Brown Patch

A peculiar brown patch emerged in last August's drought along the pathway to the door. And an unpleasant odor emanated from the far end of the house. Fearing the worst, I eventually connected the two. Irma Bombeck was incorrect: the grass does not grow greener over the septic tank. The tank, however, was a puzzlement until yesterday, when it was unsealed after some fifteen years. I had to dig a circle about a foot deep in the lawn to find the cap. Mr. Chaves of Acme Septic did the rest. All turned out well enough, the soup inside intense and foul, but the tank was not filled solid or blocked. Some nonbiodgradable plastic products were there, including a diaper. We have tenants; who knows? How it travelled through the pipes amazes me. The next question will be whether the stench by the back door disappears. It will, hopefully, and for a couple of hundred dollars instead of the feared tens of thousands. Installation of septic fields is highly regulated. We will need to attend to our own effluent carefully in the years to come, every four years Mr. Chaves told me. Already the soil has been shovelled and raked back across the hole. I'll plant some seed and by next summer, the spot will be undiscernable until the next dry spell, but its mystery has been resolved. Of course the dogs found it necessary to roll on their backs in the vicinity of where the 40 gallons-per-minute hose leaked some of the sludge it extracted. A perfect storm, combining Hurricane Wilma with a nor'easter outside should drown those telltale remains before the sun comes up tomorrow.

Too Fast

The house is filled with smoke. We wear layers of clothes. It is in the 40s, and it has been a long day by the fire, not feeling quite up to par. the windows radiate cold. There must be dinosaurs on the lawn, pterodactyls in the chimney, serpents in the plumbing, spiders in the sink as far as I feel today, misunderstood. Or Mister Understood. Or just slow and stupid. You can call it anything; it isn’t a very nice mind. In the evening it softens with whisky and wine, the din of many random conversations.

Another day dawns, rain, blustery and cold. Just a few degrees of separation and it becomes nearly useless here. We have a few weeks of separation between now and the sale of our house, from indebtedness to out of debt, but the logistics are challenging when the well is empty. The new season comes on too fast; the former life ends now with vengeful acceleration in addition to audible sighs of relief, along with the resigned knowledge that this has not gone down as well as it might have. In the meantime we have food to eat, health and there is much to be grateful around us. Thanksgiving should be a sober time for this household. Let's just hope we all get to that point in one piece, and then look forward to Christmas and then winter in Providence. We must make it through.

Flight Path

A flash of red; a pair of cardinals. The piercing cry of a Canadian blue jay. Chevrons of geese honk high overhead, seeming nearly in the contrails formed by transatlantic jets. Boat traffic is more up the river than out of it, boats making their pilgrimage to the protected boatyards of Naragansett Bay. Yellows, browns and reds. The deer have dark coats to ward off cold winds from the north and west, the better hide in brush from prey, both four and two legged. The vast schools of blues from September have moved from New England down the coastline to the Cheasapeake waters and I no longer see the birds diving on the baitfish, chopped by frenzied feeders from above and below. Fires, warm hearths, buckets of hot coffee, cold mornings, moderate afternoons. Harvest foods, squashes, stews and soups. Pumpkins everywhere. From closets, chests and bottom drawers come blankets and the heavy clothes, donned in layers in early morning and shed by mid afternoon, only to be replaced at dusk. The high and wide vista helps me see the seasons turning round and round, betraying their approach on the far horizon. The change is relentless, inexorable--it is not stealthy, if you are aware. There are dramatic swings in weather, and instability reigns, a few days of sun, then several days of raw nor'easter rain and wind, most notably shorter days, with longer nights and dark mornings. We are up well before the dawn in time for school, and for the short trip to the gas station to pick up the newspaper when it opens at exactly seven. We are loving these observances, welcoming the year's end, the fall season. The armchair pursuits like baseball's world series and the ubitquitous football match-ups. This is the change within the change, the time of harvest, of fullness before the sere and cold of winter. After so much waiting, these old bones can wait a bit longer for its arrival, but time waits for no man, least of all, for me. Even now, in middle age, the sand runs out of our glass, the body creaks and groans at times, though if I do not feel young, I am far from being old. It seems mostly a question of attitude about the great fight to persevere and never to yield. We are on the flight path from north to south, from summer to winter, from plenty to scarce, from fat to lean. The little birds remind us how things change and to prepare. they make me look ahead and to think. To change the oil, to replace the engine belts, the antifreeze. Living here on the flight path, there is a constant natural reminder to be provident. I love Bob Dylans' long famous lyric: "you don't need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows." As long as our eyes remain open to what crosses before us, we can take our cue in nature's clues.

