I'm writing from an island in the Bay of Fundy that doubles as a bird sanctuary and scientific field station. From what I've been told, it's upscale relative to other field stations. While some people have tents, we have weather-worn cabins. While others have wet wipes, we have a solar water heater. While others have tiny propane stoves and rehydratable foods, there's a kitchen that smells like the bagels L made this morning.

L introduced me to Kent. They've been here for about two months. It's a ritual they began in the summer of 2014. First, as an undergrad fellow studying snails who promptly traded crack-of-dawn tidal pools for grubbing Leach's storm petrel burrows. Then, as a grad student counting gulls and monitoring avian flu. Now, as a post doc advising the undergrad fellows on their own projects, still grubbing and counting in the in-between time.

Three years in, I've made a habit of arriving around the turning point of the season in late July, when the median age on the island jumps from early 20s into the 60s. Undergrads go home and the island repopulates with veteran scientists who volunteer their time and energy to mend paths that have become overgrown, conduct and continue some of their own work, and cook communal dinners for each other.

For me—an indoor cat from birth whose worst grade in college was in BIO120—it's a lucky portal to fall through. I don't conduct field research or have any kind of reason to be here other than the pleasure of it all. ut I'm welcome, so I come.

On the first night this year, I stepped out of our cabin around midnight to find the outhouse. The island didn't wait for my bleariness to clear. It shot starlight through a million pinholes while petrels cackled from all angles. As James Bridle might say (I've been reading Ways of Being this week), I was promptly made aware more-than-human world.

Since I got here I've:

  • watched petrels fly in the dark after coming home from a 600km journey over the ocean

  • picked wild blueberries for my birthday cake

  • heard and felt the crunch of bird bones underfoot on a rocky beach

  • stood with L as they pull a branch down into my view to trace the plots of lichen vying for a spot on the dying tree's bark

  • drew this picture of the baby petrel I got to hold

Attention, community, steady progress were L's guesses as to what Kent might value. I was trying to put a finger on what felt so different between this and the university campuses we work on. Something here is sacred in contrast to the fervent, rushing drive for achievement that a campus can harbor. It's not that time and obligations don't exist here, chicks grow to full size in a matter of weeks, there's a print out of times for high and low tides for the month thumbtacked to the wall of the main dorm, and the caretaker's kids are a foot taller each time I come back. Things can still come too late and early, but maybe it feels better because it's so rarely in your control.

For me, it feels more like walking at the right speed. Being here makes you the good kind of tired.

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In Progress

  • bird story rewrite

  • sorority story plotting

  • converting is-it-kind from Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS to React/Next.js!

Procrastinating

  • telling IT I clicked on a weird link last week

Real petrel chick pic for good measure: