Day 6 of the San Juan Island Residency at Whiteley – Otters, golden eagles, and waterlogged
- At September 21, 2015
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
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Wildlife sightings: two golden eagles swooping overhead, on opposite sides of the island; one black fox and lots of large rabbits, several otters, including a baby who was chirping because he was left behind his faster family. This was our last visit to American Camp beach, and I was happy to go clomping along the driftwood and sand with my cane (!!) because I got to see some otters frolicking along the waterline. It was raining heavily til about 2 PM, when a little sunlight squeaked through. Of course the deer were out and about as usual. Of all these, I only got a snap of the otters in the ocean at play. I’ve also included a picture of some art from our cabin – photograph of fox kits.
Now the rain is pouring down again. There was enough rain and wind this morning to knock down a third of the dahlias in the dahlia garden we took a picture of a few days back; in people’s gardens the sunflowers were drooping down, defeated. When you get rain out here, it can be a fleeting drizzle or a real gusty downpour, and unfortunately, we’re looking at the latter.
The campus is a bit of a ghost-town, as two of the scholar cabins next to me are now empty, and no one is around – even the dining hall was closed this morning. We’re packing up and taking stock. Even though this is day 6 we managed to see some new wildlife, which was exciting – I didn’t get everything done with my book that I wanted, but I’m so beat physically that intellectually I’m worn out, if that makes sense – no poem last night, and I couldn’t stop closing my eyes when I was trying to read, so maybe it is time to go home. I don’t sleep well normally, so sleeping in a strange place on a strange bed, well, that’s like basically saying hello to no sleep for the duration. I’m not a great traveler, as I’ve said before, I’m not as hale and hearty as I’d like to be. But even so, it was a wonderful gift to be out here and to have time for things like writing and reading and fox-and-whale-and-seal sightings.
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
