The View-Master Experiment

The ferry came around the point at six forty in the morning, same as it always did, and I stood at the rail of the dock like I always do when I'm early, which is most of the time. The water was flat and gray and the island sat there in it like a loaf of bread somebody forgot about. I've been running survival workshops out here for eleven years now, off and on, and the thing about this island is it never changes. The ferry changes. The people on it change. The island doesn't.

I was thinking about curiosity that morning. Not in a fancy way, nothing I could've put in a book. Just that it's a funny animal. Most people think curiosity is about big things, like why we're here or what's at the bottom of the ocean. In my experience it's mostly about small things. You wonder what a certain trail looks like in October. You wonder what a certain woman's laugh sounds like up close. You wonder if you're the kind of person who could do a thing you've never done. And the wondering sits in you like a pebble in a boot until you either take the boot off or walk on it so long it stops bothering you, and I've never been any good at the second one.

I'm forty-three, for anybody keeping score, and I've been on my own most of my adult life. Dated some. Never lived with anybody. There was a guy for about four months when I was forty-one and it ended the way most things end, quietly, over the phone, both of us relieved. People assume a woman who teaches wilderness survival is tough and self-contained and doesn't want anything. I am tough and self-contained. The second part isn't true.

The ferry bumped the dock and I helped the deckhand toss the lines, because I always do that too, and then I hauled my duffel up the hill to the guesthouse.

* * *

The old monastery has been a guesthouse for longer than I've been alive. Big stone main building, common room with a fireplace that smokes if the wind's wrong, a handful of private rooms upstairs. Behind it there's a workshop where the groundskeeper fixes things, and I mean fixes everything. Boats, stoves, clocks, whatever breaks.

The common room had a fire going when I came in, and there was a woman I didn't know sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a low table, going through a box of old photographs. I pegged her for late twenties, and I was right, she told me later she's twenty-eight. She had her boots off and her socks had little anchors on them, which told me she was either a sailor or a tourist, and tourists don't come here in the shoulder season.

"You must be the workshop instructor," she said, looking up. "The ferry came in. I heard it."

"Polly," I said. "You're the one who booked a room for the weekend? Lacey?"

"That's me." She stood up and shook my hand like she meant it. "Vet tech, mainland side. I get maybe four weekends a year off and I spend them somewhere with no cell signal. It's the only way I actually rest."

I sat down across from her with my coffee and looked at the box. Old prints, mostly faded, some of them silvered at the edges the way old photos get. "Where'd those come from?"

"Box in the hall closet. Somebody just left them here, I guess, years ago." She held one up. A group of people in front of the monastery, laughing, some kind of festival from the look of it. Banners. Somebody holding a paper lantern. "I love this stuff. Old photography. I don't even know who any of these people are. I just like that somebody thought this moment was worth keeping."

That's how it started, honestly. Two adults sitting on the floor of a common room at seven in the morning talking about photographs. She knew about darkroom work, which I didn't, and I knew about field cameras, which she didn't, and we talked for the better part of an hour while the fire ticked and the workshop guy clanked around outside.

Kane, that is. The groundskeeper. He's forty-five, built with the same straight, solid frame as a fence post, been out here eight years. He came in around eight with mud on his boots and a flat wooden box under his arm, and he set it on the table between us like it was nothing.

"Found this in the workshop behind the boiler," he said. "Took me three evenings to get it working. Any of you know what a View-Master is?"

Lacey lit up. "The little red thing? The toy?"

"Before it was a toy it was this." He opened the box. This one was bakelite, brown, heavier than it looked, with a big reel of tiny transparencies mounted inside. "Fifties era, I'd guess. Stereoscopic viewer. You look through the lenses and the two images blend into one, with depth. Real three dimensions." He'd cleaned the lenses, I could tell, and he'd rigged a little battery lamp where the old one had died, which is the kind of thing Kane does without being asked.

