Time Marches On

I know I’m not supposed to be, but I’m a terrible Anglophile. My pater’s name is Ó Suileabháin, after all. My ancestry is obscure, but it wouldn’t take much effort, I’m sure, to trace it back to Sullivan Beare, skirmishing with Henry VIII, and “hold paper” on the Empire, as it were. A long while back, I was present in a place where darts were thrown and Guinness was pulled, when an IRA sympathizer tried to pass the hat to “pay for some treason.” A man that said he knew someone killed when Lord Mountbatten was assassinated threw hands with him. I threw in with the Britisher. Michael Collins and Churchill couldn’t have done any better. St Patrick was a Britisher, after all.

Anyway, the internet tide brings in all sorts of interesting people, and yesterday, commenter “editor theorist” shared a bit of his thoughts about the similarity of our Chatham to his Northumberland:

Yes – far views. The tourist board here describes Northumberland (northernmost English county, bordering Sotland) as ‘land of the far horizon’ – and that is a great appeal of hillwalking in the Cheviots. The coasts have a similar flat expansive quality to that picture of Cape Cod.

If you’re like me, you were up to your arse in the British Empire at the library when you weren’t reading about America. There are great swaths of England I could find my way around even though I’ve never been there. It is familiar in your mind. Like Canada and Australia and many other places, Great Britain is in the bones and very marrow of this place. I own the dotted line on the map between Marion- my home, and the next town. That town is named Rochester. An Anglander knows that name. I’ve lived in Medfield, and Medway. It’s called New England, for St. George’s sake.

Anyway, he got me to thinking, that theorist, about Cape Cod and my youth.

It’s not possible anymore, because Cape Cod is a year-round residence for many now, but there was a period in my youth when the summer season would end and nobody but a few hardy souls, and artists, would remain on Cape Cod.

There was a tradition, mostly exaggerated but with a kernel of truth, of the locals standing, drunk as lords, on the overpasses on the highway on Labor Day, waving black socks at the retreating tourists. They were japing at the predilection of tourists to wear black socks and shoes with their shorts, or egad! sandals and black socks. They depended on the tourists for their livelihood, and resented them at the same time.

There was a period of weather until Christmas, with the warm ocean water tempering the thermometer, which permitted you could walk vast expanses of empty landscape there, alone with your thoughts and the gulls, and feeling as Byronic as any Heathcliff on the moors ever did.

My grandmother lived halfway down the Cape in the 1960s. She was surrounded by cranberry bogs as far as you could see. We used to walk on the tiny aretes between the table-like expanses of russet berry plants and make our way to the beach — pounded flat and smooth as concrete — and walk until you tired of walking and your own solitary company.

Time marches on. I don’t begrudge the new residents their piece of heaven. I had the use of it, free for the taking, for a good long while first. Just like the British before me.

The Long View

Ah, we’ve returned in pixels to the lovely Chatham, Massachusetts. Chatham’s way out there on the cape, near the elbow where you turn north and head for Provincetown, and then… well, Portugal, if you’ve got a boat.

Pilgrims have been mucking around in Chatham since 1656, when they first came here to farm. Eventually even a pilgrim can figure out the ocean was full of fish, and didn’t require weeding, and the local economy quickly turned to fishing from farming. My own uncle used to fish based out of the harbor down the road… um shore — Harwich. There’s more tourists than fishermen now, of course, but you can still get in a fight at the local taverns in the dead of winter if you so desire. It’s the traditional way for the Cincinnatus of the ocean to pass the time in any dead period in their schedule. It has its amusements, these fights; for the fisherman and the onlooker, anyway.

Chatham’s a rich place. And it still looks like a beachside resort, not Disneyland. It’s fun to walk around and look at, if you like shore architecture. I do.

The first picture is a scenic overlook and stairs to the beach, located across the street from the Coast Guard station and lighthouse. It’s a busy little strip of parking and gawking and shoe-sand shaking. The sand bar you see in the distance used to go right across the horizon to the left, but was breached in a hurricane a few years back and stayed that way. The beach rarely stays put in this world, no matter how much you paid for beachfront property. There were dire predictions about this breach in the sandbar, but like most dire predictions, it hasn’t amounted to much.

People from the midwest don’t understand how rare it is for people around here to see the horizon. It’s hard to get far enough away from anything around here to see it. It’s the reason, besides the water, that the ocean captures the imagination of the average person.

People build bad houses that gape at the water through big sheets of glass now, because they have money and no sense. It’s not the way to go. You quickly get a surfeit of any view you hog like that, and it becomes a sort of wallpaper. The first time you go to someone’s house that has a second floor deck served by banks of sliding doors on the ocean, you’re captivated, and massage their ego for owning the whole thing. You big scene gaping swell, you say. Stay with them for a week, and you’ll notice it’s the glowing blue thing in the cabinet, not the luminous blue thing under the sky, that they’re looking at. You’ve got to frame that view if you’re going to look at it every day.

It’s nice to be at the shore, with the great corona of the sun beaming upon your mien, and the gentle zephyr wafting the fragrant sea air all around, and tiny devils of sand like talcum swirl underfoot. You’re outside. On a boat, with land in view, it’s even more wonderful and striking. But when the shoreline disappears on a boat, the ocean becomes blue textured shag carpeting, as seen from a mezzanine in a lobby — unless you’re in a small boat, when it becomes kinda scary.

