Anatomy Trains

Last week, while the entire world was experiencing a loss of liquidity in the strange but useful energetic metaphor for love called ‘money’, I took off for as much literal liquidity as I could manage.

The one part of it you don’t want liquid is the boat itself, 35′ of ‘frozen spit’ (fibreglass) designed to keep the water out, but otherwise designed to dance between two fluids, wind and sea.

Here are a few images from the time I spent on the ocean:

The first few days, while the landlubbers were hot, we were in a grey dome of fog, a couple of hundred feet wide, like the grey dome of my brain, fried from assembling the book. Islands and rocks and the occasional fishing boat would loom up out of this greyness - reassuringly on schedule due to our radar and GPS - and then fall away again. The sameness, hour after hour, gets to you, but the water itself is in constant motion, even under the fog.

The huge seals of Matinicus Rock, sensing us somehow in the fog, set up a racket, shuffle into the water, and soon their heads are around the boat - curiously doglike in their confident wariness. Overhead, sea ducks (guillemots?) shoot out of the fog like bullets with wings, careening purposefully across our brief field of vision in straight lines.

Add the liquidity of night, slowly weaving itself into the fog in these summer evenings, long after the fog itself has gone orange and purple with the sunset.

The wind makes the air liquid, suddenly coming up on our second day, the mountain of Isle au Haut bouncing the fog into the air above us, the sails sculpted into shape by the fluid flow of the air molecules. The scud, tattered remnants of the fog, flies above us like the grey flags of a retreating army.

The boat is in constant motion, and the only time I stepped ashore in those first days - onto a dock in Frenchboro to find some eggs we missed packing - it is the solid dock whose floor seems to be undulating, not the boat. This illusion persists after the cruise - my house’s floor seems liquid too as I walk on it.

The tide brings another aspect of liquidity, that of pouring. The tiny motion occasioned by the moon (mostly) on the meniscus of the ocean means that 10 feet of water pour in and out among these islands twice a day. Sailing with the tide is a joy; sailing against it a challenge. As we round Ironbound, with its tall cliffs of granite looking in the afternoon light like a set of Easter Island faces, stone giants locked into the cliffside, waiting perhaps for their king, since there is a huge throne at the end of the island, an absolute straight ‘chairback’ (natural, not quarried) with a rounded back and arms of stone on either side …

Ooops, got pulled off into solidity - we were describing the liquidity of the tide - when we rounded between Ironbound and Jordan, we could literally see that the water was higher on the other side of the passage, and we were fighting that pouring water for every inch. But Tycha is true, and we made it uphill to the Porcupines and Bar Harbor.

The stark, shardy liquidity of the seawater when we drop into it on the next hot morning from the ten-million year liquidity of Penobscot’s soft-edged tawny pink granite rocks, the velvety liquidity of the quarry pond we dive into on Green Island to rinse off the salt.

The next day, sailing past Placentia, we see a strange shape on the shore that looks like a round orange tent or something.  We tease the boat toward shore to see more closely, and it is the body of a baby humpback whale.  About the size of a pick-up truck, this poor unfortunate is upside-down on the shore, its flippers and flukes akimbo, the hydrodynamic streaks of its underside visible on top.  The underside should be white, but the sun has tanned most of it a vivid orange. A bird perches atop the carcass, which seems to have dried rather than bloated, although liquefaction in the heat of July and August is an inevitability.
Sad death - why? - of a fellow mammal.  We tease the boat in close, but due to tide rips, the bold shore, and fluky wind, we cannot disembark to offer more than a hail and farewell across the water.  It reminds me of my earlier encounter with the whales on the Stellwagen Banks (see the first entry in “Sea Stories” under Tom Myers in Explore).
The last morning, we awaken to a tumble of the heavy humid air you find in the morning in the tropics. We know we’re in for some wind. Today the dance between the wind and water is passionate, heavy breathing, sweat, and the occasional uncoordinated bump and grind. The waves - the swells from Bertha, the cross chop from today’s wind - look like pewter mountains coming at us, but we rise each time to their peaks, only to find a hole in the ocean on the other side. The boat drops into the hole, the spray flying over us, the shrouds whistling, and the boat, bucking like a horse, must be reined into position second by second, a totally Zen exercise that keeps us in the very moment for hour on hour, while the sun and wind burn the skin off my face.

