Before I could muse on this question any longer David called over to us. “Meet Stacey. The best damned researcher this side of the picnic table.” We stared at him and he laughed. Stacey was frowning but then finally found her manners and we all shook hands.
“You’re the Indigo Bunting lady, right?” Her voice was soft and high, like a flute on the wind. It seemed at odds with her large size.
I nodded.
“Been here before?” She was holding her cane in her right hand, as if she was about to stab someone with it. It was an odd way to hold a cane.
“No.”
“Only two real rules. One: make sure you know the location of everyone’s study site. We don’t want you barging in where you aren’t wanted.” Which sounded as though it was everywhere by the tone of her voice. “And two: never ever break the first rule.” For some reason she made me feel as though I was back in kindergarten and getting my knuckles rapped — metaphorically speaking of course — by the time I arrived in kindergarten they had long since stopped rapping little knuckles. I wondered what her research project was. You can tell a lot about a scientist by what they are studying. I realized in hindsight that it would have been a good idea to get a list of all the people and their research projects. I’d have to search them on the Internet. I had been told there was Internet on the island. I just hoped it was high speed. Stacey motioned for us to load our luggage and, as Martha and I struggled with Martha’s suitcase, she and David stood huddled together.
It seems we were waiting for the second driver.
“Shit’s going to hit the fan now he’s here.” He’d sneaked up on us and I jumped a mile. I looked at the driver, whose flamboyant hat was hard on the eyes — crimson and royal blue with a lime green logo of a pelican in flight. I thought at first he was about fifteen, but his close-cropped brown hair was beginning to thin so I had to revise my estimate upward to maybe twenty-five.
“What shit?” I asked, knowing he was counting on me to ask. I mean, it was like a red flag waving at a bull. It would have been hard not to.
“Always hits the fan when those two are together. They love to hate each other.” I glanced over at Stacey and David. He was handing her a yellow envelope. She was gripping his shoulder and what little blood had been in her face to begin with had drained away. She dropped her hand and leaned over the picnic table as if she was catching her breath.
“Darcy,” said the man beside me, as if he was talking about buying a head of lettuce. I looked down at him; he was a good four inches shorter than I was.
“Pardon?”
“The name’s Darcy. Who might you be?”
I introduced Martha and myself.
“Right. The Bunting Lady. Well. Welcome. As you can see, Stacey isn’t much of a social coordinator. That’s why I came along.”
I bit my tongue and did not point out to him that he had skedaddled as soon as he arrived and that Stacey had at least stayed put.
He laughed. “Had to pee.”
I looked at him in astonishment.
“What else could you have been thinking?” He laughed again. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I do?”
“What do you do?”
“I’m Stacey’s assistant.”
“And what do you assist her with?”
“Flowers, plants, grasses, admin stuff …”
So she’s a botanist, I thought. Methodical, detailed. And probably not a risk-taker, at least not in the field.
I was about to ask what she was working on, but he broke in. “Better get those two back to the research station before they either kill each other with affection or with venom.” David and Stacey were hugging again. He winked at me and called over to Stacey to get a leg on, which seemed a little cruel given the state of one of her legs.
As I had expected, I got the trailer. I arranged myself well away from Martha’s killer luggage. One wild ride around a corner and it was likely to pinion me. We were barely out of the compound when the island showed its other face, the one you want to look at and live with forever.
It was a riotous mass of towering live oaks and hip-high palmetto, where the roads were mere trails, packed sand carpeted with live oak leaves. You could almost see the breadcrumbs if you tried hard enough. It was easy to imagine that nothing had changed on this island since the days of Columbus. No signs of civilization except for the trails. Not even electrical or telephone wires marred the view. I lay back against the head of the trailer and looked up at the magnificent oaks, leaves carving a lacey pattern in the sky. As we drove down the trails the only thing out of place with this timeless, ageless island were the ATVs.
My reverie was broken by Martha, who was yelling at me. “Darcy says the island residents formed a co-operative and designed the development to have a tiny environmental footprint. No paved roads, underground hydro wires, and none of the cottages are allowed to be seen from the beach.”
It took her multiple tries to get this across to me above the roar of the ATVs, which were certainly not environmentally friendly. But the underground wires were good, and the prohibition on building anything with a sea view was pretty impressive. I wondered how many of the co-operative had railed against that. I was lost in thinking about myself walking down this trail at the dawn of time, when the ATV screeched to a halt and Darcy pointed at something ahead of us. I had to squint because it was pretty small, whatever it was, but as the vehicles inched closer I saw it was an armadillo, that very prehistoric looking creature with the funny back. It meandered across the road, looking lost and vaguely like Piglet with a set of armor. It scurried into the palmetto and was lost to sight. But we could still hear it rustling, the same way its ancestors had done for countless generations. What is it that makes the passing of time, huge amounts of it, seem so sad and melancholy? Is it that such vast amounts of time are something we can never know and bridging the gulf between our own small lives and eternity is impossible? We can only imagine. Wow, I thought. This island is pretty powerful. Not that my musings really hold much water. It’s a barrier island after all, and barrier islands come and go, shaped by the wind and the ocean’s currents. Regardless, this island had been around longer than I had, and the armadillo’s ancestors were older than mine.
I spent the rest of the trip watching the live oaks recede down the trail and was somehow disappointed when we reached our destination. I shouldn’t have been though. It was pretty impressive and not what I had imagined at all. In my head I had seen the station overlooking the sea, but since this wasn’t allowed I had altered my vision to match the ugly one we had seen at the compound. The research station was a series of tasteful wooden buildings built seemingly at random among the live oaks that soared overhead. But the centre of attention was a large wooden staircase that snaked its way up the face of a dune to a handsome log building that poked its roof out through the canopy. I had read up a bit on barrier islands and this one was essentially long and narrow. Behind the beach, which we hadn’t seen yet, were a series of dunes that marched inland. The further inland they were the more clothed in vegetation they became. It was this vanguard of dunes that the large building was perched on, its underbelly exposed to anyone looking up at it. Apparently the island residents had been loath to cut down any trees, because everything seemed positioned so as to avoid any of the trees. Or