Sagadahoc Stories 118: 8/31/00
Dead Low Tide
Summer finally arrived this week. Sizzling sunshine. Breathless
mornings. Languid noontimes. Rising southwest wind at the day's
height. A mad urge to jump overboard.
Reflections
It's the dark of the moon and the tide wants to rise up into the dooryard. Or the bottom of the bay lies naked in the morning light. This morning TOAD went out to tiptoe through the shallows.
Toad on Sands
Yesterday we put on an extra outing for those yartists whose summer
is ending. A boatload wafted out to the sands, gambolled about
until the flood lifted us, and zigged a perfect zag back across
the wind, into the river. This morning only Arlene and Matthew
showed up for yarting. Peggy went back to school today, Leith
heads back to Massachusetts, others leaving town.
Still as the look in a whale's eye. Cloudless. A magic mirror
in the Cathance. The world doubled as we slid over it. Cardinal
flowers intense in their reflected red. Osprey perched within
arm's length, or hanging in the air. Iridescent kingfishers darting
and swooping. I idled the TOAD down the last of the ebb, and we
gazed in mute wonder, closed in the solitude of a droning motor.
snoitcelfeR
In muse
I've begrudged that garbling nuisance in the wellhole, but suddenly
realized it drowns out the need to converse. Permits our ears
to close. Our eyes to open. Grants us a convivial solitude. Without
words we can enter the stillness.
The light opens wide over the bay, and the belly of the beast
emerges. An iconic heron strides ponderously across a mudflat.
The fish hawks backwing and dive in shallows. TOAD threads her
serpentine way, past red-striped buoys leaning to the fleeing
tide. The roadmap is laid bare.
On the delta
With dog
Each time the bay is different, and the same. The narrow way widens
out. The busy landscape diminishes in detail, until you are filled
with air and light and water. This summer's ritual quest to capture
images of a confluence, and ride the wind, has emptied me. The
patterned gestures with halyards and sheets and lee boards is
no longer sailing. It's a ritual dance with the elements. A slow
Sufi spiral. Ready about.
Today we don't hoist sail, though. Still as a millpond. I cast
about for the perfect vantage. Today's angle. A place where the
wind and the tide and the sun and the view all mesh. It's a silly
game, trying to find the telling spot, when the story is about
erasure. The where we can whiten our pages.
Island backlit
Bay bones
I manage to run us aground on a sandbar by Brick Island. As we
inch our way off, I notice two boys camped on the island, and
the turquoise innards of their tin skiff. This is boy country,
for sure. A place where the wildness can get you all muddy. But
my memory of such times moves beyond nostalgia, beside these glistening
sands, into an archetypal youthfulness. An absolute nakedness
and woodsmoke. I don't long to be that boy again. I take joy in
the always shining morning. And a dead low tide.
We continued across the bay in our silences and I decided to seek
out an eddy near Sturgeon Island, where we might see the fish
jump, and watch the waters come back up. I thought to anchor off
in deep water, but even where I supposed the ledges were steep
to, I found new offer rocks. The bay showing all her bones. But
we cast the hook, and broke out the art supplies.
Artist's view
Impasto
Sharing the view with other artists educates your eyes. I see
the world as delineated masses, and my hard-edged frame drawing
in ink reflects that objectiveness. Perhaps I have more rods than
cones in my eyes, favoring a black and white perspective. I can
remember crewing a yacht into an unfamiliar harbor after sunset,
and having to take the helm because I was the only one aboard
who could see the marks. The gift of twilight vision, or a carver's
edginess.
Most yartists see the world in colors, or light and shadow, or
both. Or so it seems from their work. Matthew does oil sketches
with a palette knife, so his is a richly textured world, with
bold juxtapositions and molded forms. Arlene was working in a
new medium today, oil sticks (I think) and the elevated sense
of emotional coloring she conjures in pastels became all dense
and moody in the waxy imaging. Looking over their shoulders I
saw the island blossom in hue and mystery. Orange and pink granites.
Blue shadows. Stony reflections. I kept going back to my drawing
with new washes, new eyes, a new mood.
And another
Intensely
The collegial give and take of these excursions is in fine details,
and more subtle emotions. We exchange tricks of the trade, and
we conspire in our intuitions. The three of us barely said a word
today, but a sense of intense communion with the view was palpable.
As though our individual lookings were in cascade, until we were
all soaked in the scenery. Or maybe it was sweat from the pitiless
sun. Jeez it was hot.
We did raise the sails after we hoisted anchor, but it was a hollow
gesture. Only good for a bit of shade. Voices of the boys swimming
on sands shrank the bay, just as the sunglint made it expand to
a fading distance. Eventually I yanked the Johnson, and we retreated
to the drone.
Bryce's view
Convivial solitudes
This is the second windless voyage this week. On Sunday we took
out a boatload of poets to declaim on the water, or at least that was the intent. Thirteen
pairs of ears in a TOAD. And two dogs.Tried out a few recitations
in the stillness at the mouth of the Muddy, but couldn't raise
a wind. Drifted about. Jumped overside and struggled back aboard.
Finally landed on the Center's Point shore, and set about eating
in earnest.
Looking back, it was mildly absurd for a boatload of eccentrics
to attempt poetry, surrounded by the swallowing openness of the
bay. These merrymeeting waters silence you. Put you in the place
poetry reaches for. What need for words?
Recite
Stephen and Gary did read some of their poems, and Kendall wrote
one for the day. Leith read a verse or two, as did I. All our
eyes turned inward, and we faced out into our private thoughts.
A boat full of travelers in reverie. Pretty funny looking bunch.
We've sure made a picture this summer. Comic hats and all. Send
in the clowns.
Today I saw the whole picture, for a moment. Wonderful and absurd.
How this gaff-rigged scow has carried us into the landscape, and
out of ourselves, for a spell. How the bay where so many waters
meet is a place beyond individualities, and how the TOAD takes
us there. If we take the time to look into it.
Poet's Cove
Hooked
We mumbled back into the river with the flood. Eagles lifting.
Hot cumulus peeking up over the western horizon. Big carp rolling
and slapping. Landsmells and heated air enfolding us. Crazy to
be going ashore. But tomorrow is September, and we have all our
busynesses to attend to.
