There is no clock aboard the Little Dipper and that is by design. Once you slip the lines and clear the break wall, there’s no need for the tyranny of time, at least not as measured by the mechanical cadence of clocks. Time here should be measured in the slow poetry of waves and the clatter of gulls and the world seen in a grain of sand with an eternity in an hour as Blake would have it, or in the whorl of forever in a wildflower.
Still, for a place with no clocks, time is a concept that is everywhere in these islands. It is written in every swirl of rock in a cliff wall, in the cursive of white pine roots. Time, by human reckoning, may seem to stand still here, as if the hours themselves are walking barefoot in the sand, but that is deceptive. It is only our narrow perception of it that keeps us from seeing the truth. We see the landscape like a postcard, a snapshot. But if we could sit on a cliffside and see time pass on a geologic time scale, like a movie on fast forward – hundreds of thousands of years in just a few minutes – we would see the icy tongues of glaciers flicker back and forth like lightning strikes, mountain ranges rise, crest, and settle like calming storm surf. The biggest white pines would seem as ephemeral as wildflowers. If we could, even for an instant, see time on a geologic scale, we would see every sea cave as a clock and it would shake our sense of time and place and self.
We would never see a cliff wall, a sea cave, or a wildflower in quite the same way again. Or, I imagine, ourselves.
— Jeff Rennicke (all photographs by the author unless otherwise noted)
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