A Little Miracle

I wrote the following record of a small incident in my life a couple of years ago, while I was still attempting to digest its impact and sort out its meaning.

Story and illustration by Philip Teece

A few days ago a strange little miracle, after continuing for twenty years, came to an end.

In the last years of her life, Wendy, who was my wife, had come to love ocean kayaking. As her proficiency with the kayak increased she discovered the fun, and the peace, of solo trips to islands where she pitched a minimal tent and spent nights alone. One place especially became her favorite, a sandy, arbutus-crowned islet a few miles from Victoria, British Columbia, that she named “Sedum Island” after the carpet of flowering cactus-like plants that thrived on its sunny slopes. On serene summer evenings there Wendy enjoyed observing the seabirds, the seals and the scampering little mink who came to investigate her camp.

On one such evening as she walked the beach her eye fell upon an interesting crook of driftwood whose shape, to her imagination, strikingly resembled the head-and-shoulders profile of a raven. As one often does with an attractive curiosity of this kind, Wendy carried her weather-sculpted raven up the beach to her camp. And, also as one sometimes does when camping, she wedged it upright in a makeshift base of stones to stand, for that night, as a sort of personal totem in front of her tent. The date was July 26, 1988—twenty years ago as I write today.

How, one might ask, do I know of the raven and remember the date? In those days Wendy and I had a standing agreement: if the day on which she had planned to return dawned stormy, with high wind and a dangerous sea-state, she would not paddle her kayak home. Instead, I would come out to the island aboard Galadriel, our tough, weatherly little sailboat to assist her in a safe return. My log entry for the morning of the 27th in that July records the day as one such instance, and includes my own encounter with her iconic raven.

On another evening several years after Wendy’s passing I happened to anchor my small sloop in the shallows alongside the island that she had loved so much. When I had heated and eaten a quick supper, I rowed ashore in the dinghy and walked along the bank where Wendy’s tent had often stood. Although the place had changed somewhat, with a knee-deep tangle of undergrowth where once the grassy tent space had been, I made the discovery of one precious detail that, incredibly, had not changed. Still standing where she had set it (with the intention that it should amuse and please her for just the one night) the raven in its base of stones remained faithfully at its post, guarding the site where the tent had stood all those years before.

Winter gales, years of rain, and probably occasional visitors to Sedum Island had all spared that ephemeral little icon. The sight of its weathered form, wedged upright precisely as Wendy’s hand had set it, swept me with overwhelming emotion.

Through an increasingly long span of subsequent years I returned periodically to Sedum Island. Always, when I went ashore, it was with the slightly fearful expectation of finding that the raven was no longer there. Why, after all, should I hope for something propped up so casually in the sand to survive for such a span of years? Yet each time, year after year, I found the little totem, unchanged. Sometimes, as the underbrush grew more luxuriantly around it, I had some difficulty in finding it. But it was always there, and always its rediscovery seemed like a miraculous gift. The memory that it evoked never diminished in its vividness or its poignancy.

In twenty years of my visiting the island the miracle remained. Until last week.

One afternoon about a week ago I had dropped my anchor at another tiny islet nearby with the intention of rowing eventually across to Sedum Island in the dinghy. But I noticed something that in twenty years I had never happened to see before. Two fellows were camped on the island, very near the place where Wendy had set up her tent. A column of smoke rose from a campfire they had made on the beach. The scene filled me with an unhappy premonition.

During the following afternoon the campers piled their gear into their outboard runabout skiff and left the area. In the evening I rowed to the island and walked up the beach to the bushy shelf of level ground where, twenty years earlier, I had helped Wendy strike her camp. The little stony mound she had made as a base for her driftwood icon was still there. But the raven was gone.

Clinging to a slender thread of hope, I scoured the undergrowth nearby. I crisscrossed the beach around the fire pit as well. No trace remained of the small driftwood sculpture that had stood for twenty years where Wendy’s hand had placed it. Its fate was, I guessed, pretty clear: as they scrounged the area for suitable bits of kindling, the campers had found the raven, and had tossed it into their fire.

It is difficult to explain the intensity of my reaction. The “raven” was, after all, just a scrap of driftwood, undoubtedly viewed as nothing more than that by anyone who happened upon it while searching for campfire kindling. Yet I felt anger. And I felt a pang of sadness as sharp as a blow to the solar plexus.

Then, recovering a bit of emotional balance, I began to recognize in myself an element of monstrous ingratitude. The passing whim of Wendy’s casual placing of that token had been allowed to persist, against all odds, for a miraculous twenty years. It had been there for me during a long period of grieving; it had survived as the long-lasting evocation of a sweet memory and as an object of wonder. Was I not greedily presumptuous to demand that the miracle should continue forever?

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In retrospect, a few years after writing about my “little miracle,” I understand something else about it: Wendy was a serious student of Buddhist teaching. She was fascinated by, among other things, the Tibetan monks’ traditional practice of the mandala—the elaborate symbolic cosmos drawn in colored sands. After spending days or even weeks painstakingly constructing an intricate and beautiful mandala, the monks immediately scatter the sands and erase their artistic cosmos. Wendy once explained it to me: Nothing in this world is meant to last. •SCA•

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This article first appeared way back in issue #84. Philip Teece was the author of A Dream of Islands and A Shimmer on the Horizon.