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The Long View (From 2006)

September 4, 2009 1 Comment

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 Had) Cabin Fever (In 2007)

August 3, 2009 No Comments

We got a little summer cabin fever this last weekend. I was plain weary, and my wife was weary of all of us men in our little home, and we had to go somewhere else. Anywhere.

We often find ourselves going to places most people would call “anywhere.” Our friends describe vacations and sporting events and concerts and so forth that sound like everyone’s idea of fun. Sometimes I find myself describing our activities to our acquaintances and family and I see an expression come over their faces that I’ve seen on people that are hearing about eating broccoli when they’d rather be given directions to a steakhouse. I’m sorry, we can’t help ourselves.

We went to the Heritage Museum and Gardens in Sandwich, Massachusetts. The four year old will go anywhere and look at anything, so he’s not a problem. But a twelve year old? He can be bored, and boring.

He invited one of his schoolmates to come. That made it better. They were a pack of wolves all by themselves, and the world was their flock of sheep. We gave them a cellphone and let the line out a little on the invisible string we keep on our children. We were essentially alone in this place anyway.

The place is a big landscaping show, but late summer has few things to recommend it flower-wise. My wife and I were grateful to see a patch of grass that didn’t need mowing and wasn’t crabgrass, so we didn’t care. We went inside that windmill, and heard the docent, perhaps only slightly older than the revolutionary war vintage structure itself, lecture the few of us on the who what when where and why of it. My four year old smiled at him and the docent turned the thing on for him. The rest of us would have got bupkis. My four year old could get a dog off a meat truck. We watched the canvas sheets pass by the dutch door for a good, long, time.

The place is pleasant, and everybody that works there was more than pleasant, but it’s got no real rhyme or reason to it. And it gets a little less coherent as time passes. There’s a reproduction of a huge round shaker barn, and it’s filled with antique cars. I enjoy both things and find them interesting, but there’s a kind of incongruity to such juxtapositions that I can’t shake.

The older boys were jazzed to go because there is a an enormous reproduction sort -of-Fort Ticonderoga loghouse there, and it was filled with an interesting and compelling collection of guns and weapons and Indian artifacts and lead toy soldiers. I say “was filled,” not “is filled,” because we went in and it was mostly gone, and replaced by a rather tepid display of memorabilia from the Cape Cod Baseball League. There are only so many pictures of future big leaguers looking gaunt because they haven’t figured out where to buy human growth hormone yet that you can stand to look at. And what’s it doing in a fort? Bring back the guns, will you? We saw a few shunted off into little niches here and there. The baseball museum could have fit in a phone booth.

But the big boys were not deterred. Boys are never deterred. They walked back out into the blazing sunshine and the breeze from the nearby lake, saw me and my lovely wife sitting in the shade of an enormous oak, sized up the beauty and utility of intervening grass, and knew what it all was for.

To be.

Cape Cod, 1950

June 23, 2009 5 Comments

Before my time, of course. But maybe not.

I saw the vestigal tail of summering on Cape Cod when I was young. It wasn’t a year round home for people so much then. You got a summer rental and suffered on the clogged highways in the smothering heat to get your ration of seabreeze. The rental house and the idea behind it smelled a bit of mildew by the time I was there, but you could make it out on the receding horizon.

Later on, I used to perform at all the nightspots there in the summer. The owners were still trying to cobble together one more year of sunburned customers with too much cash and nothing to do but get a bit loaded and party. Jimmy Buffet has a sort of traveling Potemkin Village of the ideal, but it had gone grey and thick in the middle well before he latched on to it, and it hadn’t moved to God’s Great Waiting Room down south yet.

I played Happy Hour on Cape Cod before Happy Hour was made illegal here. (I’m not exaggerating; Happy Hour is illegal in Massachusetts.) The young girls would come and dance and the men would eye them warily until they all had enough tonsil polish to mix properly. We’d run sweat while we played badly and told a few bad jokes, and preside over it.

Afterwards, we used to go to an old shack called The Sandbar on the access road to the West Dennis Beach, and hear Rockwell King exhume a couple jokes and play moldy standards on the piano to people with blue hair. It was like visiting a club you were grandfathered into but never really joined, and seeing the pictures of dead club presidents on the wall in the lobby, half-remembered when alive, only half dead now that they’re gone.

No one’s born with blue hair, you know.

The Fireflies Take Their Vigorish

June 8, 2009 4 Comments


You should read The Hobbit at the beach. Who the hell reads important books in a sling chair in the sand? It’s like dinner theater. An insult to the cook and the composer.

People that play chess on vacation, do, I guess. Do a puzzle with five pieces missing and read a Reader’s Digest Condensed book, I say. Feel the flush of the sun rising in your cheeks from the afternoon, mixing with the bit of gin you nursed in the kitchen, and leave the heavy thinking back over the bridges. Play backgammon, and cheat badly, and laugh.