Gone is the yielding, accommodative liquidity of a calmer day. Pushy, solid, metallic, with a jarring, slapping force, water becomes another element. Thales thought everything was made from different forms of water, and in the middle of this run I believe him, as everything around me seems water-born.

By the time we turn into our bay and the still-building wind chases us up the river (”And stay out …”), we see the result of another form of liquidity: Fire. While we were gone a freak fire took out one of the last local shipyards, the huge wooden building going up quickly in a series of explosions - propane, varnish, paint cans, acetylene. As we rounded up in front of it, there was a gap in East Boothbay like a kid with a missing tooth, a couple of tug-boat hulls still smouldering among the wreckage. No one was hurt, but a lot of folks are out of work.

By the time we are at the mooring, the wind is over 30kn, and has a solidity that makes it hard to speak into. White caps like a Barbara Cooney painting keep us from the mooring, and we have to seek the shelter of an island to get the sails down and creep ignominiously back to the mooring under engine. The wind is so wild we must leave everything aboard for tomorrow and we barely make it to the dock in the little dinghy, so insistent is the wind.

One more liquid: the absolute gratitude of a hot shower after all those days at sea.

(more…)

Speaking of the boat, I spent 7 hours at the wheel yesterday without a break.  I escaped the endless list of the home front at 2:15 and beat my way downriver (but uptide and against a freshening SW breeze) into the bay.  These springtime days bring sudden strong winds, cold and sharp-tongued as your 5th grade teacher. By the time I cleared Thrumcap Island, I was rail under, hard on the wind, chop spray flying overhead and salting my glasses, riding the edge out to sea with straining sails and sheets.

The goal was Damariscove Island, a long, thin treeless and haunted offshore island, the last before the deep Atlantic.  Damariscove is distinguished by having been the stopping place for Maine’s first tourists, the first ’summer people’. English fishing boats followed the explorers over to gather the cod when they were too numerous to count.  They set up on this island as a shelter and resting spot, to store gear they wouldn’t have to carry back to Old Blighty, as a place to dry the salt fish, and as a gossip and trading post. It was far enough ‘off the main’ to be safe from the ’savages’ that prevented permanent mainland settlements.  Although no one knows when the visiting first started, it was certainly in full swing in the late 1500’s.  The island is named for Captain Dameril, who set up a store there in 1608.  It is hard to credit that maybe thirty ships sailed out of this tiny sleepy harbor fully 400 years ago.

But the Pilgrims, landing a couple of days’ sail south on Cape Cod, and desperate after the deadly winter of 1620, sent a boat up to Damariscove in the spring of ’21 to get fish and other things, and were generously assisted - so this summer settlement helped save the Pilgrims.  It was also the rendezvous for English, French, and Dutch ships making their way to the colonial settlements in Virginia and New Amsterdam (New York).  Men drank, gambled, quarreled, bartered with each other and the Indians – in other words, a typical commercial seaport.

The harbor is mightily thin and open to the southwest, which makes it a challenge for single-handed boats from that day to this, so I rounded up to take one of the moorings near the old Coast Guard station, only to find at the crucial moment that my batteries were dead.  (The floating switch on the bilge pump had packed up and run them down.)

In a high wind, you have only a few second to get a mooring secure, and I missed my moment. I couldn’t hold the mooring pennant, and without an engine was pushed ignominiously up the tiny harbor to rest bumping against the rocks.  Desperate, breathing hard – it was a falling tide, I was alone, and I had been in this situation before without good result – I used the whisker pole to push myself off before I got stuck fast, got the sails up again, and – shaking - short-tacked my way up the cove past the ledges to the open water.

