Time and Tide

Time plays tricks with memory. We all know that. Memory makes a treasured space out of a horrible apartment you once had when you were a young student, fresh to the city from some provincial existence. Nostalgia reworks the bored hours of childhood into an adult's longed-for moments of innocent freedom.

But once in a while, we experience something that time cannot embellish. These experiences encompass more than the places where they occurred, more than the activities we were engaged in, and it is curious how we can live outside of them and inside of them at precisely the same instant. It is as if these experiences defy the laws of temporality and physics to allow a person to exist in two places... two moments... at the same time. Even if medical science can explain this phenomenon some day, will it matter? Will knowing the exact cause of the sorcery render it any less potent? I think not.

When reading a book the other day, I briefly touched such a blurring. The book is a decent tale by a moderately talented author, nothing profound or all that moving. But the novel's setting called forth a mental time capsule like something from a Wordsworth poem.

I stood again on a stretch of road that was in itself unremarkable. Cars sped along it, occupants busy trying to reach other destinations. I could feel the ocean breeze on my hair and smell the tang of salt and seaweed on the air. On either side, water pulsed and quivered, the narrow stretch of the Vineyard Sound on my left, Vineyard Haven Lagoon on my right. The roadway covered a tiny strip of land, little more than a jetty, and I could see jellyfish gliding easily in the depths below. Had I been on a bridge or a boat, the experience would not have been the same. This space was truly liminal, not quite land nor sea. Ahead lay Edgartown, the island's chief town, and behind lay Vineyard Haven. But this space, this strip of road, was outside of both. It belonged to nowhere and nothing... except to the journey between places, between worlds.

And now, it resides in my mind, not quite real, but not imagined either... undefined, unnamed, unbounded.