So much of my summer has been spent inland staring down at the road and the white line ticking by. Biking wrings the moisture from my body and I feel brittle. I am constantly thirsty. This morning the breeze was positively wet, blue with vapor. So I grabbed my book and journal and came to Alki. Sitting now on a bench with my back to an expanding sun, my shoulders naked and probably burning a little.

Across the Sound sit those old friends: Ellinor, Washington, The Brothers, Jupiter, Constance. They're parched, barely dappled with snow. They look dark and difficult.

Even Baker's peeking out ostentatiously to the north. Visibility today is record-breaking.

All else is a contiguous blue swarming with white vessels that travel silently in and out of view. A low thrumming resonates from so far and deep that it comes from nowhere and everywhere at once. It's some unidentifiable ship of industry mining the water's depth for power. And suddenly a thunderous roar from the largest jet engine—is it the Blue Angels arriving? But when I look up, I can't find the cleft such a sound would leave. The sky is chaste, the blueness impenetrable.

And right here is the gently swilling Sound. Its rhythmic breezes and lapping waves are so much like a home. For as far back as I can remember—all the way to young mornings on Echo Bay—these make the constellation of sensations that I call summer.

Maybe I need just a little of this, a little ritual to repeat.

When I was a kid, my family camped each year at Echo Bay on Sucia Island. We'd pack our little outboards full of camping gear, float the boats at Anacortes, and motor up. We'd stay for a week, fishing, eating, and lolling.

I went annually until I was 15 or so. Each year I'd spend about half the week homesick. Just when it was almost time to go, I'd settle in and wish we didn't have to leave so soon. I didn't think much about the going or the being there or the leaving—it was just something we did. When I hadn't gone for a year or two, nostalgia crept in and the annual summer trip became idyllic. Once that happened, subsequent trips became hollow, forgettable.

Once I decided that the trip had a specific meaning, I tried to simulate the original experience and failed. You simply can't return. When you try, you aren't moving ahead, either. It's like you get caught in some eddy of uncertainty about place and purpose that makes you oblivious to future possibilities.

I think our country does this when it commodifies nostalgia—VW Bugs, Mini-Coopers, Starbuck's Frappucino milkshakes, Denny's retrofitting to something it never was, and new vintage kitchen appliances, to name a few easy ones. It keeps us stuck in subtle ways. HA!—like The Matrix.

Isn't it funny how everything can be explained by The Matrix?