Rock Salt Journal

Editor's Note

Five canoes, eleven people. We’re of varying abilities. Most of us can paddle straight, the others get where they’re going eventually. Nobody capsizes, though my one-year-old niece leaps from the boat in the first hundred feet. She bobs to the surface, sputtering, shocked by the cold and the gall of gravity. She howls even before my brother plucks her from the water by the loop of her life jacket.

It’s becoming an early fall tradition. Some combination of us have journeyed into New England’s wilds each of the last four years. I suspect we’ll keep it up. There’s a nervousness that grows in me at the end of summer, a wheedling recurring thought that I’ve wasted the year’s beauty, that it will be winter soon, and I’ll only experience the air in quick frozen bursts. The others are likely less anxious, hiking and canoeing are fun, so why not do? And so, we do.

This year’s excursion is leisurely. One-year-olds can’t hike. We paddle an hour upwind. The water is dark beneath the dusky sky. My boat is heavy with jugs of water and jars of tomato sauce. We spread out across the water until every boat is indigo, and the sky is nectarine. We camp on an island and shovel Annies’s mac and cheese down our throats in silence. The sunset watches us. Already, I feel peaceful.

We sleep, and then we lounge. Some of us canoe to the mainland, where we chop wood for the fire-that-cannot-go-out. We eat hotdogs and s’mores eight of our fourteen waking hours. All day, we watch the hills around us, fall leaves, embers in the green.

“Look at that,” someone says, pointing at the hill. An hour later, someone else says it again. It becomes our motto. There’s nothing else to look at, but it feels worth remarking on.

I’m proud that Rock Salt Journal has gotten this far. I’m proud that I’ve kept it up, season by season. When I started, I was sure it would be an effortless endeavor, slap a couple short stories together, and bam, there’s an issue. I enjoy it more than I thought I would because of (not in spite of) the time and effort spent. It’s like a biannual marathon, and every time I reach the finish line, I’m amazed. This thing that didn’t exist before now, this is a good thing. These are good stories worth reading. This is good art.

Bam, there’s an issue.

— J.B. Marlow, Editor