I decided to spend the night closer to shore, as I would have no power for lights, stove or anything. Starting at 6:30, I opened the sails and made my way shoreward, fighting the ebbing tide, but helped by the wind that persisted long after the sun had gone to bed, I decided to try to make it all the way home, and arrived back on the mooring at exactly 9:15, far into nautical twilight – I put the sails away mostly by feel.

Except for a 30-second run down below to check the bilge, I had not left the wheel for 7 hours.  It was a great lesson, and one that ended with a welcoming committee (no one should have been out alone on such a windy day, so Annie, Quan, Peter and Sarah, knowing I was out in the airy dark, were anxiously awaiting my return) and with me in my soft bed – not bad therapy.

I come from fish. My father dealt lobsters. I deal with salt water and chat with fishermen most every day of the year. But I’ve never seen anything like this. I set out for the riverside park I can see from my room just as the rosy-fingered dawn had its nails over the horizon – never made it. I’ll try another day, but I was sucked into the huge covered warehouse of a market – first the vegetables, where I recognized daikon and a few others among the unfamiliar shapes and textures, but then I was in the fish market. You have to get there earlier to see the whole fish auctioned, but this has got to be one of the busier places in the world, narrow walkways of near-flooded stone filled with walking smoking people, two-wheeled wooden carts with a man within the pull rail, and really deadly electric and diesel trucklets that turn on a dime without warning. The alleys are lined with tubs filled with – well, let me see what I can call up:

Clams of every size and shape from tiny vongole to huge geoducks that squirt you as you pass
Fresh water eels, twenty to a tub, their necks neatly broken, or literally nailed to the chopping board for skinning

Salt water eels, iridescent platinum and mean-looking

Octopi of every size – from keychain to ‘Lord save me from encountering that mo’fo’ – tentacles as big as Popeye’s arm, many turned over to present like a rubbery cactus flower, others seemingly melting together in the tubs, others still moving within plastic net bags
Crabs on ice – big legged snow crabs, other emperor-like in their crusty tiaras, little ones – but no lobsters I could see until finally I found some Maine lobsters, far from home and in reconstituted water
Conches, mussels, razor clams, scallops, whelks, and one huge something somewhere in between them all, massive numbers of these presented on the large triangular half shell
Packages of uni, endless packages of bright orange uni ($35/packet – but I couldn’t eat all that within its due date – sniff)
Sea squirts - ancient and inedible looking, large tumescent pickles floating in tubs
Squid – again every size from sliver to forearm, and every color of Turner’s rainbow
Red fish, blue fish, one fish, two fish – Fugu (the poisonous blowfish) alive and sedentary in tanks, everything else laid out in every variety imaginable.

And of course the huge tuna that produce the maguro and toro, being sliced by experts now that the auction was over. In one stall, three men filleted a tuna about 4 feet long with a sushi knife (samurai sword? – no, a sushi knife) about 6 feet long, one at each end (the man at the blade end being rather gingerly, and the third lifting the 30 lb. filet from the bones – a perfect job.

“Oh, Lord, “ the saying goes, ‘Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small!” But after viewing this incredible bounty – I has walked a steady 20 minutes dodging the bumper cars of these ‘outamyway’ delivery trucks before I emerged on the other side – the reality of overfishing – this simply can’t be sustainable – had mixed the wonder with rue. And of course Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd are at this very moment trying to stop the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean from harvesting another 1000 fin whales and minkes for ‘research’.

We humans are so ingenious to organize all this and yet so headlong in our exploitation of every available market. Economic collapse of the fisheries- a canary in the ecological coal mine – can already be felt in every corner of the world I have visited. The corner where I live has done as well as any to make lobstering sustainable and to develop aquaculture, but we are still not on top of it all. Economics and ecology both come from oikos – household in Greek. When the inevitable economic collapse comes – recession, depression, whatever sand jams the gears of our commodity engine – we will survive. But if the underlying ecology collapses – we lose some essential part of the food chain like the bees or some small herring we used for bait which turned out to be crucial – then we humans will die in droves, miserably and pathetically, and we will have no one to blame but our greedy, headlong collective selves.

