The fish are a gift: vital, immaculate bodies of streaming light, each one a shining fire. Cod, mackerel, minnows and bass, bluefish and tuna (called “horse mackerel” by the early settlers who would only use it for fertilizer), flounder, skate, and squid, and shark: the fish are strangers, citizens of another realm. They live inside shifting currents, always moving ahead and sideways, wriggling and darting, or they hang suspended in water, slowly flapping their fins against the current. Slippery fellows, queerest of folk, the fish is a gift, the fish is a mystery, the fish is food, who knows what a fish is?
Torpedo shaped, lacking limbs, they propel themselves forward by weaving movements, working side to side against the force of the water they must feel touching them always, heavier, denser than the air we know, more real. Cold-blooded, the oldest vertebrates, they are twenty thousand species, in fresh and salt water. They go by singly and in rushing schools, following light, prey, and flowing currents. They strand themselves following some necessity onto shore; they leap up in the water, slip and flash, breaking the surface, panicked by feeding schools below, some powerfully muscled, some mere slivers of light. The fish disappear under tons of water into the dark below, and tons of fish are hauled out of the waves, squirming and heaving, smacking the wet decks, violent with savage power.
We use fish to catch fish, an imitative magic, turning their hunger back against them. We catch them by the mouth, by their hunger, their open-jawed need, and haul them in on lines where they thrash and flail and bite the air. Fish are hauled out of dark water into the glare of headlights—their last vision is of blinding light on a dry, unbreathable shore. We catch fish in nets, in waving filaments that take the shape of water, that billow and waver like water weeds or tendrils of shadow. Gulls follow the boats, rolling and screaming as the nets are pulled in, birds of pure voracious appetite, holding the reflection of the sea in their eyes.
The clamor of the terns increases as I walk along, cutting just below their colony. A few birds make threatening sweeps at my head as they fly over. I wonder how they’re doing since the storm. There are chicks running back and forth, and parents feeding them, but it’s hard to judge the population without going in there and counting, which I will not do. All their effort is bent at driving off intruders and it seems the least favor to leave them well alone. They endure gale winds, rain and sun, jeep traffic, and attacks by hawks, foxes, gulls and owls, to raise their young on this strip of sand, riding the waves offshore when storms lash the beach, fleeing under the shadow of the great horned owl, and returning to meet the morning with a shrill hunger, crying and wheeling after fish. All day we glimpse them in the distance, at the edge of our vision, hovering over the water with fast, shallow wing-beats. They drop into the waves with their bills pointing down, and climb the air, catching a rising current, and the tide circles gracefully to turn and return, bringing squid and schools of sand eels, crabs, and small fish into the shallows.
Down in front of Frenchie’s shack a little motorboat has fetched up on shore, where it sits half in and half out of the water, snagged on a sandbank, swaying mildly in the current. It must have broken its mooring and washed down from Chatham or Orleans, to float up here onto the bars. The park rangers will notify police down cape this morning and somebody will come and claim it, tow it home, little runaway.
The little boat bounces in the ebbs and swells. I walk along swinging the bat against my thigh, keeping time. When I get closer I see that it is intact, though swamped. It is a small boat, comfortable for three or four people, its red plastic cushions hanging down at funny angles. I feel an urge to replace them, and I do, and then I get in and sit down, my feet in three inches of water, settle the bat across my knees, and face out to sea.
The terns fly busily back and forth overhead, satisfied to ignore me now that I have settled on my own business and none of theirs. I sit by the water’s edge, rocking, as little waves break and slosh up the sides of the boat. Waves drag stones back and forth on the bottom. Should I be a fisher? Set sail, cast out a line over the water? It’s a fine morning for starting out. High, clean winds and open skyways ahead. My eyes follow a shadow of fins underwater, a slick on the surface, a cloud of gulls far out. The terns flash and plummet into the swirling surf. Shrill and driven by necessity, with a wild bright hunger, life spends itself constantly. The world moves forward in great circles, following ancient, wide-armed lines of regeneration. These currents do not fail—wind and tide, fish and gull, the sandpipers running up and down the beach with their insatiable, panicked appetites.
The fishermen have gone home to sleep. The boy, rolled into bed without waking, floats in the rocking tide of first slumber, deep grooves of memory settling in his brain, the memory of waves splashing up, the truck rocking side to side. Back up the hill, the shack will be still and quiet; Bert may be turning over, sliding deeper into the covers, the dim light gathering around his face. I’m hungry too, and wanting company. I think I’ll head back, maybe fry a few eggs, wake him up.
August
Since i have been walking back and forth to town to work every day mon through fridays and sometimes on sat, i have, each time i have come upon fresh deer tracks, told Sal about it… these fresh tracks always excite me in the sense that, as i walk to work over the dunes through town, i know, when i see them, that the deer have made the tracks just an hour or so, or sometimes, minutes before me.
—CHARLIE SCHMID (“Dune Charlie”)
Excerpt from a journal
TWENTY-TWO
Meridian
Now it is August and the days are slow. We’re strong and lazy, fed up on sweetness and the fat of the land. Chores slip from our hands as we linger at summer’s table, talking quietly over coffee, extending every pleasure as the season burnishes to gold.
