Large Fierce Mammal

Was this the sentiment, or something else?

So here we stand, Goode Reader, at a point from which to reflect upon what happened to bring us here.

For this to make any kind of sense demands that you must have first read each of the previous five episodes, so on the chance your first landing here is this article today, links to all preceding Covey Island Shenanigans are provided below for your convenience:

• Backgrounder
• A Pattern Emerges
• You Can’t Go Home Again
• What Do You Tell a Man With Two Black Eyes?
• What Do You Call 200 Lawyers at the Bottom of the Ocean?

From the perspective of my life experience, and as I have previously written most particularly here, my meetings with Raven and Porpoise were blessings of Nature. Affirmations in keeping with what Jim Keating described — “Look for the mini-miracles, the odd synchronicity and sublime messages that walking this new path brings to us. If you see them, they are confirmations that you are on the right track.”

But is that all that they were? Was that what was going on this time? In Truth, I struggle with the comparison because my experience with, “… mini-miracles …”, “odd synchronicity and sublime messages” is of clarity wrapped in subtlety, unmissable by the attuned but invisible to the Great Unwashed. Those first two events, playing out as they did in their singular similarity, carried all the subtlety of a punch in the nose. In this, I believe a different message, or set of messages, was being conveyed.

And then we have the matter of the rowboat that couldn’t go home, and the line it wouldn’t cross that bore a striking resemblance to the course steered by both Raven and Porpoise years before — northeast to southwest.

Next, the failure of the Mi-Pet-Val II’s battery and the fury of an unforecast windstorm that very nearly swept her off the island, only to be saved by Michael’s timely answer to the call of a full bladder. Or is that what called him? Was the timing a little too perfect? Was it his cry of dismay that woke me to noticing his empty sleeping bag, or another kind of call? Whatever it was, the ‘Val II’s rescue had to take place within a very narrow interval of time to be successful, and there we were. Odd synchronicity indeed.

There was the subsequent failure of my own radio battery, and a morning greeted by a stout wind blowing with increasing vigour back the way we had come to reach the island. Its direction — northeast to southwest. In retrospect, the very direction it was blowing the morning we embarked on the trip when it was hitting the ‘Val II square on her nose.

Was it all a sequence of messages, steadily decreasing in subtlety as they went unacknowledged? And why was I such a key ingredient? While there were trips I attended that were unremarkable beyond being a great deal of fun, and many more in the course of those 20 years that I couldn’t find the time for, during which nothing untoward happened to anyone. This begs the question, why did all of those on which something did involve me?

Was it me alone, or me in concert with the other two members of the Olde Guard — those three of us who landed together in 1975? While I was certainly the one upon whom the most focus was placed by whatever forces were at play, whenever I was there, the others were as well.

If indeed a message was being conveyed, it could be interpreted negatively through the encounters as:

• “Hello. You should go back.”
• “You really shouldn’t be here. Follow me.”
• “I MEAN it.”
• “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!”

And yet I can say with certainty that I never, at any point in these events, felt that my life was in danger. Certainly, some situations arising from them were inherently dangerous to varying degrees, but I never felt a sense of malice or viciousness in it — more one of heavy handed playfulness at worst, and in a way that felt … personal.

In retrospect, the way things played out suggests another set of possibilities — that I was (am?) a point of convergence upon which events were focused. Taken together, and absent further investigation, I feel that rather than representing a single coherent message, an argument can be made that this was all about presentation of problems to solve.

If that was what it was, were they aimed at me, or was it my presence that brought them to being and called them to action? Through it all, I was the same person, but over the years between visits, a very different Man. And so the puzzles and problems became more challenging?

At this point in time, all is mystery made of more questions than answers, and the maybes could go on all day.

Thank you for reading, and I welcome any observations or personal experiences that may seem relevant.