The trouble is that no one person is evil here, everyone, from the whaling boat captains on down, are just ‘doing their job’. If only the line between good and evil run between groups of people, then our duty would be clear. The trouble is that the line between good and evil winds through the middle of each human heart.

Quan calls it my mistress, I call it my indulgence (especially after looking at this year’s bill), but let other people find their joy where they may, sailing just plain does it for me.  Even though the tool is artificial - at least mine is, frozen spit and aluminum and nylon; nothing natural (wood or canvas) about it - the dance is all animal.

Beset with obligations, Annie and I instead played hookey yesterday, setting off at noon.  We were spit out of the river at 1:30 by the tide and strong west wind, and Annie persuaded me to lay off for Monhegan - along trip for an afternoon.  But the air burnished so clear that each flame-leafed tree is etched on the shore - unusual for such fast-moving air so near the water’s surface to stay so dry - so making a run for something was irresistible.  The waves were high with some cross chop, and she horsed and slewed the nine miles to Monhegan in a mere hour and a half.  Empty now of tourists, we roared through the harbor dead before the wind, seeing almost no one, the boats and wharf uncharacteristically deserted.

We pulled around Manana, and tightened the sails for the trip uphill to home.  We were flat on our side, rail under, climbing and slamming over the rollers, spray flying above us and in our pockets.  Both Annie and I could feel how little sailing we had done this summer, our balance and footing shaky, more than it should be at this time of year.  Also, though it has been warm here, there was a bit of October in this wind, so we were a bit stiff-jointed from the cold and from managing the wheel of the plunging boat.
Halfway across, I saw water coming through the floorboards, and there we were, full of water and bouncing along at 6 knots.  The pumps - the electric and my flying hand on the manual - kept up with it, and it stopped as soon as we rounded Thrumcap and were upright in the river, so it must be a leak up near where the deck meets the hull - something else for Mike to look at this winter.

The tide and the last tongues of wind helped us up the river.  We couldn’t bear to turn on the engine even though it went from civil twilight to nautical twilight, and we landed at the dock under sail in the dark, putting her to bed for the night by feel and the light of the waxing moon.

But this is it.  Today I will pull off the things that can’t freeze, and then take it down to Mike’s to be hauled for the winter. It will be six months before I take the helm again, six months that will take me to Canada, England, Japan, Norway, Germany, as well as all over the States.  But nowhere will I find the country I enter when I leave the land and take to the sea, dancing between wind and water to commune with my God.

Distress is the state of having a different view of what you think the world should be from what your senses are telling you the world is, and my situation with my neighbour is distressing.  She has upped and given her house not to her daughter but to the son of her boyfriend.  The boyfriend was a sweet old codger, but the son is a skulking little weasel.  He will get the land when she sheds her body and meanwhile he wants to use it for a large fishing pier, though she thinks he is just rebuilding what was once there, a small personal dock.

The neighborhood is objecting the large pier, but he has poisoned her against us all.  She’s an old coot, opinionated and spiteful, but we all love her for her independence and her spunk - she’ll be out there most of the day at 92, chopping at a stump, whittling it down until nothing is left.

She thinks Quan and I are after her land, but we have enough trouble with our own, we just liked having someone elderly in the neighborhood, made it variable and fun.  Quan took extra food down to her, and I carried her wood and shot the shit, gossiping away about current peccadillos and strange events of 50 years ago when she was in her prime and I was but a stripling, cadging her doughnuts.

But I haven’t spoken to her since June, when this thing came up.  Today, though, as I chopped and lopped the bruch to make room for the dock to go on land at the top of the ways for the winter, I saw her flag - raised every day and taken down every night, despite her deafness and macular degeneration - today it had been raised upside down, the universal naval signal for distress.  The flag is torn, and seeing it buckle and furl upside down was so sad.
Should I believe her and see what’s up?  Break the silence? Or leave her without confrontation in her last days?  I think we should all go see her together, and confront this wrong, but we haven’t built up the collective courage yet.

