To the editor:
One of your devoted followers has left our midst. In her wake she leaves people like me who are landlubbers but nevertheless who’ve been affected deeply because of her draw to the ocean.
In her mid-teens, as the Great Depression fell hard on the land, Marguerite and her friends would take their small sloop out of Marblehead harbor in Massachusetts for a weekend sail to Nantucket. I have images in my head — based on stories she told — of the Jovencita coming back into port in the midst of a high-brow regatta. How proud she felt as motor yacht sailors looked down with envy on these rumpled youngsters returning from their voyage, triumphant and weathered.
I have an original watercolor from that morning, painted by the Jovencita captain. I have a crude oil painting my mother did 40 years later, as she vacationed at Monhegan Island and painted a pair of hell-bent cat boats heeled over into six-foot swells under s threatening sky…
Holding Ground was among the other books I saved from her small library at Hancock Hall, a small nursing home where Marguerite spent her final 16 years…the power of stories, told by the likes of my mother and … other authors at Island Journal continue to generate tremendous awe and respect5, both for you and the relationship you have with all that oceans signify….having now lived within an hour of the Pacific Ocean for the past 18 years, I find that while I’ll never set sail like my mother did, nor frequent the literature of the sea with such regularity, I am finding more desire as my life shadows deepens to be ever closer to the edge where life begins…
Next summer, as was my mother’s wish, the small remainder of the Buckley clan will migrate to Bar Harbor and Boothbay for a week, from whence we’ll ferry across to Monhegan to scatter Marguerite’s ashes out beyond the required 3-mile limit…
Jim Buckley
Salem, Oregon
(Adapted from a longer letter sent originally to Institute president Philip Conkling along with a memorial donation — ed.)