Epilogue

This collection has come to represent a time in my life that stood apart from the rest of it—an age, an era, a passage. Echachis, Stone Island and Maltby Slough became like time capsules that I could open if I wanted, but that rested firmly on the continuum of the past. Even as I felt these experiences falling away from me, a tide swept me onward, into the future.

At first I was hesitant to collect these stories. At the age of not-yet-fifty, who was I to write a memoir? But in this rapidly changing world, memoir is increasingly relevant. I realized this during the writing process, when trying to convey the experience of life before cellphones. Already, this reality has been forgotten by people of my age. And just as I can’t conceive of a life without antibiotics, contraception or the right to vote, those younger than me simply cannot conceive of daily life unconnected to friends, answers, advice. In the short span of twenty years, much has changed. And because we forget so easily, we need to be reminded.

Change continues, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but stories help to review those changes and show the full range of human experience. For me, these stories act as an inner compass, staying my course in a changing world. They reiterate the importance to me of living simply, resisting society’s lure of wealth and status, the need to keep a meaningful personal connection to the planet’s vanishing refugia—the places that make real this wild, fierce thing we call life.