Woke this morning as usual at 5 o’clock, and as usual stumbled to the loo to to pee.  What was unusual was the silence, but I didn’t realize until a few light switches and a faucet that hissed like a snake what it was - the electricity was out.  The house, usually alive with machinery, was as a mausoleum.  I worked on my book by battery on the computer until it ran out, and then ran in the early morning mist.

Mid-October, the height of the leaves this year, and it is still balmy, balmy enough for fog.  Around my three-mile run, the houses are all dark, but the sun awakens, blasting the fog up in slow motion, setting the leaves alight - the sun is Agent Orange, the leaves are napalm, the world is at silent war.

No, it’s peace.  Coming back home, we discover from clocks that it’s been off since 12:30, and the freezer is starting to melt.  Fuss with the rigamarole of wires and switches, and the generator chugs into life.  The house breathes again, and all our conveniences are there, but only at the cost of burning gas, disappearing dinosaurs, and carbon footprints slouching toward Bethlehem.

The New York bodyworkers didn’t like it when I warned last weekend of the coming economic storm.  It was sobering in the middle of an otherwise elatory weekend.  We therapists float on the froth of the affluent society - the whole cappuccino will be off the counter when the foecal matter connects with the atmospheric conditioning device.  We’ll be bartering for sessions, as the economic sieve shakes us all down.  Food and energy will cost most of our salary.  The strong will survive?  No, not the strong, but the most adaptable.   How adaptable has our profession made us?

Even the boat needs the shore - the batteries have run down while I was in NY, and the bilge pump can’t run.  I’ve been keeping the boat pumped out by hand, but I have the battery on shore on the battery charger, and after the lights have been back on for an hour or two, I take the battery back out and start the boat, the possession I prize for not using fossil fuel - it has an engine, but I use it little, is in fact connected inevitably to the system grid. We’re all co-dependent.

In these October days, the sun goes white, while the sky darkens, taking the sea with it into a cobalt blue.  Probably the last day I will be able to sail this year, I set off downriver beam reached to a westerly.  “She was sailing herself, from the river to the bay, I could feel the breast of swell beneath my feet …” - this song has been working in my head all summer, but I can’t find the best next lines.
The trees are at their height of fire, so that even the islands were aflame.  By the time I was free of the arms of the river, it had backed around to the southeast, and I shaved the White Islands and skirted around Outer Heron and its ledges.  I said hello to Damariscove, but then climbed up the easterly to Pemaquid to see how Tammy’s house was progressing, then eased across John’s Bay to Crow Island.  I beat my way up the Thread of Life, and then laid off around Pumpkin to reach up the river again to the mooring.  A world to a world in six hours.
It’s all sparkle in the fall, glinting off each wavelet, cat’s paws of wind on the water - the threat of winter and the last sigh of summer all at once.  I am glad I went - today is gloom and drizzle, and I mjust back to work.

All week I have had to be ‘good’ in that sense of being ‘on’ with a lot of different people. Not much refuge for a recluse. Tonight, with the last of the meetings wrapped up and Quan taking off with friends to ride in the moonlight, I took a large slug of rum - two, i’sooth - and with my jaw thus loosened, I set off rowing. The night was exquisitely still, the river flowing glass, the pentacle moon wraithed in vapor, the trail of swirls fractaling out behind me as I cleared the boats of the cove out into the river proper. With one of Enya’s slow Gaelic carols on the iPhone, I am in the middle of a Scottish loch, magically cold within the hills and almost solid under a winter sky.

One of Mark Knopfler’s sea shanties paces the run across the channel, the rhythm marred occasionally as an oar hits a lobster pot. On the other side a long inlet runs up for a couple of miles. James Taylor’s steady picking and warm chords take me into its funnel, narrowing like some lazy southern river heading for a rapid, the oars rising and falling in time to the music, the bow singing as it broke the water ahead of us.

As the banks narrow down and I must pick my way more carefully though the curves, Etta James makes it a hot Louisiana bayou, schools of little herring sizzling out of the water ahead of the boat with each stroke, the overhanging branches closing out the moon until finally - no headlamp in the iPhone - bumping into the end of the salt water tide in total blackness.

