History Lesson
The tide’s going out here on Mystery Bay where we’re hunkered down on Marrowstone Island. The coffee table history declares that the first settlers to Indian and Marrowstone Islands — about ten in all — in the late 1800’s were men who just ‘wanted to be left the hell alone’. Good luck, gentlemen, good luck. You want privacy and isolation, don’t live in Paradise, speaking as one who knows.
Marrowstone’s a smaller version of Camano, an island you can drive to so unless you blow the bridge upon arrival, expect company. We’re holed up in a 1914 farmhouse surrounded by the old orchard and various outbuildings that look more worse for wear than most of ours back home. It’s a virtual museum of antiques, add-on rooms over the decades, photos of the cows munching in the backyard, all clues to generations of early islanders long ago passed, a vicarious window into our own aging homestead draining like the Bay into lost history.
Some say if you don’t remember history, you’re doomed to repeat it. But that was before the era we live in now, the Digital Age that creates a chasm between what’s coming and what was. History may be useless to the world of algorithms, AI, cyborgs and drones. All that matters is what’s NEXT. The past will offer no clues, no guideposts, nothing but nostalgia for what is irrevocably lost.
Course maybe this is just the cynical musings of an old geezer watching his world disappear. Maybe the androids will study us, maybe learn from our mistakes. Trouble is, they were our mistakes.
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Tags: Living in a Crowded Paradise, Marrowstone Island Getaway, No Repeating History