So that’s a lovely place I showed you to go and see and sit and swim. But this is how to meter that loveliness into your quotidian life, like divdends on some wise investment. Frame it and show it, and snatch it back from sight and reveal it again.

I walked back and forth right there until the owners of the house called the police.

I Could Paint That, But My Brushes Are Too Small

I had to dash all over creation today. I found myself in Chatham, Massachusetts in the early afternoon. I risked death, dismemberment, and a general lack of other motorist’s bonhomie — as distinguished by the raised finger salute I received for daring to jerk the truck over at this spot —to get you, my dear readers, this essential view of the fabulous thingness of late summer light on Cape Cod.

You’re welcome.

More tomorrow.

Ramshackle Is My Middle Name

I’ve been in the construction business, in one form or fashion, for most of my life. Tectonic plates have shifted; continents meandered across the mercator projections; empires have risen and fallen. Pluto’s not a planet again. I keep going.

When I was a schoolchild, they told us Pluto might not be a planet, by the way. What’s happened in the interim that gave everyone the impression it absolutely was a planet, and now absolutely isn’t? Is it the same thing that makes people argue about it on the internet as if they owned real estate on Pluto and stood to lose money, all the while spelling argument “arguement” and sprinkling apostrophes all over the place except where they belong? I expect so.

People have all sorts of information available to them now, and not much of it is very good. And some of it is good, but not useful. To paraphrase Mark Twain: stay away from the internet and television, and you’re uninformed; go there, and you’re misinformed.

I’m an odd person. I’ve been lots of places and seen lots of things that most people that can read, write, and spell never do. The real world callouses make me inscrutable to a cubicle dweller; the “Three R’s” make me suspicious to the day laborer. When I left my last job, the CEO and the COO begged me to reconsider. They had promoted me from the lowest rung to senior to one of the owners. What did I want? Why would I leave? They called me, a day before my notice was up, the notice they had strung out over three months, and told me: Eureka! we got the bright idea of digging up your old resume and now we finally understand you.

I think not.

Ever live in a house like the ones pictured above? I have. I used to work on them all the time, too. By gad how I loved them.

When I was wandering through a portion of the education required to become an architect, a friend of mine took me to see one of his other friends who was renovating a bombed out looking victorian in Roxbury, Mass. I was born right down the street, but hadn’t been there much recently. It was very dangerous to be there after dark.

The fellow had bought the place for next to nothing, lived in it like the wooden cave it had become, and was repairing it by himself.

He had taught himself carpentry, and electricity, and plumbing, and plastering and painting, and all the other aspects of home construction usually foreign to architects. You heard me right, architects generally have nothing but the most vague ideas of how things get done in construction. Surgeons don’t empty bedpans. I didn’t want to be an architect anymore. I wanted to be that guy whose name I don’t remember. And this was five or ten years, easy, before Norm Abram and Bob Vila stood on a scaffold right down the street from the place I was describing, and did the same thing with a camera pointed at them.

I’ve done everything you can do to a house, old or new, from digging the hole to putting a vane on the cupola. I’ve bathed in lead paint. I’ve discovered beehives the size of mattresses inside the walls. I’ve found whisky bottles left by the workmen who built the places in the 1800s in the walls. I’ve seen wooden plumbing pipes and dirt floors and secret closets where people hid during King Philip’s War. I’ve worked 16 hours straight, laid down on the wood floor when it got dark, and got up and started again. And now I make furniture.

I’ve got to get my hands on it. I can’t help myself. And I’m just like Pluto. I dip into the solar system, occasionally, in my erratic orbit, and the other planets wonder: Is he like us, or isn’t he?

It gets cold out here from time to time, but you get a wonderful view of the universe.

It’s New, Improved, And Old-Fashioned

Anything that doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

That’s a banal observation, but like most things that enter the lingua franca, it’s probably got at least a kernel of truth to it.

I’m supposed to be a fuddie-duddie. Get accused of it all the time. I’m not.

The way I see it, there’s two kinds of observations about yesteryears:
1. I like to go backwards in time because I had all my teeth and most of my hair then.
2. I want to go back in time because we’re going backwards, progress-wise now, and to go forward we’ve got to back up a little first.

I’m almost never in the first camp. I’m happier now than I ever have been. I see people in general, and egad! politicians waxing nostalgic for the 1970s or worse, and I reach for my imaginary revolver. Look, I was young, and wild, and free, and so forth, in 1976, and I wouldn’t plunge us back into that morass for anything. People forget easily. As far as I’m concerned, the Jimmy Carter memorial should be at the bottom of a deep dark well.

Anyway, my fascination with old fashioned stuff is more #2. (Insert obvious joke about bears doing number two in the woods, and popes and so forth HERE)

Enlarge the photo I supplied. I started Sippican Cottage Furniture a few years ago, and that photo is older than dirt, so you guessed it: I work for Reuters in Lebanon.

Just kidding. But yeah, I manipulated the image for grins. Now how do you pigeonhole a fellow like myself who uses photomanipulation software on a digital scan of an old snapshot like that? I like the old look. I like the new whizbang methods of communication and data movement. Where do you draw a line?

I’ll explain it as succinctly as I can. Not everything that happens is an improvement on what came before. If it is, let’s go warp speed. No union set asides, subsidies, or rationing please. But there’s an awful lot that gets changed for the sake of change, and gets worse in the bargain. It’s not my fault I notice that, and point it out.

I describe my business as : new, improved, and old-fashioned. All the best things –and people –are.