Headphones off, I let the silence sink in until it was no longer silence but a rich blanket of sound - the plops and clicks of nearby insects or fish or birds, way up in this isolated, people-less cove. It is a little creepy, a little Stephen King, but wonderfully my own at that moment - ultima thule for this night’s journey. There is nothing to harm me, but my ancient self hidden under the social veneer doesn’t know that - my imagination puts anacondas in the black branches, and giant squid under the black surface.

I reverse the oars to align the boat back up the funnel, pumping out of the miles to the bouncing steel ball of Ry Cooder’s guitar. It feels so good - my feet are planted wide on the thwart before me, and I yield into my legs as I reach down and forward with my arms, not bothering to feather in the windless night. My pelvis rocks over the sitz bones, riding up along the ramus toward the pubes, arching my back. As the oars dip into the water I lean away from my arms, feeling the back of the arms engage right up over the shoulder and the bones elongate within the flesh. My legs push me back, twisting all those bones together from foot to hip into one piston rod, rolling the pelvis the other way on the seat toward the tailbone.

Push-yield-reach-pull - I’d been teaching it all last week, and now the tensegrity feeling of this frog-like movement overtakes my body as if I am leaping over the water - hands, then feet, hands, then feet. My breath falls into the easy rhythm, the movement creeps into the stiffer areas of my spine, especially the chronic panicked flexion behind the kidneys. Suddenly, with a fluid rush the kidneys open into the movement. The spine creaks into action, old water flushing, mossy shingles of locked open facets closing, adding to the movement as the enclosing X’s of the Functional Lines links the upper and lower parts of me in a new but familiar way. The arms reach as if pushed from the adrenals and the arching kidneys; the push of the feet linked all the way to the psoas to embrace them again.

It all feels wonderful and effortless, but like any new movement of course it isn’t, so I am grateful when the music fades to allow me to hear the ring tone, and I stop to drift as I talk to Misty, excited about her impending leap into college, the headphones doubling her lilting voice in stereo. As I drift I pass a wonderful scene of the moon shining through a row of trees and lift the phone to take a picture while I am talking to her. Everything on this little hand-held computer is so intuitive - I haven’t needed to access the manual yet. Within a very few clicks, you can get from any one thing to any other thing. An easy on-and-off switch avoids mistakes and saves the battery. The map bit alone is worth the price of admission.

Bending to it again with Roslyn Turek wailing out Bach’s English Suites, I fly through the warm August air toward our cove, where I finally turn to see Quan waiting anxiously on the dock with a light, “Where have you been? We’ve been looking all over. What if something happened to you? It’s eleven o’clock!”

I pluck out the earphones. “Why didn’t you call?”

Finally I got out of the river for a week, sailing Tycha with Annie then Quan on Penobscot Bay.  Making my way home on my own for a few days, the winds were light and variable so I made my own adventure.  On the last morning though, the dawn flew in from the north, driving silver scud like scrubbing brushes across the sky above Monhegan.  By the time I finished breakfast the boat was pitching fore and aft.  I set the jib and mizzen only, leaving the large main furled, sailing upwind in long tacks straight into the wind over Pemaquid Point.  On my side in the sea of heaving green, I was quite comfortable though unable to leave the wheel for more than a few seconds for the three hours it took to make it to the Hypocrites.

It seemed to be abating, so I put up the main to sail up the river to home.  Immediately regretted it. The northerly funneled down between the banks of trees, slapped me sideways with water coming into the cockpit over the coaming.  Every tack was a mind-rattling fight for control of the sheets.  The water was tropical green now, but with white spume coming off as gusts topped 30 kn. in gusts.

I veered off the wind a little and limped into Jones Cove - rested, ate, shortened sail, and skittered up river on the last of the flood at 7 knots with no more than a working jib and the mizzen.

Needed a minute to stop shaking after I made the mooring - such was the nature of the exercise.  The wind is quite solid at that speed, and it’s good enough if nothing goes wrong.  But my boat is old and that’s a tall order.

