Layers

The slow accretion of the familiar

It is almost as if the Little Dipper is steering itself.

Early May. Early morning, the bow of the boat eases its way beyond the safety of the breakwall and almost instinctively turns north for one of the first runs of the season. Me, I have no particular destination in mind this morning, a run “just to work out the kinks” I tell myself. The Little Dipper however, seems to have other ideas and to know exactly where she’s heading. We angle towards the West Channel and power up. Apparently I’m just along for the ride.

Not far up the channel, I realize where we are heading: Quiet Cove on Oak Island.

That is not its official name. I doubt it has one, not down on any maps anyway, but then, to quote Melville, “the true places never are.” Quiet Cove is just what I call it - a pocket-sized grotto in the sandstone cliffs on the northeastern edge of Oak Island. In the years I have been exploring the islands in the Little Dipper it has become something of a touchstone, a place I return to again and again, almost instinctively, as if drawn by something as real and as invisible as what draws the needle of a compass.

First, there is the soft, shallow, and sandy bottom which makes it perhaps the easiest anchorage in the islands for a small boat like this. It is where I came early in my navigation of the learning curve of the Little Dipper to practice setting the Danforth anchor, playing with different sets in different winds. It is here that I first began to feel confident that I was biting the anchor strongly enough to be able to don my wetsuit and swim away from the boat feeling secure that it was safe in the protective arms of Quiet Cove while I went off and explored.

That freedom first brought me into the nearby caves to begin something I had long dreamed of: photographing sunrise through the archways, portraits of water, rock, and light, framing the morning in stone, a feeling of peering into the very heart of these islands.

Then there is this: one day, after working a set of photographs from the caves, I slipped back into the water expecting to swim west back towards the boat, for some reason I swam to the east towards a non-descript crack just then catching the day’s first light.

It didn’t look like much, the water was cold. I wanted the hot coffee waiting on the boat, but I was once again drawn by unknown forces, and waded through the narrow passage only as wide as my outstretched hands expecting a dead-end at any moment.

Instead, it led straight into wonder.

The passageway opened to a much bigger, more complex cave lit by the morning sun. Reflections, like silent echoes of light, danced on every wall. It was like being inside of an emerald: the Emerald Cave. I was so enthralled I hardly picked up my camera. The proper response to astonishment sometimes is silence. I hadn’t come to be astonished, of course, you never do, but I was willing. “What I want in my life,” said the poet Mary Oliver, “is to be willing to be dazzled.” Alone in that cave the first time, shivering perhaps with the cold, I let myself be dazzled.

Those kinds of memories — soft anchorages, watching the sunlight knit the morning from deep in a cave, stumbling into the wonders of such unknown beauty — are all laid down now like layers deep in my mind when I think of this place. Geologists measure time in the layers of rock - the accretion of sand grains in the slow rain of centuries. The kinds of memories I now associate with a place like Quiet Cove gather almost as slowly, and almost as deeply.

In that way, the memories are a measuring stick in the laying down of a kind of bedrock of knowing a place. I know where the anchor will hold the best, what time of year the light sinks deepest into the caves at sunrise, and where to find the fireweed counting the progress of the season like slow-fused fireworks.

When I began my search for a deeper understanding of these islands, I had no idea what measuring sticks would mark the journey but the layers of memory laid down in a place like Quiet Cove may be among them, each layer speaking not just with the beauty of the now, but also with the richness of then. No wonder I would end up here instinctively on one of the first runs of this new boating season. It is a place I feel at home. It is, “familiar,” a word that shares the same root as the word “family.”

I spin the boat to slowly tour the art gallery of the sandstone walls. At one wall, I see again a panel of abstract shapes on a cliff face. Since I first saw those figures years ago, I have tried to decide what they look like, a bit meancing, apparitions, ghostly figures in the slow dance of time. Today, however, they feel more friendly, more familiar, almost like family.

I am half-tempted to wave hello as I drift slowly by.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).