The Salt House

by Cynthia Huntington

  We spoke to one another in resonant, calm voices. Meanwhile I was looking at the sky and gradually, abetted by a certain detached concentration, I was able to feel myself turning over, to make it so the sky was floating below me and I was sailing, with the planet pasted to my back far above it. The stars were revolving as usual from east to west, around the North Pole. Now I looked down at the stars. I had come out for the eclipse but it was the stars I watched, growing brighter as the moon dimmed. We rush, falling, into those distant lights, the stars where we can never, ever go. Most of them are further away each time we look, accelerating into the distance and someday there will be no starlight at all. No one will lie here and search the sky—what we call “here” will have disappeared. I felt serene as if we’d lived long ago, as if our life here were a warm, affectionate memory.

  Watching the stars, these thoughts descend calmly. You shift focus and forget for a while to identify with the small person drawing breath after breath in the shelter of a sand bank, lying on a sleeping bag with pictures of cowboys on it. Instead you become the mind of that person, limitless and cold, sailing out above the earth.

  Bert had been studying the constellations all summer and he began to point them out as they appeared. “Over there, that’s Sagittarius, that’s mine,” he said. I never had much interest in those myths—I knew these points of light had no relation to one another in deep space; their patterns described, as I thought, nothing real, distorting the three-dimensional universe to a false theatrical backdrop. Patiently he would trace Draco, Ursa Minor, Perseus, the long “W” of Cassiopeia, but nothing about these shapes was obvious to me; only the Big Dipper really looked like what it was supposed to be. Stories of kings and gods, anyway, what could they mean?

  But lying there like that, gazing long into the sky, for moments I could see the sky flatten out and imagine figures scrawled across the black. Patterns created by our viewpoint, confirming us. That we have a viewpoint, that we are in fact here in this place and time, to see the shining lights as they appear to us.

  The astrological signs, and their constellations, come to us from the Chaldeans. Their scrutiny of the heavens was long and thoughtful, revealing nothing less than a divine order. How must it have been to think like a Chaldean, to scan the sky for prophecy, predicting eclipses of the sun and moon, to calculate, for the first time in human existence, the length of a year? They managed wonderfully accurate observations, patiently watching, night after night, in the clear desert sky, a whole priesthood of skywatchers, seeing a fixed universe above a central earth. The people of Nebuchadnezzar II, who rebuilt Babylon and destroyed the temple of Jerusalem, the priests who measured the year and the cycles of the moon, could, with all their learning, have counted forward to this very night, this eclipse where we lie watching the ancient moon go dark again. It was all foreseen, changeless, part of the story they told; and at last only the stories matter.

  We no longer believe those stories, and the stars seem farther away from us than ever. No longer do we look to the sky for prophecy or observe festivals in accordance with the rising of certain stars. Who knows the summer constellations and the winter constellations and follows their changes through the seasons? We can’t believe that gods reside in that visible heaven, that Orion hunts in the night, or see the Centaur draw his bow. Those old shapes have meaning only when we think of navigating, using them to gauge movement and direction if we were lost without instruments—but who among us gets lost anymore, even venturing so far off the path that the sky can open for us? The view from the front of Euphoria tonight is perhaps three hundred trillion miles. Looking up, our gaze penetrates this atmosphere, this solar system and galaxy, to look beyond its own lifetime and be met by arriving light. A typical distance between stars is five light years, or about thirty trillion miles. Traveling by jet I could reach the nearest star in about six million years.

  On a clear night we may see two thousand stars. The Milky Way spreads over us, the “path of ghosts” in Norse mythology, one hundred thousand light years across, its tail flared out from the engulfing center, swirling like water down a drain. Writhing in slow time, this shining trail appears to be going out, perhaps being pulled into a black hole. The stars we see, which may or may not still exist, give us the wrong impression. The universe is essentially empty—and still expanding. Atoms are mostly empty space, protons and neutrons spinning in clouds of little electrons, held together by invisible forces. The nucleus is only one quadrillionth of the atom’s volume. If you enlarge the nucleus to the size of a bowling ball, the atom would be twenty miles across. My body is a void, and an “empty quarter” of the cosmos has recently been found—a void, measuring thirty septillion cubic light years. A three and twenty-five zeros, written like this: 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, a place with no forms or light or mass, only cold dark matter.

  But we’re here. Briefly, in the path of ancient light, in an empty universe, there are places of presence and we are one of these. I look at the sky; an ant crawls up my leg. I hear the voices of the others near me, warmth and motion as we lie here, falling out of orbit, racing toward the center of the Virgo supercluster, sixty million light years away.

  When Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem in 587 BC, his army broke the bronze pillars of the temple and scattered the people abroad, so they became a people not of a place but of a law and a book; people held to this day by the story they kept. Then there was Nebuchadnezzar himself, maddened by prophecy, on his hands and knees in the fields, eating grass.

  It is important what story you choose. The new ones we tell ourselves, about light years, quasars, quarks and cold matter, are stories of vast distances and unimaginable, dematerializing reality. These stories amaze and chasten, but also alienate us. The stars now remind us of our powerlessness and insignificance, our isolation, signaling the end of our world and time.

  We need to imagine the story further, to refigure it without denying what we know. We need a new story about the stars. Though the boldness of numbers makes us catch our breath and marvel, and the vast calculations which dismiss the material world titillate our minds, we humans cannot live with utter alienation. The story needs to draw us closer, to bring the universe once more into us through our bodies and felt rhythms.

  The story might again be one of navigation. Sailors crossing an uncharted sea to new worlds were no more lost than we feel when we imagine the galaxies flying apart. Can we steer by these stars still—can we use them, so far out there ahead of us, can we follow the stars out of time as we are flung toward Virgo, and beyond?

  The moon, however, is ours. We have touched her, and brought back rocks from her surface, her very body. We have photographs of earth rising over the moon’s horizon. Those voyages to the moon are circular; it would be counted disaster were they not to return, whereas star journeys are sent outward, drifting endlessly into the dark.

  Intimately as we have touched her, she touches us. Her tides draw up and back on this narrow strip of sand—we are flooded and constricted, then released—water converging and dispelled. These tides are in our blood. We see her face change in the sky from day to day; we wax and wane. Corn Moon, Pink Moon, Hunter’s Moon, these designations corresponding to earthly seasons still hold our imaginations. On a full moon, an electric energy prevails on the land; we lie awake, thrilled by a ghostly light. It’s not the brightness alone that keeps us awake—I could turn my face to the wall—but her wakeful presence charging the world, a spirit shining out of the deep backdrop of night, holding the black sky at her shoulder.

  At the moment of full eclipse, when the last sliver of moon, a chip of light, a clipped fingernail, a slit in black cloth barely present in the deep black sky, was covered up, another moon appeared. This moon, in the exact place of the old white one, was a dark and fiery red, a coal of a moon glowering above us. It changed all at once from a nothing of passive, dissolving light, into an angry ghost whose fierce light rang against the sky, a red disc one-sixth the size of the world,
looming near and round and personal, not to be mastered. Set against the sun, we cast our big shadow across the moon, and the emptied sky protested.

  This lasted only moments and then the shadow moved onward, uncovering the moon from the other side. The first glint of cool light put out the fire. The moon began to grow again, and the stars blinked out. By two in the morning there was a quarter moon with light clouds blowing across it. Bert and Susan went inside to sleep, and I lay on the sand, still traveling.

  I woke at dawn, stiff and cold, a quilt over my shoulders, the sleeping bag bunched up beneath me. The full moon hung over the southwest dune, opaque and yellow, the eastern sky greying with light. As the sun approached the horizon, it took all color for its own, bleaching the moon to shell-white, then melting it like ice. I shook myself and got up, walked across the yellow sand and up the steps into the shadowed dawn of Euphoria. Susan was in my bunk and Bert lay sprawled across his, so I rolled out a mat and lay down on the floor to sleep.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Another Fish Story

  Walking toward Race Point last night after supper, down where the sandbar is uncovered at low tide, Bert and I ran into a fishing party out from town. Bluefish were running alongshore, setting off a great rush of excitement on the beach, a lot of shouting, and movement in every direction. We stopped to watch. A deep-tanned man with strong-muscled arms and a big voice played the expert; he walked calmly backward, pulling his fish into shallow water, keeping the rod bent and the line tight as he shouted out instructions to his friends. A pot-bellied man wearing a t-shirt which proclaimed “I Am A Wild And Crazy Guy” lost three in a row, pulling up too sharply, not taking time to play the line. Finally, he landed one and stomped back up the beach in a black humor. Their wives were there with them, taking pictures of the fish, of the fishermen, of each other, and the big blues arched and flapped on the sand, flashing sharp, pointed teeth, and the men laughed and pulled the hooks out of their mouths with pliers, moving quickly, in a hurry for more.

  Then everyone was catching them. A motorboat pulled in close to shore and a van stopped in its tracks and three men got out and waded out on the sandbar to cast. Everyone was catching the strong, blue-green fish that jerked the line, bent poles almost in half, that flashed out of the water, breaking, and were hauled up on shore. It was exciting, gorgeous with the scent of slaughter, the bodies coming in so fast, long and lovely. Blue-green scales with silver underneath turned dull as the life went out of them, no light in the eyes. A dune tour, and then another, stopped to let their riders out. Men in Bermuda shorts took pictures of other men’s catch, pictures of fish in the air, fish on the beach, and we stood among the crowd, feeling their excitement sparking up like drops of water shaken in the air. Then we walked on.

  “Why don’t we ever go fishing?” I wondered, not remembering that we don’t have equipment, or know how.

  “You fish, I’ll take your picture,” Bert offered, framing me with his hands and crouching down. I posed, hand on hip, chest thrust forward, pouting. “Beautiful, baby, keep it coming!”

  Further down the beach we could still see the fishermen, their figures small in the distance, moving jerkily like marionettes. We turned, following the curve and sweep of the shoreline away from them until we could see nothing. By the time we came back the fish, the fishermen, the boats, and the onlookers were all gone and the beach was empty again. Blues are like that; they go by all at once in a hurry, and you just have to be there when they are.

  This stretch along Race Point is known as one of the best surfcasting beaches on the east coast, and is a long-standing source of controversy. Thousands of people come from all over New England to fish here every summer: amateurs and sportsmen and commercial fishermen. But lately the Park Service has taken to closing parts of the beach to off-road vehicles for interims, in an attempt to protect endangered terns and piping plovers, which nest here. Every year we suffer the same outcries in the local newspaper, as fishermen argue with the rangers and local conservationists over beach access. The idea that a handful of tern or plover chicks can close down a strip of prime summer beach for weeks doesn’t make sense to those who worship the sacred mystery of the internal combustion engine. The idea of running down tern chicks in the wheel tracks doesn’t sit right with the other side, so things get self-righteous on both ends. Eventually the beach-buggy contingent is portraying itself as composed of itinerant hunter-gatherers and subsistence fishermen (in $35,000 fully equipped micro-vans) while the other side is evoking Thoreau and Gandhi and claiming to faint at the sound of a motor. None of which has much to do with the terns, the plovers, or any sensible accommodation thereof.

  Historically this beach has been a place of industry and sustenance, not a preserve in any sense we might mean today. It’s been a garbage dump and a morgue too, you might as well argue; until the turn of the century it was common practice for townspeople to throw their garbage—everything from vegetable peels to cast iron washtubs—right into the harbor. But the men who fished and gathered firewood on the beach in those days went on foot, and this limited their impact. It’s good to see the beach used instead of only visited, to renew the commerce between lives that runs so deep in the imagination of this place. I’m of two or three minds here—I can’t take the arguments for driving on the beach seriously, and I deplore many of the assumptions that drive them. But I like the fishermen.

  Along the coast up in New Hampshire, bluefish have been biting swimmers. Five people were treated at a state beach after bluefish bit their feet; we read about it in the paper. The bathers suffered cuts on the soles of their feet and puncture wounds on their insteps and ankles. It was a hot day, and the blues had some mackerel cornered in a cove where people were swimming. A heavy surf had churned white water into a froth, and a whole mob of blues went charging through, slashing left and right, mistaking flutter kicks for fins and feet for dinner.

  Fish bites man. The papers must have been elated, but it’s not hard to believe when you’re talking about blues. Anyone who has seen bluefish in a feeding frenzy can attest to this creature’s appalling proclivities. Fast, voracious, vicious, a school of blues will charge full speed into a school of smaller fish, striking at anything that moves. The arrival of a crowd of bluefish on the grounds must send the same bolt of panic through the sober citizens of the deep that the approach of Viking ships produced in the matrons of seaside villages eight hundred years ago. We saw a kill last summer down toward Phil Malicoat’s shack, just five or six yards off shore. It was the terns we saw first, from a distance, wheeling and dive-bombing over the spray, frantically zigzagging the air. It looked like the surface of the water was exploding, blue waves detonating into white, as if the terns’ dives were scattering the surface. When we got closer we saw the water thick with sand eels, flipping and thrashing in a charge to get away from the bluefish who were chasing them in toward shore. The sand eels pressed forward in confusion, one on another, sometimes leaping straight out of the water as if evolution could speed up in an instant to give them wings. The waves glistened with thousands of finger-length silver bodies as they were driven up the beach. The beach itself squirmed with stranded sand eels. Only a few feet offshore, the water boiled with bluefish, their torpedo bodies rising and plunging, as terns and then gulls wheeled overhead, screaming, dipping down to pick up bits of torn flesh that floated in the water. The birds were careful not to dive completely under the water for fear the blues would eat them too.

  Like many such attacks, this one simply ended when the bluefish abandoned the chase, leaving behind a rouge-tinted water, floating shreds of scales and flesh, and seagulls massed along shore feasting on the beached remains.

  A bluefish can weigh up to thirty pounds, though the ones I’ve seen have been not much over ten. They are long, stout fish, with blue-green scales, shading to silver on the belly, a pointed snout, and a big mouth full of sharp teeth that can cut through nets, bite through a line, or take a man’s finger down to the bone. They like r
iptides and clashing currents, are creatures of chaos, and will strike at anything that moves. All appetite and rage for destruction, they chew up much more than they can consume, and bite off somewhat more than that; they will even eat and then regurgitate in order to gorge themselves again. Dark and fatty, their flesh has the wild taste of the sea in it, slightly sweet, with a penetrating odor. The meat is dark and comes away in ragged strips, a heavy, sustaining dish that stands up well to strong drink. Walt Whitman always maintained a particular fondness for a bluefish dinner, savoring the hearty flavor of the fish. Fishermen say you can tell when a school is nearby by an oily slick on the water, and a faint smell of cut watermelon, or some say cucumber, whereas striped bass, for instance, are said to smell like thyme.

  If bluefish are the brutes, the surf’s barbarians, the striped bass is the glamour fish of these waters, particular, even sensitive, as the bluefish most definitely is not. Their long, compressed bodies have a particular elegance as they wind along the coast, following baffling, indiscernible patterns. They appear flashing in the surf, a metallic sheen along their sides, a hint of gold, and dark olive green, two fins on their backs pointing upward. Where bluefish come in mobs, their schools sometimes covering several acres, full-grown stripers tend to be solitary, or to travel in pairs, hugging the shore between the tide levels, where they find crabs, squid, small fish and razor clams. Toothless, they have to swallow their dinner whole—this makes them think twice before striking and earns them a reputation for being finicky, or even intelligent. They are said to like “live water,” the turbulent, oxygen-rich shallows, but are extremely disturbed by surf. Elusive and unpredictable, loners in the classical sense, they are a highly prized catch. Their flesh has a delicacy, and an elegant texture, all firm and white, that the restaurant crowd goes crazy for. A big one can bring good money, if you can bear to part with it.