But funny to have made a cruise where I first time soloed my way onto Brimstone to collect rocks, and explored the coves on the swelly east side of Ragged, and did the Turnip Yard upwind by sail (that was with Annie - wouldn’t have done that alone).  Finally, after a full summer of doing nothing but going up and down the river, I have a cruise - and the biggest challenge of the week is coming back upriver.

All this recent travel has left me a bowl of stewed prunes - soft, wrinkly, and full of farts.

One packs a lot into this week at home - Quan and I have to readjust to each other, each having been ruler of our respective domains. I need a day of de(com)pression, and hours in the office with Tammy to keep Kinesis rolling.

So it is with great pleasure - no matter how I grumble - that I turn to the physical work of making the waterfront ready for the summer.

Memorial Day weekend is the traditional cusp between winter and summer here, spring being non-existent in Maine. This year is no exception - it’s the end of May and spring has been so cold that we are just between the forsythia and the lilacs even now, when suddenly we have a day so hot and still none of us can move, and in 48 hours bare trees are fully-leaved, the apple trees are in full blossom, the rhubarb has bolted, and the yard is yellow with dents-des-leons.

And the black flies appear in the garden, making weeding a misery. Annie, fully sleeved and wearing her bug-net hat tucked into her shirt, looks as if she has adopted radical Islam. Mosquitoes are bad - and they’ll be here soon - but the two weeks of black flies are worse, going for your eyes and under your hair in the back of your neck, leaving bleeding holes that scab and itch.

But I to the shore must go: the rowboats must be launched and commissioned, my mooring chain pulled up from the bottom and the bridle and ball reattached, the water turned on and flushed in the summer cottage, its swimming float and runway lifted into place, an iron rod driven through the rusty metal fittings, and most of all, my father’s old scow must be wedged down the ways into the water, in a yearly ritual even though it gets very little use any more.

Each task requires more tools than I remember to bring, so at first I curse my inefficiency and resent the time, but gradually the joy of work returns, and I warm to the simple use of muscles against something other than these computer keys, even welcoming the blisters and splinters and gouged knuckles as I lay the wooden ways with grease, lever the heavy old scow 1/2″ at a time at each end with a long iron pry until it gets over the lubrication. Then each pry gets a gratifying three or four inches until the big old thing hits the water for another year.

Over a couple of days, the working waterfront loses its winter feeling of terse abandonment into the luxuriant burble of bobbing boats, rubbing against the dock like happy kittens nosing your hand. The last task, after the heavy old outboard has been clamped and cursed into grudging life, is to fix the fendering - the rope and fire hose that lines the docks - so damaged in last fall’s hurricane (see the entry ‘Black-Clad Char’ for a description of this storm).

The fishermen are there too - the lobsters have just started to move from their winter torpor, and they are busy transporting traps from their yard to a pile of 20 or more on the pickup, swung into the boat and dropped into the ‘holes’ in the river bottom, there to feed the young lobsters (who can move in and out of the traps easily, feeding on the bait) and to catch the market size ones, who can get in but not out, spiky bugs that they are.

Lobster fishing is now essentially a large unfenced aquaculture project, with millions of pounds of bait put out to catch slightly fewer millions of pounds of lobster - the young ‘uns are essentially supported by the bait until they’re large enough for market.

We celebrate the completion of the work (and the departure of a friend from the community) with a lobster feed, the first of the year. At this time of year, before these exoskeletal bugs ’shed’, the meat is tight against the very hard shells, and we squeal as we ‘get’ each other with bits of shell or juice when we use the ‘crackers’ on the claws. Bacchanalia ensues, and Quan and I are up late washing every surface around the table, for nothing smells like old lobster.

This early in the season, we pay a ‘high’ price to Timmy - nearly $6/lb for the freshest seafood imaginable. Lobsters were so plentiful here in the 1700’s that they were gathered in barrels on the shoreside and used as garden mulch (what a smell that must have been). Because they were bottom feeders, they were thought of as ‘trash fish’, and eaten only sparingly - along with that other bottom feeder, the oyster - by the lower classes, like the indentured servants. In those days it was the cod - high in the water column - that was most highly prized.