In the 1987 Francis Ford Coppola film Barfly, based on the life of the poet Charles Bukowski (1920–1994), when Faye Dunaway asks Mickey Rourke if he hates people, she is told, No, but I seem to feel better when they’re not around.

For myself, though I am no misanthrope, I have struggled throughout my life to join gladly the company of others, impatient as I am with the perplexities, ennui, and disappointments oft engendered by such commerce, which vies equally with my appetite for revelation and renders partygoing cumbrous and friendships elusive. Others detect this nimbus of unease and register that I am condescending and aloof, for which I compensate by being generous. When the dissonance becomes too great, I adopt the vague air of a poet to pilot my disappearance into the garden, where I interrogate the growing grass and think about the epitaph Descartes took from the work of the Roman poet Ovid, Bene qui latuit bene vixit, (One who lives well, lives unnoticed)¹ which is the rub. In context, Ovid is arguing that each of us ought not to stray from our proper rank; on its own, the famous line, variously interpreted, is a prescription for loneliness and despair. Although I contentedly made a living solving problems, I have rarely enjoyed solving puzzles, but wanting neither loneliness nor despair for myself, and withal the irksomeness of unifying my reticence and my noble instincts, I have tumbled to the realization that plumbing the matter of how I might help others not to feel at sea is a useful gimmick for outflanking my inclination for solitude. To know me is to cope with my neuroses.

Despite the penalties, a mad few have persuaded themselves that my company is at least occasionally worth keeping, and I wheedled two such friends into teaming with me last Sunday on a motorcycle ride around Whidbey Island, which is a favorite destination of mine. The weather forecast included a mere suggestion of rain for the afternoon, with skies that were otherwise to be only partly cloudy and warmed to an early‐spring temperature: the beau ideal of an April day to be spent knocking about on motorcycles in western Washington. We eased our kickstands onto the deck of the ferry at Mukilteo and prayed the skipper deposit us at the dock at Clinton, where, twenty minutes later, we were climbing the hill leading away from the shoreline. Our first order of business on the island was to stop at Whidbey Coffee at the side of the highway on the town outskirts, where the absence of a table at which to sit in no way inhibited our chatting while sipping our drinks and fussing with our gear. Then, it was time to do some sightseeing.

Possession Point is the southernmost landform on the island. The land was purchased in 1999 by the state park service; yet, although there are signs on site identifying it as a state park, a residence for a park ranger, Bing Maps labels it as a state park, and a state‐issued pass is required when parking in the gravel lot, the state parks website makes no mention of the place. This is because the state classifies the land as state property rather than as a state park, which is a distinction arising from consideration given by the state in 2016–2017 to ridding itself of the land as surplus. I always imagine that the ride through the farmland and forests to reach the park is an enchanted roller coaster, known only to those who have petitioned to redress a mind ill at ease from the burdens of care, and whereafter alighting, as if having passed through the wardrobe in Professor Digory Kirke’s house, one has arrived at the park revived and eager to meet tidings of great pitch. There once was a dance hall by the shore, as well as a distribution center for explosives. A fish reduction plant here that smelled horribly and closed in the 1950s extracted oil from carcasses for use in paint and other industrial products. We walked onto the gravel beach to study the view across Possession Sound to Picnic Point and beyond to Puget Sound, the water green beneath marine haze as cool air moved lazily aside to make way for the approaching hora sexta, when the sun would contrive to be seen. There is a deep hole in the earth nearby just at the extreme of low tide line that is 75–100 feet across. Locals claim that the bottom of the hole has never been found and that the largest octopi in the world live there: we were cheered to be in their neighborhood.

Having found ourselves in harmony with the island, it was time to eat. One of my treasured places for doing so is Prima Bistro in Langley, and we mounted the stairs there just as a luncheon table at the front window had been set to await our very arrival. Seated and bound by a skein of convivial voices; sharing plates of chickpea fries and Castelvetrano olives; anticipating a croque monsieur made from pain de mie smothered with jambon de Paris and Alpine cheese; all was well with us, and I was thankful for the grace of my companions to agree to leave their home to come to this place to break bread and to speak of their lives.

A little‐recognized feature of the central island is the incorporation of 17,572 of its acres into Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve, the only national historic reserve in the United States, which was established in 1978 to preserve, protect, manage, and interpret the area involved, including woodlands, open prairies, wetlands, shorelines, sloping uplands, dozens of historic structures, and the entire town of Coupeville.

Ebey was Colonel Isaac Neff Ebey of the Washington Territorial Volunteer Militia, who was among the first white settlers on the island in 1850. His death in 1857 came at the hands of a group of Indigenous raiders from British and Russian territories who were exacting revenge for the death of a chief the previous year at Port Gamble, where the USS Massachusetts had interrupted their slave‐seeking attack on Coast Salish people and skirmished with the war party, killing that chief and 27 other invaders. Colonel Ebey, who was not involved in that 1856 clash, was shot on the porch of his home and then beheaded.

When I was a boy, my sixth‐grade class spent the night at Fort Casey Historical State Park, where we told ghost stories around a campfire and spent a day hiking the bluffs overlooking Admiralty Inlet, concluded by an examination of Admiralty Head Lighthouse. Today, a portion of those bluffs are within the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve. These landmarks were named for the British Board of Admiralty by Captain George Vancouver while on his 1791–1795 exploration of the west coast of North America, during which, on May 18, 1792, he sailed past the site where the fort and the light appear today.² I have vivid and fond memories of that sixth‐grade field trip, including our science teacher, Mr. Gibson, frightening the wits out of the entire class with his dramatic telling of the story of Ebey’s death and the legend of his bodiless head that haunted the bluffs.

All of those places from my school days may be found today within the Reserve, and, after eating our lunch, we continued north to visit.

We parked our bikes near the lighthouse and meandered around the old fortifications and through the grass atop the bluff, where kites were flying and the Strait of Juan de Fuca ahead pointed the way to Asia 5,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean. I surveyed the Inlet, knowing I will be sailing past in a few weeks to explore the San Juan Islands and hopeful that whales will escort the boat through these waters. It was a blue‐ribbon affair, basking in the sunshine with my friends, a belly full of good food, my motorcycle nearby, the sea before me, the laughter of families around me, with history so present that my countrymen have designated the surroundings a land unique in the nation to elevate its stories.

A Chinese proverb tells us, A peasant must stand a long time on a hillside with his mouth open before a roast duck flies in.³ Our fortune this day was made upon the wager that gemütlichkeit trumps estrangement; that hope is the attendant of intrepidity; that playfulness begets comity; that friends are worth having. We visited a distant part of our precinct together, and it was glorious.