Seeing Desirable Things

Not exalting the gifted prevents quarreling.Not collecting treasures prevents stealing.Not seeing desirable things prevents confusion of the heart.

—Tao Te Ching

The events that led to my seclusion on Ocracoke Island began a little more than four months ago at a weekend family reunion in Panama City. During the weeks earlier, in May, I'd had orders for custom cabinets, a dining-room set with six chairs, and a bureau of cherrywood, and I was finishing two of my own table designs I wanted to get into a furniture gallery in Atlanta. Wood is irrational and can't be rushed, so when the reunion occurred (if that's what it was), I was more impatient than usual. That's what Angie said. "You weren't yourself, Allen," she said. "Think back on it in that light."

We had differing views of what happened, or at least of the aftermath, and this created a strain between us that remained through the ensuing weeks. Angie insisted on a resolution because she didn't like the past looming over the future, but it was my family, not hers. Family was special to her—critical, she said. She had two sisters in Dunwoody she was close to and parents she adored. But how could a resolution be achieved? A crossword has an answer to be filled in, and a Sudoku or Kakuro can be figured out by logic, but the circumstances with my family had missing pieces, questions I couldn't answer no matter how many times I replayed the events. It was a mystery such as a man might feel if his wife went out to get her hair cut and never came home. One might search among the details of the past and still not arrive at a reason for the disappearance.

I'd driven up to the Outer Banks from Atlanta on Monday because Angie thought I might sort things out better alone, without the pressure of work, without a telephone (though a cell phone is hard to escape), in an environment separate from my woodworking shop, away from her, though she was coming up on the weekend. It was a clear September day, and the forty-minute ferry ride made me feel as if I were separating myself from trouble. Islands can do that, even though it's an illusion.

Ocracoke is ten miles long and a mile wide, an expanse of sand and dunegrass and a few wind-skewered trees bordering on Pamlico Sound and, on the other side, the vast Atlantic. I had traded a pair of end tables for the use of a friend's white clapboard cottage, well maintained, though it was drafty and not meant for winter habitation. I had brought warm clothes, because at any time of year the sea can make a place cold. A live oak in the yard absorbed the light from the front of the house, but I had a view along the street two blocks down to the masts of sailboats in Silver Lake Harbor.

It was a short walk to the village center, but I preferred the beach or the spit that extended on the landward side into the sound. In the evenings I liked to walk there with my binoculars because birds were flying to their roosts, and the light ebbed into the salt-air haze. The lesser world of birds seemed simple compared to human beings' interactions, but anything looked at closely becomes complex. The sanderlings on the beach followed the tide in and out searching for grubs and minutiae the water brought to it, but what synapses were in its brain that allowed it to know one thing from another? How did its eyes work, its olfactory sense, its hearing? How did it know of danger? A single bird has myriad feathers for different purposes—soft breast-feathers for warmth, tail feathers for balance, tertials and the stronger primaries for flight. (And each species has specialized requirements—think of a hummingbird or an owl.) Where did this bird nest? How did it know where to go in winter, when to leave, how to navigate...