You can’t win if you don’t play, someone once said. A loser, most likely. A spectator, even more likely; the pinnacle of losers. What would they know about it?

You see, you can’t even play if you won’t lose. That’s the world. You have to steel yourself beforehand, understand that the game is fixed, and you’re born to lose. That’s the cover charge to even get on the pitch.

It was a perfect moment there. The sun was just an ornament hung on the Christmas tree of my life. The reeds murmur assent; the muck beats anything a doctor could conjure. She was a flawless diamond hung on a chain of luck around the neck of a muse. I saw it, and knew, that I must lose, right there, if I was to play. Even if she could hide a portrait in the attic, and play keep-away with time, there isn’t much chance for me to mark time as well.

A decision must be made. And you cannot be eying the bridesmaids, forevermore, after you make it, or it’s not really made. You will drift through this world, forever trying to win, and not really playing.

So you make up your mind, and wend your way back through the wicked edged grasses and the beach roses, the faint sound of the table radio in the kitchen getting louder as you get nearer. The screen door can’t keep mosquitoes out, or music in. Milt Jackson is identifiable at a hundred yards, Percy Heath at fifty. Eventually you sit at the battered kitchen table that’s hardly suitable for a third house, not someone else’s second, but it’s your legs that are wobbly.

On the way home, you stop at the crazy old boneyard hard by 6A. The white marble is too soft for the centuries and the names are as fuzzy as the people they were. But you think for a moment, what you’ll risk together, when you see the little nameless granite stubs at the foot of the graves.

Everything.

I Feel Good — You Should Too (From 2006)

May 17, 2009 3 Comments

(Editor’s Note: I really don’t feel that good today. I felt better after I read this)
(Author’s Note: The boat was dismasted and made a total loss by Hurricane Katrina. Anyone that doesn’t think that was a pretty big storm should keep in mind the boat was moored in Massachusetts. There is no editor, and there is no boat, and I’m hitting my thumb all day. My point stands:)

The world is a wonderful place. It’s hard to see the forest for the trees sometimes, and the fellow weaving in the next lane jabbering into his cell phone while eating a submarine sandwich and occasionally nosemining can distract us, no doubt. Many things intrude. But sometimes, if you’re available for wonderment, you can have a moment of clarity.

On the ocean is a place for moments of clarity. You cannot be in a motorized anything, unless the motor is turned off, because you’re just a commuter if the engine is running. Sailing’s better; contemplative.

You can’t sail like the kind of people who always want to tug on the lines to get an additional half a knot out of their breeze bucket. You need the kind of sailing where you set the sails, fix your course to nowhere to allow the fewest interruptions, then lay your leg over the tiller, trail your hand in the water, and consider your situation. Coronas with limes never hurt, either.

You have nowhere to go, and nowhere to be, and after the second time you take them, your sailing companions must lose the urge to talk about the process of sailing in an enthusiastic fashion and simply enjoy it, and the company. With the sky arrayed overhead, and the sea below, you are content to examine the world dispassionately. The beauty and simplicity of the clouds that drift, the terns that swoop, the wavelets that tap their gentle knuckles on the windward side, the feeling of motion snatched without struggle from the endless breezes that massage your cheek and sail alike allow you to enjoy the world and all its wonders, and everybody in it, if just for a moment.

That’s a complicated and unusual apparatus to distill the elixir of life, ain’t it? We need to find ways, every day, to get the simple flavor of the sublime, in an espresso dose — short, fast, concentrated; ephemeral but available.

Two minutes of pop music can do it for you. It has to be good. It can’t be serious. Serious pop music is an oxymoron. You’re not saving the world, Bono, you’re just a preening middle aged man in a ridiculous getup who’s first job is to entertain, but you never got around to learning how. I’ll raise my hand when you’re Woody Guthrie. Don’t hold your breath. On second thought — do.

My bad. We’re filled with love for our fellow man today. Our fellow Irishman too, last paragraph notwithstanding. Maybe’s he’s trying hard but failing. I’ll leave him be. You too, if he makes you smile.

It’s not supposed to sound like you’re trying hard, even if you are. Try hard in rehearsal. It’s generally best when it’s a melody that sounds about fine whether played by a chamber orchestra, a busker, or a chicken pecking it out on a toy piano. The lyric is generally best about as complex as a nursery rhyme, a little obscure maybe, but with a hint of the recognition of the sublime percolating in the background, and hints of the whole daft fabric of shared human experience like a breeze blowing over your face.

It should be over in one minute fifty eight seconds, and comprise one third of your quarter’s worth of selections in the DiMeglio’s Pizza jukebox in 1968, too.

Tag: cape cod

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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