Precipice

You know the way water rushes just above the head of a waterfall, headlong, unawares, powerless to do anything differently, thundering, powdering, obliterating itself, from solid to mist on its helpless, yet beautiful way from top to bottom? It is how I feel. A month to move from our house of 17 years; a month to relocate to a house with heat; a month to vacate a summer camp before its pipes turn icy. It is like the slow-motion reliving of a car crash, or watching a bad boat landing at a dock. You can see it coming, a mile away, and all you can do, sometimes, is watch the accident unfold, a Titanic and iceberg sort of thing. I hope this is not a case getting what I have mistakenly wished for. I hope that rather than instant atomization on the rocks, we--my family--will be in for a soft landing soon, just like the time I fell from a tree top and was caught in a mesh of grape vines before I hit the ground. Imagine, there I was, excited and climbing down as quickly as I could to see my parents, just arrived from a vacation in Europe, and instead of saved, lying broken on the ground, or worse? Imagine my parents' great sadness. That was but one among many such strokes of great good fortune. As I grew older, I came to rely--probably more than I ought to have--upon such deus ex machina to keep me out of trouble. Whether it was another climbing escape, this time three floors down a friends' house on length of laundry line, blistering my hands badly before crashing into the shrubbery, or the beneficence of a paternal Frenchman in Davos who lent me shelter and food for a few days, or help from another friend with sufficient money to lend in time of unemployment, or a final look before darting across interstate traffic, an eighteen wheeler going 75 only a foot away, unnoticed in its vastness, or just the blessings of good health while uninsured, I have flirted with altogether too many virtual precipices, a cat with many, many lives. Time for Change is a time for me to step away from such uncertain living, to move back and build upon more solid ground. I have been living on a fault line, gambling. It is a time to be wise after so much foolishness. But here is the rub: I am only me. I am what I am and can extend upon my experience? How can I become sage after a life of jestering? Can a fool be wise? I do not know these answeres, except I will listen, more than I have ever done before. I do not trust the precipice; I do not like the precarious situation. I do not want to walk the cliff any longer, and I never want to fall! For the first time, I look in the mirror and see fear. I realize how everything, but for some sort of grace, could change in a single, catastrophic moment. I shake my head and clear these awful thoughts from the head that has created them.

Dark, Dark, Amid the Blaze of Noon

It has rained for forty days and forty nights. There is no blaze of noon, no sun, no moon. In the metaphor of the world events, and sports, things are dark, echoing the disasters in pathetic fallacy. The Yankees self-destructed, along with the Red Sox, so there's no intense interest in baseball in these parts until next spring. A woman knocks a pregnant young mother out, drives her unconscious into the woods and carves open her abdomen with a razor knife so that she can kidnap the child and call it her own; a teenage passer-by interupts the murder/kidnap. In the breadbasket of the world, Iraqis keep blowing themselves and Americans up on a daily basis. The President's interviews are staged, even scripted--qule surprise! Bird influenza is spreading this way. White police in New Orleans beat the bloody hell out of a middle aged, docile Black man on the street. Hurricanes in Lousiana, Mississippi, Florida and Central America, flooding in New Hampshire, earthquakes in Pakistan, landslides in Guatemala. There are lots of good things, I know. Most of these are only in the papers or on television, glimpsed from afar, impersonally. But these are horrible events for tens upon tens of thousands of people. These are the times that try man's souls. "Some say the world will end in fire, and others say in ice..." Yes, Mr. Robert Frost. But if you had asked me, and I know you didn't, I would say it will be neither: it will be water, and that is my advice!

