Thursday

If summer hadn’t come to Kent Island earlier in the season, it certainly had today.

There was no wind, and what felt like a new kind of heat lay in the still air.

The Upward Bound students went for a walk with Damon to the southern end of the island to collect snails for their experiments.

When they returned with snails they began measuring and weighing them, and needed to boil the periwinkles to make extracting them from their shells a more manageable task.

This meant I needed to move my toast-making operation over to another burner on the stove, which was quite all right. 

The toasters are the camping-friendly sort that have four wire sides for toast, and ours seem always to be folding down when that’s the least desirable thing they could do, such as when there is toast on them. 

Janet engineered an ingenious solution to the problem and wired the four sides to one another so they would support the weight of a standard slice of bread and I could make 30 slices of toast in a timely manner.

We were preparing breakfast for dinner, so this was something we wanted to do.

I cooked honey-garlic sausage and extra-thick bacon for the omnivores while Janet made a beautiful salad to accompany all our heavy fatty foods.

The Upward Bound students were placed in charge for dessert, and made a white cake with vanilla buttercream frosting with rainbow sprinkles.

There were some really incredible smells happening in the kitchen while this was underway.

 The main course was frittatas with onions, green peppers black olives, and cheddar cheese, which came out perfectly puffy baked in cast iron skillets. 

Janet prepared her trademark baked oatmeal, which has become a favorite of everyone on the island. Both pans of it quickly disappeared. (Recipe)

After dinner dishes were cleared away Jesse led us on the first real old-fashioned bird walk of the season, taking Nat’s old route down the L-Transect and Eagle’s Nest Trail (where we did see an actual bald eagle) and back.

Emily chatted with a common yellowthroat, which then, having befriended her, followed us along the trail as we went.

The woods were unusually quiet for evening but the walk was lovely.

After we returned (along with those who had gone out in the skiff with Damon for some water sampling) and the Upward Bound students returned to the lab to further analyze their samples, Elisabeth, Emily, Charlotte, and I began preparations for a journey to South Hill.

Aidan decided to join us just as we were leaving, and we were glad for the company.

Emily packed up her camera equipment- she had planned to film both the sunset and the following sunrise but because we were getting such a late start it was clear we would miss the sunset altogether and that the sky would darken during our 30-minute walk.

 Despite it seeming very unlikely that any rain would fall overnight, we decided to cover the oven with a tarp to minimize the slowing effects of the dew on the mud-drying process.

This turned out to be a much smarter choice than we imagined it could have been, as we learned when it began to rain around 2 a.m.

Up to then the evening had been mediocre, with no stargazing, but not made less comfortable by pesky insects or gusting winds. 

This was the turning point.

Aidan and Elisabeth immediately jumped ship, not being the type to be any more uncomfortable than they need to be and not terribly eager to sleep outside in the rain.

It was only drizzling, and it seemed like it must be a passing shower, so the rest of us stayed, still intent on capturing the sunrise on film as planned.

The rain stopped soon after those who had chosen to walk two treacherous miles in the dark departed, and we went back to sleep.

We were awakened again around 4, when it began to pour. 

The deluge continued until 5:30, by which time our sleeping bags, pillows, and clothing (especially hats) were absolutely soaked, and I mean drenched.

Our clothes clung to our bodies and there were literally several inches of water under me on the tarp. I thought I might float away.

We decided this was no longer desirable and that our chances of ruining the camera with rainwater were greater than those of capturing it on film, and we headed back downtown.

Our gear was at least doubled in weight by the water it had absorbed, and Emily’s and Charlotte’s boots were full of water up to calf depth.

I was characteristically barefoot.

We stopped periodically so the others could empty their boots, which kept refilling.

Water was literally pouring out of our backpacks as we walked.

When we reached the portion of the trail where the grass is literally taller than we are, we made the best of that as we had been doing with the rest of our tribulations (we had been laughing constantly since we started folding up the tarp-perhaps an adaptive response to stress?), telling ourselves that on top of the free bath we had gotten laying in frigid puddles earlier we were now going through a car wash free of charge as well.

We’d been feeling ambivalent about the tarp- Emily: “I’m not sure if I feel indebted to it or angry at it.”

When we arrived back at the dorm, dripping and desolate, we began devising clotheslines to string across the library, as quietly as we could so as not to wake all the sleeping people in the dorm and with considerable difficulty considering our only materials were cheap acrylic yarn and packing tape.

What we needed most, of course, was a good hot breakfast.

While Emily and Charlotte finished hanging our dripping outerwear and bedding over all the furniture we were able to commandeer from other areas of the dorm I scrambled some eggs and made tea and toast.

This helped improve our condition of misery, but one is never really so warm or dry on Kent Island as one might hope to be, and things will always be that way, it seems.