Free Marrow Island by Alexis M. Smith Page A

into the distance. After a moment he glanced back at me. I must have looked green, but he had the decency not to notice. He offered his hand. I switched my cup to the other hand and took his with my warm one.
    “Carey,” he said. “We didn’t meet properly yesterday.”
    “Lucie,” I said. His fingertips were cold, but I felt an urge to hold on to his hand. Tethered to him for that moment, my insides calmed, steadied by another body.
    “You’re a park ranger?” I asked as I let go of him, hoping he hadn’t noticed my hesitation, the way my hand fell to the bench between us, bracing.
    “Yeah,” he said. “What about you?”
    “Journalist,” I answered, watching his expression. He seemed undeterred, which wasn’t always the case with government employees. “I write about the environment.”
    He nodded. “What are you doing out here?”
    “An old friend lives out here, at Marrow Colony,” I said. “Have you heard of it?”
    “It’s a farm collective or something like that, right?”
    “Something like that—we’ll see. This is my first time.”
    “Strange place for a farm—given the history. I suppose the land came pretty cheap . . . ?” He trailed off. He seemed to expect me to fill in the blanks.
    “I guess so.” I shrugged, but I was thinking about it myself. How the Colony had ended up on Marrow, and how they had managed to live on the island for so long, after the devastation that occurred there.
    Orwell was getting smaller and smaller in the wake behind us. My eyes started to tear up from the early morning chill, my cheeks and ears burning. I was wearing a wool sweater under my life jacket, and under my jeans and cotton T-shirt, an old pair of silk long underwear that had belonged to my mother. She had loaned me the long underwear for a camping trip in high school, and I had kept them, remembering how she used to wash them by hand and hang them to dry in our little bathroom on Orwell.
    Coombs hollered something over his shoulder, but I couldn’t hear. Carey went to have a word and came back. He sat down and leaned down, closer to my ear.
    “He said it might be rough ahead. Almost there.”
    The swells hit. I felt it in my lungs first, in the cavity of my chest. A sudden vacancy, then a swift welling up. Empty, then full. Brimming. I broke a sweat and my vision perforated into thousands of pricks of colorful light, like pixels. I managed to turn and lean as far over the edge of the boat as I could to throw up. We hit another swell and I lurched forward. I felt Carey’s hands on my waist, holding me in the boat while I puked.
    When I was empty and the worst passed, Carey helped me back to my seat and put his coat around me. He poured me more tea from Coombs’s thermos. Then he sat right up next to me and started talking, like a voluble stranger at a bar.
    He was new to Washington, he told me. He had been in Montana before, at Glacier. I leaned over with my elbows on my knees, and he did the same, so that I could hear his voice, right next to me, over the motor. I sipped my tea and listened, tried to concentrate on what he was talking about: wildland firefighting, forestry school, working for the government. Chris Lelehalt had deputized him that day at the clerk’s office; most park rangers are deputized; many carried firearms.
    “But not out here,” he said. “People love their public lands here. No anti-government fanatics shooting at rangers, setting tripwires and spikes on service roads.”
    The state wanted to reopen Fort Union State Park, he told me, on the other side of the island from the Colony. I nodded that I knew where it was; Katie and I had gone to summer camp there. It was a decommissioned military base and historic site from the Pig War in the 1850s; the campers had all slept in the old barracks.
    “How much do you know about what happened here?” I gestured to the ruins of the ArPac Refinery. We were coming up close to it. The docks were wasted; the charred, weathered