Without warning thresholds can open directly before our feet. These thresholds are often shorelines to new worlds.- John O’Donohue
In the fall of 2021, I visited a clairvoyant in Haines. She told me that my dream would be coming true in the new year. You are going to the Galapagos!
I said that while I think it’s wonderful there is a place for very old tortoises, I have never dreamed of meeting one.
Are you sure?
Certain. I mean, I’m not opposed to the idea, it’s just that this is the first time I’ve even thought about it.
She closed her eyes. There was a long pause. “Tahiti?” she said. “I’m hearing something with a T. Tropical, warm and humid.”
Nope. I freckle and burn and I don’t like to leave home. She was sure, absolutely, that she saw me in a plant-filled grotto.
Later, I learned she was a clairvoyant in training.
The next August, I came to Tenakee to begin building a cabin. Or rather supervise the construction of one. I am not a carpenter and becoming one is not a dream of mine, either. Also, supervise is too strong a word. It’s more like I cheered on the project. The local builder did not need my help at all. That too, was weird and wonderful and so unheard of. I didn’t even know how to spell his last name on the first check. Chip helped me order and ship everything on the barge that docks three times a year. We made a good team.
I started my first journal on that first day of mucking out and removing the rotten shack. I’m still writing in it. I spent a lifetime living out loud, so this was new, too. “I need to figure out where I am,” I wrote. I’m still working on that in the big picture—which is why I’ve been away from here a bit, but back to Tenakee: I first saw it in 2016 when I came to talk to my friend Teresa’s book club. I loved it. Chip and I came two more times for a week of winter deer hunting. Each brief, memorable visit as we walked or pedaled past the For Sale sign on a blue tarp and plywood shack I said, “there’s my house.” Then one day I called the number, and two weeks later I had the deed.
My husband is a man of few words, but you should have seen his face when I told him.
“I didn’t think it would actually go through,” I said.
It could have gone so badly.
Why is it that the default setting on taking chances is always the worst case scenario? Sometimes things turn out for the best. Maybe even, most of the time—when you think about it. (Like that prayer I love, asking God for ‘what is best’ for me, and then trust that the spirit knows.)
I knew so little about so much. And not just my neighbors and the builder and the ways of Tenakee—basics like, what are the red berries called and are they edible? (A sweet child told me they are huckleberries and that they taste good. She did not laugh, which was a good omen.)
I didn’t know how long the inlet is or what whales sound like. That whoosh of an exhale. The crack of a fluke. A fog horn. A rusty ramp. They say you should learn new things as you age. Tenakee still feels like a foreign country, and I like an ex-pat, only I don’t need new clothes, and I can bring the dogs on the boat from Juneau.
This time, when I spotted my happy little house from the ferry, I had two grandchildren in tow.
It was their second time in Tenakee this summer. As the boat docked, friends waved. Our totes were unloaded from the ferry cart before we reached the top of the ramp and the kids and the dog ran home ahead of me.
In Under the Tuscan Sun, her wonderful story about restoring a crumbling Italian villa, Frances Mayes writes that life offers you a thousand chances and that all we have to do is take just one. I am glad I took mine on Tenakee.
Also, Tenakee ain’t Tuscany, just to be very clear, and I am happily married and not newly divorced as Mayes was.
You know, they all sound so much alike, these “T” places. Tahiti or Tenakee? It’s an easy mistake to make. The hot spring is a humid grotto. There are plastic vines hanging from the skylight. Maybe the clairvoyant knew something– and just maybe– I do, too.
