Temperature's Rising

We follow the winding road, driving Sunday slow, into the rainforest-dense overgrowth of mammoth ferns and sky-stretch cedars that compose the south-end island terrain. The homes down here are fewer and further between, the wooded acreage impervious to attempted human encroachment. Deep ravines and marshlands populate this narrow stretch of the island’s pointed-tip water surround, and it’s easy to imagine we are a hundred years away from reality: the raw primitivity of the land, though sparsely settled, speaks of a wildness – a wilderness – not known on this island for more than a century.

We pass turn-offs that lead, via private roads, to bluff-side houses, and occasionally comment on the strangeness of what we see. Telephone wires strung between stories-high poles sag low enough for a tall man to touch; an abandoned shack covered with moss is being reabsorbed – via moss embrace over roof and tree roots wrapping their limbs beneath struts – into the landscape.

And, incongruously, a wood-carved sign denoting a bicycle-narrow drive: Cougar Lane.