Nor'easter

You know, this is a nothing of a storm, but it is dramatic notnetheless. I drove over the Mt. Hope bridge today and watched standing waves, Whitecaps with a strong wind behind them and an incoming tide. I would not have wanted to be in the water this afternoon, given the alternative. I visited the Herreshoff Museum and met the venerable Halsey Herreshoff there. What a monument to American maritime history, to sailing, to his family. Pish to this minor league storm! There is was, amongst the Fish Class, the Alerions, the 12 and 1/2s. All that salt and cold water over the bow. All that wind, all that beautiful boatbuilding. Americans, at least around here, do not have that moxie any more. I do not have it either, make no mistake. When I look into the funhouse mirror, I do not see myself as fat. Or phat. I see myself at the helm in my oilskins, wheel in hand and riding the bucking seas, whooping like Dr. Strangelove on his atomic bomb, ten gallon hat waving. Yee-hah! High above the ocean waves, where all is still, I look at the sea with impunity, knowing just how lucky that I am. There was a time when I had bile, that I defied the vomitous sea. It is perfectly acceptable to reminisce about this, knowing that those who say the world will end in water are wrong, they had their chance. Now it will be fire, or ice or some other desperate desire.

Sophie's Fort

We went down to the beach deliberately, wishing to learn what we could about the margin of the rocky shore between marsh and sea by living there, eschewing for a time the well known laneways of our relatives and townsfolk on the main road. We wanted to build a simple dwelling from materials already on the beach in abundance, a shelter that could outlast a winter storm perhaps, serving to feed our imagination and strengthen the bond between daughter and father as summer vacation drew to a close, with time seeming to accelerate as we measured its last weeks, then days, then the final hours until the first dread day of school.

We cleared the project with our neighbors first, in effect obtaining a ‘litoral’ work permit from them. We knew from past experience that someone had—quite amazingly—deconstructed our two previous efforts, and we meant no offense. Had the winter’s storms simply taken the measure of a child’s driftwood fortress it would not have been so bad; we had expected that. That the pieces were actually taken down and piled a hundred yards away seemed strange; someone had smashed our efforts, modest though they were. The contrarian effort made no sense, unless—we speculated—a legal statement was being made, say, by an wary neighbor fearful least we might declare “eminent domain,” claim ‘squatter’s rights’ or worst of them all, sue! We mentioned we were thinking about building a new fort, asking the owner if he minded. He said: “go right ahead,” implying that we need not have bothered to ask. Armed with that bestowed grace, we set off quickly for the beach and began our work.

One finds antecedents of our shanty-style house along the seaboard everywhere. Ours has the look of fisherman’s shacks Down East and in the Maritimes. An oar decorates the front entrance to the fort. As we began, the voices of my Ancient History teacher quoting the advice of Greek farmers about location and the words of the sage of Walden Pond and Concord to “simplify” guided us in our choice of site and driftwood, and I mumbled the words of the Calypso song “House built on a weak foundation will not stand, oh no…”

Remnants of some part of my grandfather’s bath houses provided a rectangle and integrity for the base of the fort, sea-worn and blending into the rocky shore. This same concrete slab had survived at least the great storm of 1938—the one never even named as a hurricane—when my mother and her father had discovered the drowned body of an Azores fisherman in yellow oilskins, rigor-mortised knuckles still clutching a broken piece of wooden gunwale. Then in 1954, Hurricane Carol smashed onto the Rhode Island shore, delivering the coup de grace to the private bathhouses. Now, a half century later, what remains proved perfect for our needs. When we built our fort the year before, I had attempted to steer my daughter towards using it, caving in to her desire to build elsewhere. Site selection needed to be Sophie’s choice, not mine. I reckoned that she needed to figure things out herself. How could there be a wrong or right?

Our rule was to use driftwood and detritus found beachcombing, with importation of materials from beyond the beach verboten, but we were not strict. Post selection was critical, and we found two pairs close enough in length to serve, plus sufficient rafters and planks to span the roof of our post-and-beam construction. Here we cheated, bringing a plastic tarp from the garage. On another return trip to the beach, still in an adult frame of mind, I brought a handsaw, a folding camp shovel, some nails and a hammer to make sure the roof would not easily slide down on top of us. There went the “no tools” concept as well! I used the saw to trim a particularly long piece, unnecessary in retrospect; I wish I had left it. And I wondered: was I sending the wrong “situational ethics” message to my daughter, that it is O.K. to break the rules when they become inconvenient? On the other hand, the nails really helped make things sturdy, while the shovel made short shrift of digging stones.

