I have these memories from childhood.
These memories include my father, a charming little town called Steilacoom in Washington State, and sweet little meandering beaches that give stunning views of the Puget Sound and nearby islands.
It’s a quiet kind of beautiful, a sacred beautiful.
I loved being there. Those were good days. Those were impressionable days…the kind of days that become part of your soul, and you carry into adulthood to revisit at random times for unknown reasons. But you do…revisit them both in the physical and the spiritual..perhaps hoping to find a clue, to find some meaning, some insight into something you may have missed because of age and inexperience.
Juxtaposed to this serene, protected beauty is the view of McNeil Island Penitentiary. My father would take my brother and I to a small beach that gave a clear view of McNeil Island. He chose this location on purpose…so we could stare at that prison and wonder about it.
We would watch the ferries travel back and forth from the prison to the ferry terminal in Steilacoom. We would wonder if they carried new inmates and what they did to wind up on that island behind those cold, hard bars. We wondered whether we would ever spot a human moving about.
We never did.
We wondered what kind of life was happening there. And, this made us appreciate ours a little more despite having a lot of uncertainty and very little of everything else. I learned much from those moments that really didn’t involve a lot talking. Wondering was mostly done in the quiet. My father isn’t much of a talker, even with me. But I learned how to listen in a different kind of way. And, I’m grateful for it.
My father…He taught us to skip rocks and to wonder a little more about things too big to really understand. I enjoyed that. I don’t believe this was his plan intentionally…to wonder and think about some heavy stuff…but this was the end result with me. As for my brother, well, I’m not sure.
I suspect my father was equally curious about that prison–an entity that seemed to house a dark and weird world in the middle of so much natural beauty. I’m grateful he didn’t shy away from sharing this curiosity with his two small kids despite it being a bit suspect to the conventional world.
I was mesmerized by McNeil Island. Still am. Fascinated and frightened by it simultaneously. I wanted to understand it, everything about it. I was terrified of the place and terrified of the people. Yet, I was oddly drawn to it. Drawn to it as long as I could be on that beach with the water in-between, with my dad, my brother and those rocks.
I felt safe as long as those rocks continued to hop along the water’s surface, as long as that island appeared too far away, as long as things were quiet. I could sit staring at that prison for hours on that beach. And we often did.
I still return to that little town every so often. The beach access is now closed. But, I still go as close as I can. And, I still wonder.
What about you? What do you wonder about? What memories from your early years skip along your life’s surface?
May your small light ignite something grand, as it only can….
Autumn