I looked first. You looked through the eyepieces at a tiny bright square of world, and there it was, the celebration. The same scene as the photograph Lacey had been holding, but in color, sort of, faded toward pink and gold. People on the monastery steps. Lanterns. A woman mid-laugh with her head thrown back. And when I moved the lever, the next frame, the same scene from a step closer.

"It's a celebration of the harvest," Kane said. "The monks used to hold one every fall. This reel is from the last one before the place closed, I'd bet. Somebody stood right where you're standing and took these, and then somebody else put them on a reel so other people could stand there too, later, and see it."

Lacey took her turn and was quiet for a while, which I was learning was unusual for her. Then she handed it back and said, "That's kind of sad, isn't it? All those people thinking the party would never end."

"Or kind of hopeful," I said. "They wanted somebody to see it later. That's the whole point of recording anything."

Kane wound the lever back to the first frame and left the box on the table. "Anyway. Fixed it. It works. That's my contribution to civilization for the week." And he went back outside, because Kane talks about as much as a fence post too.

* * *

Lacey and I ended up walking the headland that afternoon, the two of us and her dog, a shaggy thing she'd brought on the ferry in a crate. We got to talking the way you do when there's nothing but trail and wind, and the talk got more honest than trail talk usually does. She told me about a fling she'd had at twenty-six with a coworker, both of them single, short and good and ended without wreckage, and how it had taught her she liked things she'd never thought to want before. I told her some things I'd wondered about for years and never tried, and I watched her not flinch.

So that evening, back in the common room, with the View-Master sitting on the table between us like a dare, I said what I'd been turning over all day.

"There's a thing I've thought about doing and never done," I said. "A group thing. One night, planned out, everybody knowing the rules going in. I keep not doing it because it always seems like the kind of thing that goes wrong when it's spontaneous. But planned, with rules, with people who talk first and touch later, I don't know. Maybe it just goes right instead."

Lacey turned her coffee cup around a couple times. "Who were you thinking?"

"Ethan, who runs the ferry. And Kane. Both single, both grown, both the kind who ask before they take. We'd sit down first, all four of us, and say out loud what's allowed and what isn't, and anybody can stop it any time for any reason, and when it's over it's over, no follow-up, no weirdness on the dock."

"That's a lot of rules for something that's supposed to be fun."

"Rules are what make it fun. The trick of it is exactly that. A fire needs a ring around it."

She looked at the View-Master for a while. Those people on the steps, laughing, never knowing we'd be looking at them. "Let me think about it until tomorrow," she said. "I want to actually think, not just be flattered somebody asked."

"Best answer you could give," I told her, and I meant it.

She gave it to me the next morning over eggs. "Yes," she said. "But I want the rules written down. Actual paper."

I already had the paper. I'd written it the night before.

I would like to say Ethan took it well, but the truth is he took it better than I did. I cornered him at the dock on Tuesday afternoon, while he was tying off after the last run, and I got about three sentences into my prepared speech before he held up a hand.

"You're the survival instructor, right? The one who's been coming out here eleven years?"

"That's me."

"Kane already mentioned you'd been talking to him about something. He didn't say what. He said, and I quote, 'Polly will explain it better than me.'" Ethan coiled his rope and sat down on the pilings. "So explain."

So I did. I told him the shape of it, one evening, four adults, rules on paper, talk first and touch only after, everybody free to walk away at any point right up until and after. I told him Lacey was in, twenty-eight years old, visiting for one of her four weekends off a year, and that this was her idea as much as mine by then. I told him I'd known him six years and trusted him with my life on open water, which was a different kind of trust but a real one.

He listened all the way through without interrupting, which I didn't expect from a ferry operator, because ferry operators interrupt for a living.

"Condoms," he said, first thing out of him. "I've got a box in my truck, I'll bring fresh ones. That's not negotiable with strangers and I don't consider it negotiable with friends either."

"Already on the paper," I said.

"Then yeah. I'm in." He grinned at me, and it was the same grin he gave you when the swell was up and he brought the boat in anyway. "Never done anything like that. Always wondered. Thirty-five years old and I still wonder about a lot of things, turns