There is a bluff here, and a bluff there.

Here: mossed stone above a marsh, the Sea breathing somewhere past the firs, a view that ends in water, as all island views do, expansive only where the land agrees to stop.

There: the Ogilvies, lichen-pelted, tundra-shouldered, where the stone does not end in water but in more stone, and more lichen, ridge after ridge pouring north into a light the island has never known. On the island, distance is a gift the seas and peaks give. In the Ogilvies, distance is simply the condition, unyielded, unencumbered, fathomless, a view that does not close because nothing has arrived yet to close it.

I carry both in the same chest. The island taught me intimacy, how a place can be small enough to love entirely, how every bluff is somebody’s backyard, how the road is always on the other side of the hill. The Ogilvies will teach me the other lesson, the one the island is too kind to insist on: that a country can be indifferent and still be the thing you came for.

Three weeks. I am already half gone, already shedding the skin of this coast the way the arbutus sheds its red into the wind.