What if time was mist and disappeared at sunrise? What if time bent like the wind patterns around each of the islands? In his creative and playful book Einstein’s Dreams, (a book I often carry aboard the Little Dipper) author Alan Lightman fictionally depicts a series of dreams about the nature of time that young Albert Einstein may have had during his creation of the theory of relativity — time as a circle endlessly repeating, time as a nightingale trapped under glass to be studied, time that moves differently according to altitude and distance from the earth’s core, time as a river.
I’ve often thought that young Einstein might also have dreamt of islands. Time moves differently in the islands, as if the hours, years, even decades themselves were walking barefoot in the sand. Some mornings, I slip the lines at the marina tethered to time through the date stamps on the electronics aboard the Little Dipper and enter the more dreamy state of island time — waves ticking against the shorelines like an ancient metronome, the calls of the gulls echoing off the billion year-old cliff walls exactly the way they have for tens of thousands of years of gulls and mornings.
What is there beyond the horizons of your own boat, I ask myself in a kind of mind exercise, that anchors you to a specific time or date? What clues to the decade, or even the century, can you see from this quiet cove?
Nothing.
And that is exactly the point. Beyond the beauty of its beaches and its deep green forests, one of the true treasures of the islands is the way they seem adrift beyond the ages, untethered to time. We need a few places left in the world where date stamps and wristwatches are replaced by our own heartbeats and the tick tock of ancient rock, if only to remind us of the inherent contradiction of time: that it is both endless and precious. Endless for the earth, precious for us humans, and passing as if in a dream.
— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted)