The Salt House

by Cynthia Huntington

  There is a certain mystique about the striped bass. They are the fisherman’s enigma, the muse of these cold waters. Stripers seem to come by magic, to an individual call, prompting superstitious thinking. Stripers drive fishermen crazy—they stay up all night for weeks casting for them, an affliction known as “striper fever” and recognized as grounds for divorce in many households. People tend to have stories about stripers they have caught, remembering them for years, whereas a bluefish is just dinner.

  Bert and I turned homeward under a soft grey, luminous sky, picking up feathers and sticks, walking in the jeep tracks. I found a quarter and a fish bone. Neither any good to me here. The bone shone white and clean, very hard, and sharp at one end, like something useful, and the quarter glinted darkly in my hand. Why not a doubloon, or pieces of eight? Why not a bottle of pirate’s rum, coughed up from the belly of a whale? What might not rise out of these dark, shining waters, what unimagined treasure might the tide leave behind when it slides down the beach? I always think I’m going to find just one diamond necklace: there must be hundreds out there.

  Bert stopped me as I stood staring at the sand, and pointed out over the water. In the soft twilight, two harbor seals were swimming on the shoals. Playmates, or a pair, their cat whiskers twitching with curiosity, they seemed to be following us, diving and coming up as we walked along, gazing back toward the land with intelligent dark eyes. One dark head would pop up in the waves, big eyes staring wetly across the distance, then it would dive and swim along the beach, coming up after a half minute or so. One then the other. Soft brown shadows, they roam the shoreline, pretty creatures, fish-eaters, with the coarse hair on their cigar-shaped bodies, their sleek, glossy heads. The seals rose and dove, playing in the twilight surf like ghosts, spirits with kind eyes, at home there, peaceful, with nowhere they had to go. A couple of fishing boats riding low in the water steered back around Race Point past Wood End. The water was calm and warm, pressing forward and curling back. Up ahead some fishermen were setting up for the night, their squat, navy blue van catching the sun’s last rays, darkly flaring along its side.

  The eyes of fish, like the eyes of birds, return no gaze. They take in light, respond to movement, but do not meet you. Theirs is a long stare, beyond particulars; they swim in global currents, go where we can’t follow. We don’t know much about fish, where they come from, where they go, even how long they live. To see them you have to train your eyes to look through the surface glare, where the water refracts light, to look past the reflections of the sky held there, down through light glancing inside the water. The living fish is a mystery, glimpsed for a single moment when it is hauled up into the air, struggling, caught by the hunger that hooks us all. We eat, while we live, from the banquet of the living, our food fresh with life juices. This is the fish story, how life lives on life, everything nourishing that current.

  There are several brands of wildness in the world, elusive or savage, or modest and patient, various ways of living outside the world’s understanding and control. It is not necessary to choose among them. The fish may come in a rush, breaking the water, maddening the waves, straining furiously at the line, and you may pull in one after another, working yourself into a frenzy as they fight you. Or one fish may come as a single possibility out of the wide dark waves where it threads its way along shore; it may strike, or slip by without your noticing. Or maybe you will pull it in and, as in the old story, it will grant you three wishes.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  A Late Walk

  We’ve been to town twice this week, a social whirl for us, first to a birthday party, and then to a friend’s gallery opening. When we walk back at night, the dunes are a new mystery. If there is any moon, or even bright starlight, the sand glows dimly and we walk at ease across this wide, unworldly world, feeling sure of our way, and tolerant of every sound and movement. A dry smell rises as our feet scuff the sand; toads hop in the grass, and the dry bogs give off a stench both rich and rank. To stroll through a wide, shadowed landscape, over cool white sands, among the secret leaves of the cranberry growing next to the ground, is a vast and peaceful pleasure, though we do tend to scare the deer. We pass through woods and over the big bald dune, then down across the moors, quietly awake with poverty grass, scrub pines and sheep laurel. Then we cross the jeep trail where the old oak stands bent double with salt winds, its grey leaves sweeping the sand. Dessicate and twisted, bent ever more radically downward, flat at the crown, it gives an impression of constant pain. Past the crossroads the trail begins to climb and cuts through a dune into the blowout where the rusted metal hulks sit gathering shadow. We climb the path, cut across to the little footpath by the pump, then straight uphill to where Euphoria sits, dark and closed, the big padlock hanging from the latch, and all the windows shut tight.

  We come up the path and look around for tracks, to see that no one has been here, that nothing has been disturbed. Returning to an isolated place at night, there is a quick current of fear, and then a feeling of comfort once we see that all is well.

  Returning to Euphoria at night, turning the lock, pressing open the heavy door, I always feel a deep sense of privacy and possession. The inner dark is denser, blacker, than the dark that lies across the land. Inside, the air has not moved for hours, and in the gloom our things lie still, books and silverware, the breakfast dishes dry now, a hush all over the place. A house on the dunes— as if it were truly ours. Shack, shelter, hut, hull, or shell of boards, it is ours if anything is. No less borrowed than our bones, it holds our lives and we call it home, returning at night out of the wide dark world.

  We go in and do not light the lamps, but sit on the steps, drinking cool water from coffee mugs, gazing across cloud-shadowed dunes, secure in our only life, where mice play in the grasss and the old moon is just rising. The house of boards rises at our backs. We sit there long, gazing and pondering, and then we go in to bed, passing from dark into dark.

  On our second trip from town this week there was no moon and a thick haze covered the sky. The party had been loud and happy, and it was past midnight when our drowsy, exhilarated friends dropped us at the trailhead. We stepped away from the light and noise of the car, the radio and all our voices talking at once, back into the damp, overhanging trees. Our friends drove off and the highway lay quiet and black behind them. Bert flipped on the flashlight and we hoisted our packs loaded with clean laundry from the morning’s errand, and turned our faces toward the path.

  It was like stepping off the edge of the world, and for a moment I swam in panic while the woods reestablished its presence around us. Stepping forward on the path, I was suddenly very drunk. It hit me like a wave across the sandbar, knocking me sideways, dizzy and floating at once. Reeling, lifted, I was afraid to ask Bert if he felt the same thing for fear he did, and instead fell quietly in step beside him, following the spotlight of our single lantern along the floor of the woods.

  We walked under the trees for some incalculable amount of time and finally came into the open. I expected it to be brighter, but there was only a faint sensation of inanimate presences pulling back, a release into a dense, watery darkness. There was no sky, and all I could see were our feet in a bald patch of light going forward again and again across the trackless sand. A foot would appear, shift, another come up from behind to replace it, and so on continually, a blue sneaker and a white one, each followed by its likeness. We walked, and after some time I began to realize that I not only had no idea of direction, but I could not assure myself that we were even moving. I had the unnerving sensation that we were walking in one spot, that we had always been walking, that we were nowhere at all. It seemed that time had stopped, that this walking nowhere went on forever. There were just our feet treading forward in a single beam of light, the untracked sand we stepped down on continually, and nothing before or behind. Finally, in a small, I hoped not very concerned-sounding voice, I asked Bert, “Where are we now?” and after a slight pause a very quiet answer came back: “I wa
s hoping you knew.”

  We felt the ground under us rise and fall, going who-knows-where, too muddled to stop and reconsider, too dazed to properly panic. Briefly, the long slope of the big dune steadied us as we climbed, and we grasped at a sense of progress. But even this security was shattered as we gradually felt ourselves going up sideways, crablike, with no downhill anywhere in evidence and nothing like a trail or a footprint in sight. We put our feet down one after the other in a spot of light held flickering in Bert’s hand and kept walking blindly through the world.

  Drunkard’s luck, the feel of the path, the wakening of senses we don’t usually pay attention to, led us home that night in spite of ourselves. We did not find our way: we were led, not knowing the world. Had it been so dark and we been sober we might not have given into whatever sense guided us; we might have second guessed and blundered and gone off the path and wandered further a field. At least, this is what I believe. I know we reached Euphoria by abandoning effort, giving ourselves up in the most irrational way, and falling homeward. We found our beds, I think by sense of smell, as homing salmon do, as we swam home across the dark hills. Attaining the doorway, we crossed over and fell down together in the bottom bunk where we lay unmoving as the night air floated through the screens, and when the sun came shooting over the hill at six o’clock, it caught me in the eye and I rolled over once and Bert never moved at all.

  The nights stay warm now straight through till dawn, but the days are getting shorter. The sun rises later every day, just a minute or two, you’d barely notice. A few minutes absorbed at each end, less than fifteen minutes lost in a week, hardly worth considering. Waking late to go stare at the cool pinpricks of stars, the sweep of Highland Light bearing across the hills, I see the whole Milky Way spread across the sky. Already Orion is hauling himself up over Highland Light, one shoulder out of the water, following me as I turn back to bed. It is August; we sleep through many sunrises now.

  September

  I will not forget you. See, I have carved you in the palm of my hand.

  Isaiah 49:16

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Star Flower

  Bright air of September, red in the oak leaves, burnt orange in the fattening rosehips. Huckleberry blazes through piney undergrowth. We walked all afternoon in bright sun, across the open dunes, into oak and pine woods, through shadows and clearings. The leaves hung flamey and big on the trees where the path climbed steeply up from the pond. At the edge of the woods, the sand dunes opened, spilling across to the deep blue of the Atlantic, and a glimpse of Euphoria’s slanting roof. We walked all afternoon together, taking the sun into our bodies, breathing salt and loam and leaf mold mixed with the spice of wintergreen crushed underfoot. Pine cones flared their scales, their seeds cast wide, and cluster flies hung in patches of bright air, dancing in ceaseless motion, never lighting or going away. Now the rain is on the roof, tapping against the walls, a small, slow rain that will last for hours. I turn in soft worn sheets, warm with my body’s warmth, sand in their creases, and as I turn I am walking, climbing and circling back, gazing down the slope to the pond, then climbing up the hill where we rested in sunlight at the edge of the woods.

  This is the best time of year for walking, these mid-September afternoons with their clear, transparent light. The air is cooler on the dunes now, their soft flanks rippling along the horizon where the sky lifts up, unfolding rafts of cumulus, and alto-stratus whips, with side seas of renaissance blue between. These days the sun is an animate, changing presence, played in layers and shafts of light, lighting up great clouds with bright white edges and swirling, seal-grey centers. The dunes shimmer, gold hills folding into green and brown troughs, a line of pines darkening the seam of a valley.

  It is a familiar fiction that this season brings endings. This shows perhaps our prejudice, in a still-new culture, for the seed-head over the root. We see the leaves’ turning as a pre figurement of death, but it is simply a change, after all, a discarding that allows the trees to survive. The world is never any older in one season than another, or any closer to its beginning.

  Yet September, in its own right, is hard to imagine: it seems so always on the verge of being something else, so not-quite-finished with what went before. September seems not entirely to be here— it is always earlier or later, leaning back into the last of summer or charging ahead into cold, and it is an act of will to focus it, to take each changing day for itself alone. Clarity demands a quick look round, a sharp eye for detail, and a refusal to extend the evidence by implication. It is a moral act to see September, to see what is and no more, to feel it around you and to let your mind rest there.

  We took a long route today, beginning up behind Euphoria where we searched for beach plums but didn’t find any. We continued back into the dunes, heading west, down into the hollow behind Phil Malicoat’s shack, circling the bog where long reddish vines of wild cranberry trail over the sand. The berries are just beginning to ripen. Finches flitted in and out of the scrub brush, domestic, busy, making a little colony of this green valley.

  Across the open dunes, we climbed up to the furthest rim where the woods hold their line against tons of encroaching sand. We scrambled down a sandbank and the trees closed in around us. The trail was dusted with pale, greyish sand filtered down from above; black earth showed underneath. Under the trees was a world of shadow and light between branches, layers of undergrowth, a complexity of lives. These woods are old, with well-worn paths and walls of green, filled with rich soil and marks of use. Asters blinked in shafts of light, catching the sun in their tips. A tang of pine resin filled the air; the leaves glinted and shook themselves over webs swollen and sagging with dew.

  Bert walked ahead on the narrow path. His long, easy strides soon gathered speed and I let him outpace me, sensing his impatience for what lay ahead. He seemed eager and pleased with the rhythm of his walking, moving energetically forward. I lagged in my own time, looking left and right and up and down, mentally stepping off the path into the infinite distances between here and there.

  There is the path the deer took when they flashed out of sight one evening last spring, the doe and her fawn together. The little one was curious and stopped to look back a minute. Their trail is hardly visible now, a mere trampling in the bush. Purple thistles sat high atop their stems, tightly bunched like the compound eyes of flies, and a fallen tree lay across a small clearing, its bark halfpeeled away, moss growing furry and wet across its roots. Milkweed seeds blew toward me like great photos of atoms, listing side to side and slowly winding, making visible the currents of air that drove them. Fat bumblebees bumped against the asters, white and violet clusters springing up on weedy stalks. When I see the asters I know it is September. The last flowers of summer, they bloom just as other flowers are fading. Aster is Greek for “star,” and though they take their name from the stiff radiating petals around their heads, they seem star-like also in coming out so late, to shine against a darkness of green. Their petals open bright and showy, but at the center of each flower a dull yellow eye looks soberly out on the world.

  The ground was soft, yielding underfoot, but I left no prints where I walked. So many people have passed here, the woods keep no trace. I found an envelope leaned up against a tree, addressed in an old-fashioned, looping script: “To Stephanie.” Inside was a card with a psalm on it: “The Lord is thy keeper. The Lord is thy shade…” And, “Congratulations on your confirmation, Always, Adele.” The illustration was a watercolor drawing of an improbable sky, all lavender and gilt, with streams of silvery light pouring down from an unlocatable source, some artists’s view of nature perfected. I eased it back into its envelope, soft and wet like a large white leaf, folded it once and placed it carefully inside my back pocket.

  Bert stopped to wait for me at the fork. One trail, the one to the left, leads out to the highway, and then to town; the other takes the long way down a hill and up again to circle a marshy pond, then finally reenters the dunes further west. I found
him standing stark still, studying something before him on the ground. When I caught up with him I saw a small bird, not much bigger than my thumb, lying in the dirt, all black and green, with a patch of raspberry at its throat. One black eye stared upward, fixed on the sky. Its belly squirmed with tiny ants, who went back and forth and in and out with businesslike energy, as if inspecting rental property. Bert took out his sketchbook and began to draw: penciling the line of the beak, fold of wing, and the infinitesimal flurry of the ants; he put these down quickly, for future reference, while the black eye gazed past him into space. He finished drawing it and we went on, taking the right fork, the long way home.

  We walked easily side by side as the path widened. Summer has yielded a deep familiarity between us. Now we relax, and take in the world together, at ease in one another, two minds seeing two worlds. Bert notes detail, isolating items of interest, often drawing them in his sketchbook, while I tend to daydream, drifting along between worlds, taking a wide impression of the day.

  The pond appeared gradually, magically below us at the foot of the hill. Protected by thick undergrowth and steep banks, its fresh water feeds crayfish and birds, turtles and salamanders, all summer. Mallards are stopping over there now, and black ducks. I’ve seen a blue-winged teal, and once a great blue heron, shrouded and gaunt, stood for a long while unmoving on shore, like someone thinking over his whole life. Swallows chase after insects in the twilight, and at night the great horned owl feeds on them all, rising up silently in the dark.