Found materials conspired with the rectilinear form of the old foundation to determine the length, width and height of the fort. Hauling the larger pieces hundreds of yards was the hardest work, but it served the purpose of making us think about each piece, and so our house ‘evolved’ square to the water, with a downward sloping roof, its cant conforming to the pitch of the beach. An old pallet weighs down the tarp-skinned roof, along with sticks and stones, and the walls are made from vintage salt-cured oak and pine, a bit of marine plywood from a destroyed boat, a swatch of fishnet, all scend from the sea

As for its interior décor, our fortress wants for little. Its middle school educated designer selected only the most colorful and unusual forms and colors of plastic and polyethylene, lending great authority to the guiding spirit of recycling. The beach yielded a profusion of flatware, table, lamps and vases for flowers, even a custom broom. We are scavengers, fond of our adage “One person’s trash is another’s sculpture, appliance and art.” The curtains are made from fabric ‘imported’ from home, that is, old “dog” towels tied back with bits of a lobsterman’s line, with square knots, if you please; no granny’s. A piece of densely woven industrial black mesh, spread over a sub-floor of flat rocks created wall-to-wall carpet. The floor itself is a foot or two below grade, enabling the forts’ denizens to see and not be seen. The diminutive Frank Lloyd Wright would have been totally at home here, while “short people” phobic Randy Newman might rebuke us for its vertically challenged scale. The style is pure and impure, at once none and all. Is it ‘post modern,’ Bumpzoid or Minimalist, Bauhaus, outhouse, or merely recherché, a mélange of many things? Who dares define it?

The fort has been well used. In only its second day of existence, our nest attracted a young couple, appreciating its privacy along an otherwise open beach. As we approached, quite suddenly, like a ruffed grouse flushed from its cover, we watched a surprised young man burst out the side door and jump into the sea. Moments later, a young woman emerged, adjusting her red bikini, following her boyfriend. We waved to them as they swam away, evidently too embarrassed to wave back, emerging a long way further down the beach where, shoeless, the girl clambered up on her boyfriend’s back, ardors temporarily chilled. This was a fort for child playing, not child making, thought I silently, wistfully. This went over my daughter’s head, I assumed. On second thought, it probably did not.

Another day we watched in horror from far above the beach while the neighbor’s grandchildren clambered over the ramparts of our fort. They were wrecking it, my daughter was certain, yet the sounds emanating were only those of excitement and fun, as far as I could tell. My daughter raged, wanting me to tell them “Get out! Leave our fort alone!” but I demurred, hoping for the best. Later, walking past our house, their grandfather complimented us, praising the artistry and “whimsy” of the fort, and I felt redeemed. “It was better to have kept quiet, wasn’t it?” I now asserted with knowing conviction; “diplomacy works the best.” It did not matter that his grandchildren had rearranged the curtains, the artifice and many of the artifacts, false renovations we could easily restore.

And so it went. Another day, another set of friends, this time invited, played in the fort. I asked one of them, at age 14, whether she were not too ‘sophisticated’ to play in it. She looked at me as though I were moronic. “Of course not, forts are fun,” she said. Overhearing our exchange, her father said to me “And I’m not too old, either!” which made me feel better still.

The fort now stands, facing Third Beach and “The Breakers” several miles across the Sakonnet River estuary. Our fort makes no such grand pretense to man’s permanence in the face of nature. How long things will last, Katrina reminds us, only time and the sea can tell. Most likely it will be when the next neap tide’s high waters engulf its base. Or maybe the roof will fall beneath the weight of winter snow, or maybe not; who knows? It has been loved and played in, enjoyed by a happy few, lured by its magic. This driftwood shack served to pull this father away from more pedestrian pursuits, to spend time with a fast growing child-woman-daughter who, hopefully, will never be too old for such fun. It all goes by so fast, this life, this fortress building. It is so important to make the time, for in a blink, we are too soon old, filled with memories of what we did and did not do.

Baseball Season

I know, it starts in Florida and other warm places in the winter and the first games that count are in the beginning of April, but I don't really tune into things until August, when the divisional races are sorting out the contenders from next year's teams. Baseball season just goes on and on. The world has been standing on its head of late and with all that is off kilter, I was kind of hoping for a year that would sift out teams the way it ought to, a sort of harmonic signal that all is well with the universe, which of course, it isn't. And so, accordingly, the New York Yankees managed to boot their season's best efforts to win the American League championship and go on to the World Series. All is not right or well for yet another year in which birds may well fly north for winter and rhododendrons will bloom profusely in October, as ours is doing. There are other teams, but after a decade plus of seeing the likes of Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Mariano Rivera and their ilk, you can't go home again. For now, the party's over.