In town the guest houses and restaurants are full: “No Vacancy” declares itself from every window. Traffic moves sluggishly as Route Six bloats like a python that has swallowed a springbok. Cars wait at the bridges, squeezed forward by the peristaltic pressure of rotaries. Now tourists and townspeople troop out to the beach all day—hikers, jeep picnickers, fishermen, swimmers and sunbathers. Yesterday a group of teenagers trying to be human kites flew dangling from winged harnesses, eight feet off the ground, pulled in turn behind a fat-wheeled pickup. The girls’ shrieks rose over the snarl of the truck’s wheels grubbing down in sand, sending mingled sounds of pleasure and gasoline engines floating up the hill. We lounged on the deck in afternoon shadow. A purple balloon wafted overhead, blown from the public beach at Race Point, two miles west.
Flies hang by the door all day, stupidly content. In July we slapped them down, hunted each one vigorously to its death. But now we wave them away, show them the door, the hell with them. They go slowly, fat and dirty and unafraid, herded from the door they will never leave, where they wait endlessly to be let in or out, buzzing lazily in the key of F.
Back among the dunes, high-bush blueberries the size of BBs hang in a dusky haze over bogs presided over by jays and mockingbirds. Mosquitoes swim in the air with vicious, prayerful whispers, fainting on a breath of insect repellent, but returning to float just out of reach, failing again and returning. Underfoot, cranberries store up their sweetness, beginning to show red. August sees little new growth, but a fulfillment of forms, as fruits ripen slowly from within, swelling and hardening, elaborating each cell in the long, generous light of late summer. Gardeners call this “sitting time,” these hot, humid days when things come simply into their own. Now as the sun works through the flesh, the world waits and does nothing, becoming ever more fully itself. And don’t tell me you are tired of summer. It isn’t true. It isn’t possible. Perfect ripe tomatoes falling in wet slices across the plate. A sky like this.
We wake in the same small room to the sound of waves, butter our toast at the table and hurry down to the beach. The morning’s chores will wait, but this particular slant of light, this slightest breeze whispered up from the south, smelling of grass and sun-war
med sand—these won’t come again.
This morning high winds had buffed the sky up to a clear, Chinese turquoise, with not a cloud to set it off, a sky you might go and live in. Down here at eye level not a breeze moved. The water sloshed gently up onto the sand, splashing over our feet as we walked into it and out again. A white motorboat cut in close to the beach with a sawing noise, its prow spanking up and down in the surf. Sand flies rose up at our ankles, murmuring lasciviously.
We walked east toward Thalassa, where two generations of park service signs guarded the tern colony: the old “Nesting Terns: Keep Out” notice superseded by a later warning that read: “Caution: Young Birds in Tracks.” Now the nests are empty, the colony has scattered, and sand forms little mounds at the base of each signpost—a line of wooden poles staggering off into the distance. The citizenry appeared calm, ignoring us as we tracked the water’s edge. The birds still gave their high, shrill cries from time to time, flying back and forth across the water, but they have lost their accusing tone and seem addressed less to any mortal than to the elements themselves and to the shimmering landscape. These are leisurely days for them, a pause between the anxious work of nesting and the long flight back to South America. They inhabit this time easily, swooping overhead, making little chases back and forth—perhaps youngsters practicing their dives—seeming, briefly, willing to be a part of this scene, instead of constantly protesting their condition.
There is a fullness on the land these days, a saturation of light and a feeling of calm. I saw the marsh hawk this morning, but the tree swallows have flown away and the song sparrow is unnaturally quiet. The red-winged blackbirds have disappeared en masse, keeping out of sight in the marshes while they go through their molt. They won’t be seen again until September, when they reemerge to form huge flocks before starting their migration south. Mama and two young sanderlings, picking along the strand, seemed not in a hurry for once, world enough and time.
We walked the beach quietly, steeped in our interior rhythms. Our progress was halted every few yards as Bert stopped to pick up the most unlikely objects, turning each one over in his hands with a wondering look, as if he had never seen such things before. Mermaid’s purses, odd bits of frosted sea glass, sand dollars with incised patterns of stars; he would inspect each find closely before placing it in his pocket or casting it aside.
A whelk’s egg case lay tangled in a heap of eelgrass, alongside a particularly loathsome spider crab, recently deceased and already beginning to stink. The crab’s toad-shaped body and long scrawny legs were coated with sea-moss, a diatomaceous ooze housing algae and tube worms: at its best the creature was always hideous. Bert bent down and carefully disentangled from this mess a string of parchment discs a foot and a half long. Nearly weightless, it formed a continuous loop like a corkscrew, wafting in the air, translucent and fragile as old parchment—a made thing of another realm. He shook it lightly and a sound as soft as sand grains fluttered down its length, the shells of hundred of tiny, dead whelks shifted through endless compartments making a dry shushing sound like rain.
Bert goes out into the dunes every morning, moving through the landscape with a pen and a sketchpad. He’s just finished the piece he’s been building since spring. The reed is stiff now, bleached to a hay color, and the driftwood poles have given up all their sea-dampness to the air; they stand white as bones. He can’t add anything now; the materials resist any change. He’s taking photographs, the only record that will remain when the piece is taken down.
