent wind that buffets the shore and us.

*

We eventually get the fire going. Tacos, wine, s’mores with dark chocolate oozing onto our dirty fingers. I tell my friends what’s been on my mind, in my life, all about traveling alone up the coast. In the bathrooms up the path we find three ticks on my body, two already attached, and it’s almost as though I have to take myself out of my body entirely to escape the unreasonable degree of panic I feel at this development. We brush our teeth with non-potable water, change our shirts and underwear. Next to the fire, I turn to one friend and tell her, finally, When it happens, we want you to be the godmother. That’s big, she says, wiping her cheeks again, I just think that’s really big. I cry with her. We laugh into our hands.

*

I don’t put up the rain fly properly and after a long, cold night the sun finally rises. Morning fire, break down tents, rinsing our cups and flinging the waste water in a wide circle around our camp. The 2:45 ferry takes us back to the mainland. Repacking, washing my feet in the sink, a man in a truck who backs into my walking, exhausted, easy potato salad at a dive bar. One friend to the airport, then another, then another. We disperse once again. Andrew’s car isn’t clean anymore. On the highway I drive with one knee propped against the door panel, bad music, Australian pine, big clouds, bare foot on the gas.

*

I sit in Flagler’s old ice plant in St. Augustine, now a bar where I’m sipping on something—sweet, alcoholic black tea, and rosemary clipped to the rim—with a beet salad on the way. After a night alone in an unusually soft bed, I’ve already walked miles to this bar, stopping along the way at the old fort where 16th century masons chipped dovetail joints from tabby concrete, studded with shells. Andrew says this is very strong. I wonder if this is how I will feel. I wonder if, even now, I am curing inside my skin as I wander this lovely, old city, sitting alone at a bar, sticking Band-Aids over the blisters on my feet. I walk some more to work the gin out of my system before I drive to Smokin’ D’s BBQ for second lunch, a dollar short but still waived along by the postmaster, across the street for local honey and fruit, so full, ready, and then south the Andrew. Home, now. Home.

*

Dune grass reaches inland
I
Walk toward the sea