Point of View

In a year of postings, the physical, not to mention, the personal point of view appear dominant in all of them. Whether I refer to the view outside my windows perched on a great pile of stones in a shingled, shanty house nearly a hundred feet above a marshland that leads in a westerly direction to the sea, to sunrises and sunsets, to sun or storm and though most of my thoughts here occur during night or morning hours, it is all just me and my point of reference. When "maxi" sized sailboats sail up and down the estuary, their mastheads can be at eye level upon occasion. When the sun rises, it strikes a distant western shore and bounces back, a veritable dawning in the west, at least until it crests the trees and hills above our little perch.

When I look at everything, it is through my own increasingly myopic set of eyes. At least I have two of them, to view the world stereoscopically, two separate cameras that merge things into one fiction of a view. Could one be measuring pure fact, the other what my eye would wish to see, a fiction? Could this explain how people viewing precisely the same set of things or events have so many different recollections, and why there often are so many sure and certain, extracted, conflicting truths? My surroundings influence me greatly. When I am here in my redoubt by the sea, I am more expansive than in a Providence closet. When I am not disturbed by things like painting, patching leaks in a roof gone porous in its dotage, or scrubing scum off shower walls, I can be most focused. The long view of things taken in a modicum of tranquility yields my longest thoughts, and if and when I shall have some peace, "for peace comes droppping slow" here, at least for me. I need some stillness, a view from a soundless room. I need like Uncle Bill, to operate from a distance, even from my own cranium, but without ambient cacophony. I have a running conversation from within.

And then, of course, there is no such thing as objectivity. If it is a camera, at what decisive moment does one click the trigger, and on what angle, high or low or close or from afar? And what gets cropped in the end, or edited from a set of images or a proof sheet. It is far safer, in my view and opinion, to recognize that the point is not objectivity, but awareness that what we see is ours, unique, special and valid. If we wish validation, then seek out the views of others and plot them, marking them on a kind of chart to see if there is a grouping, a center, or if they land like grape shot in a random pattern that betrays no more than many different views. And there is a further point, to never waver in the certainly that what we see is just as valid as what someone else does, just as worth communicating, and to at once be humble and egotistical. The world would want us to melt away and merge into the earth. Sooner or later, we all do that; no sense in going out without leaving any mark. We are all important and omnipotent, could we realize it!

And so these thoughts about my point of view, my perspective on everything that flickers into view, seen and imagined, reveal only personal truths. I try to gain objectivity by watching and listening to selected other perspectives. I triangulate and crunch the information in the myriad algorhythms within my mind. Depending on what interests others, how they relate to what it is I choose to see, determines just how interesting I may be, how locally or universally these truths that I extract may be. I do not want to be alone with my thoughts, but to share them. I am alone with these thoughts,of course, it is the universal condition, but I can attempt to communicate them to any soul that is receptive, should there be one. Were no one interested, I might live hermetically, in a sealed bottle, airless, looking out, and dead to the interactive world.

Goodbye Columbus

We have experienced a three day blow, in Hemingway terms. Strong winds and rain, colors begining to turn red and yellow en masse. Goodbye summer; hello fall this weekend is about. Goodbye Columbus! The holiday comes tomorrow. Already I can see and feel the wind shift towards the north, I trust that clear and cold will follow on the morrow. We have not had cold since last spring, although I can easily wait. The cost of oil will cut as quickly through the countryside as anything, whether it be for transportation or for heat. We are in for a belt-tightening winter. This is the pivotal weekend, the moment of transition. How is it that a single point in time can seem so smblematic, so representative of change? It must be time, pure and simple. Were this photography, it would be the perfect moment, l'image sauvette of Cartier-Bresson, the moment of intersection. I am going to light a fire to ward off the damp. I want my girls and dogs to sit cozy by the fire and waken to its crackle, to its warmth. I can see clearly now; the day has dawned. I can see all obstacles in my way. I may need to wait a few hours, but it is going to be a bright, bright sunshiny day.

Got it Made

A year ago I sat in this very chair, this very same room, looking out at the very same view. Today, the wind blows, it is warm and raining, still more summer than fall. Earlier today, our friend and lawyer, Bill, called to say that he had a signed agreement and a check to deposit once we signed the agreement. This means that we will be doing what I thought we would have done a year ago now. It means that the time for change, this limbo, is at its tangible end. There is much work to be done, but the important thing is this: we have a buyer, and the end is near. We will be able to get on with our lives!