Yesterday he returned to say he had named the piece: “Secret.” Naming always comes last: now it exists for itself, taking its place among the pines and undergrowth, in the intimate space of the bog as the season completes its business around it.
On my best days I can sit for hours at my desk. Draft upon draft, the poems grow and are cut back, change and turn, pulling me with them. The pleasure is in giving myself over to it, to lose the consciousness of any distance between myself and the work. I answer to nothing and no one here, forgetting the world entirely in these hours. This is not the work of production, or even the dutiful pleasure of chores, but a devotion to something larger than I can ever achieve. A poem may be finished, in time, but the work cannot, must not, be finished. To be “finished” in that sense, would be to fail. “She’s finished,” they say when inspiration has fled, and not in congratulation.
Much of what I love about this place is the concentration it allows. In the silence, thoughts and images are intensified, distilled like salt from seawater. To meet the great, shining surface of the beach and the vault of sky over sand and water, to be a single particle in all that space, and then to return to the small interior of the shack and hold all that inside me—this is a weighty pleasure.
Bert’s methods are different. He moves through the world, measuring space with his body. The walk across the dunes is part of it, the sky and wind, the smell of the hot sand. He sits and draws in a windbreak, his back against a wall of sand, staying away for hours.
Sometimes I envy the activity of his work, how he uses all his senses and his body. This lack of separation between self and world intrigues me, though I’d never be capable of it. When he draws in the afternoons in the shack he likes the radio on, letting music or baseball scores accompany his moving hand. He seems to let sound, landscape, sense impressions, flow through him as he works. I cannot write to any voice beside my own, or follow any language but the sentences spinning out of my own head. I sit at a table with my back to the water, my head down, block out the world and build it all again.
Morning catches a rhythm, builds and crests, and slowly recedes. Bert returns to find me gathering my papers into a pile, sweeping the tabletop clean. Was anything accomplished? I’ll leave that for tomorrow to tell. He stacks his drawings under the bed, on top of a summer’s worth of drawings; he works on them sometimes in the afternoons, or cuts them up for collage; sometimes he just looks at them endlessly without deciding anything. There’s no hurry. It’s August, high tide, high season. The intense white light of July has lengthened and turned a golden color. Time slows a little, loose silk with light running through its folds, slack water, a ripple of grasses. It’s late summer, rich and ripe, and every drop of it is gold.
TWENTY-THREE
At Leisure
Water keeps what the sun gives it all day. Full jugs set by the rose bush wait through morning. By noon there’s hot water for bathing. We strip off our suits and soap up in the high grass, pouring the water over ourselves in warm, trickling streams, washing through our salt-stuck hair, across arms, belly, breasts, and rounds of buttocks, the water running down our legs and over our feet, back into the sand, sloughing between the packed, slick grains, scouring salt and brine and suntan oil and sweat and sand and minute flakes of kelp from our skin. The white places our clothes covered seem doubly naked now. Inevitably, several times a week, the sightseeing plane will catch us standing there, wet and gleaming in our skins, with suds foaming our hair, and will circle over low, a reliable guffaw for the tourists who gape and go off, but though we shake our fists in the air and shout back at them, nothing can touch us. We’re the savages of three miles from town, brazen, unvisited by missionaries. Children of the sun, we worship water—the vast salty ocean licking us clean, and the deep, single, sweet well-hole whose spring we prime and pump and carry and hoard in jugs and covered buckets, that is the single source of our life here.
When it came out of the ground, spurted from the steel lip of the pump, Bert’s brown arm flexing to work the lever, then mine in turn, it was cold. Cold of a thousand years underground, rock caves with no sun, the first spring trapped in the ground forever flowing. It kept that memory, changing slowly all day as the light moved across the stone. Cold water touches us deep inside, fills our cells with a mineral light, and leaves a taste of iron in the mouth. We bring the fresh water with us, uphill. Heavy and still in the pail, its weight pulls our arms down. Covered in shadows, we hide it; it remembers what it is un
til dark.
Entering the board room, we blink in shadow, set the pails in the far corner under the stove, and cover them with tin plates to keep out the dust. I lean over to tug a comb through my wet hair; fat drops of water splat on the boards and disappear, soaking into the wood. Pulling my cotton robe loose around me, I feel the pleasures of my body, clean and sound, the long bones, and hard soles of my feet, the sweet brown flesh with its rising hunger. I will live and be strong forever.
Bert goes to hang the towels and swimsuits on the line, while I assess our options regarding lunch. Most days anything will do— soup from a can, or noodles in broth, something warm and quick—always crackers with peanut butter if nothing else comes to hand, maybe with olives on the side. One week we ate vienna sausages with hot mustard over and over; for another spell it was sweet peppers on toast. Today we’ll stretch the remains of last night’s chowder with a can of creamed corn and the last of the good bread, a little hard now, but good for dipping. We eat quietly with full attention, piling our plates high, and move slowly away from the table as we finish.
The Salt House Page 13