"Preserve"

A piece about memory

It’s hard to imagine how deeply-familiar places can go on existing in your absence. It’s as if they only come into being upon your arrival and vanish upon your exit.

Some places feel like they go idle without you, waiting for you to come back. When you finally return, they awake from dormancy as if flipping on a light switch in a dark room.

But even more bizarre is stumbling upon an unopened door down a well-trodden hallway, revealing an uncharted wing in a thoroughly memorized home.

There’s a place I didn’t discover until one of my last visits to a small island I’ve been exploring my entire life, during the shoulder season of Autumn when it empties of tourists and begins to feel deserted.

Down an unassuming and easily-missed road, the pavement abruptly ends at a dirt cul-de-sac. Faded signage points toward a footpath cut through dense shrubs, and past that, a network of overgrown trails along high coastal bluffs. The paths are carved like a maze, offering a few options at frequent intersections, some choices curling back to previous sections while others fork off in diverging directions. Though the preserve isn’t massive, you could easily spend hours walking each possibility.

The paths meander through scrubby woods, then open up into goldenrod meadows swarmed by monarch butterflies, then duck back under the tree cover. These fluctuating landscapes are disorienting and deceptively repetitive, and with the immeasurable ocean as the only static point of reference, it’s hard to gauge how far I’ve gone. But after several alternations of meadow and forest, the fractal paths converge into a singular one that skirts the highest edge of the bluffs, finally feeling like it’s leading to something instead of chasing its tail.

I follow this straight line along a cliff for another half mile before the compacted dirt tapers off into long-neglected concrete— cracked and potholed, with sand and grass overtaking it. The short-lived street then fully submerges into sand at a sun-bleached “No Trespassing” sign. I disregard this and continue up a driveway implied by sporadic patches of pavement.

At the top of the driveway, a small rectangular cottage appears against a panoramic ocean backdrop. Bushes and vines creep up the sides, reaching toward a roof with several missing shingles along one edge. All the doors and windows are boarded up with plywood, except a small squarish one whose cover has been pried off.

Peering in to the once-living room, I find a floor covered in trash— empty spray paint canisters, broken bottles and crushed beer cans with decades-old designs, and a few smashed appliances with their innards strewn about. Inscrutable graffiti decorates the hole-punched walls while fluffy pink and grey insulation spills down from the ceiling like low-hanging clouds just after sunset.

I walk around the back of the house to discover a wooden deck overlooking the sea. The deck is covered in writing and drawings in marker and paint— names, poems, hearts, insults, curses, prayers and flowers. The greyed-cedar boards have warped and bowed out of alignment, with oxidized screws peeking out above their holes. This spot feels the most desolate of any I’ve found here.

Upon the departure of summer crowds, signs of wilderness begin to reclaim the island’s once-peopled spaces. In the absence of human voices and recreational machines, birdsong and insect choirs return to the forefront and the land teems with life.

But this vacant locale, scored only by ever-rolling surf, feels like a seaside tomb. It emanates loneliness, casting the shadows of countless trespassers and their amalgamated angst.

Now these shades take up residence— marauders, who ripped out copper pipes and wire to sell for scrap; mutilators, who stabbed walls with pocket knives and smashed windows with bricks; self-medicators who lost their balance and likely, consciousness; mourners who scrawled tributes to their departed wherever they could find space between previously-carved epithets, who then sat smoking for awhile, whimpering between drags.

But somewhere across the water, this cottage sits dormant in someone’s memory as they once knew it— a place his family convened for an all-too-brief week in the height of summer, as kids waging losing battles against waves and parents nodding-off in folding chairs.

And then later, a place to disappear in solitude, spent in quiet on the outer edges of the peak season, finding reprieve from the cacophonous city and its ubiquitous eyes.  A private promontory, tantalizing close to a sea which could easily creep in from beneath to overtake him, but had agreed instead to carry his thoughts out with the tide until they vanished over the horizon.

A place that, upon moving out, he’d resolved to faithfully preserve, vowing never to return so as to keep it unchanged from how he last saw it— a faithful container of memories, safely secured in darkness as he flicked off the light switch on his way out.