There is wind. Yes, there is that. There is the cold ocean wind. There are gray waves and white caps and old boats washed up on the sand, and sunlight in the Spanish Moss and Tule Elk like black paper targets on the ridgeline, driftwood and deck planks, big dumb things with google-eyes and Rhorshac spots that low.
There are dogs. There are dogs. Spirit guides, and mud-stained angels that run and swim and retrieve wonderful objects made of wood washed clean by blowing sand, aghast and lonesome, waiting for the boys to come and take them home.
There are waves in the sea. And birds. Coopers’ hawks and vultures, grackles on the white fence, a raven on the wire, all this by the roadside dairy we stopped to admire, the gulls, the terns, the little pygmy owls, the orphan kite shrill, a redwing blackbird, a myriad of sparrows and plucky wrens. We wish to fly.
Children, we are little golden mirrors made of plaster and bits of shell. We are marrow. We begin in the tunnel and wind up on the side of the road. We are made mostly of water. We flow over the low dunes and down to the sea in dead hulking ships, where the cool salt spray stings our eyes among the sweet musk of Holstein cows drifting in from the meadows above the whicker dunes like grandpa’s cigar smoke in the dog days of our time.
We are brittle. We are black boned. Cormorants in droves of silver dust. Where moss gathers, deadfalls speak of bright mornings to come, filled with sparkles and nights of wonder.
We actually fly. We skim the meadow lightly. The combined weight of us dwarfs the biomass of ants. We defy the rigid math of rockets. Our bodies flit. We are not aerodynamic. A good, strong breeze will blow us away.
There is the sound of the ocean, and the white noise of the sea, the hollow rush of water at the hull line, the rapping thunder of sail cloth, the whine of small winches, our little bare feet like tom-tom drums at the dock-master’s shack where an old man whistles the hauling songs of the men we dreamed we’d become.
We remember the water. Horseshoe crabs glisten under the moon. The sound of Spanish Mackerel, Conger eels thick as an Adirondack bat, smash their heads on a stone. Barnacles faintly ticking after the ebb of the wave, a drag-net heavy with silversides. The old dock-cat, Peaches, chewing snapper guts and bones.
Smalls hands, small engine. Oil and gas, cough like a crone until you choke it good and make it flood so that we always have to row. The rusty oarlocks. A sweet patina of creosote and paint. The lap, lop, lip. The gentle pull. The small drips alongside the large, the gunwale, drifting through tidal inlets in our moccasins and birch bark canoe. Dipping, the oars, the water is obsidian smooth and black as wort until the crab pots drop. It’s celadon in the bubbles and the whoosh.
The wind in the cattails. Black birds, red blaze, black wings, throat noises, puffed necks and wobble in the reed beds, cicadas thick as a man’s thumb. Birds like you’ve never seen. Slouching night herons still as stone and cranes bright as ghosts, Eider ducks and Mergansers, Grebes, Mallards and Loons. And boys. Skinny-armed and flouncy banged, trailing fingers chewed down in the cool brack. Trolling. Bamboo poles and sidewinders for the stray snapper or blue.
Floating. In our beds past midnight, lay there, unspeaking, listening, not unknowing, listening, to the sound of the foghorns at Execution, the sound of the waterways, the oboe-like warning, the French horn at dawn, the battle brewing, the boys quietly reciting, Hail Mary after Hail Mary, fending off the devil in the dark, with the windows wide open and insects buzzing against the screens like an untuned guitar string, that heavy surf G string that sounds like the bottom of the canoe when we strike the beachhead and skim up to where the horseshoe crabs couple beneath a summer moon heavy with a crane-like glow.
Night fishing. The poles and the tackle box rattle like a telegraph on the back of the Sting-Ray. Your legs dangling around the banana seat, your hands gripping the sissy-bar, a clothes-pin jutting from the fork for the baseball cards you wrecked in pursuit of mini-bike sounds, when it didn’t really matter, because you only used Mets. Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman. Sadecki and Tug McGraw. That was my own hissy-fit.
Weaving and whooping beneath the arc lights, throwing shadows this way and that, serpentine and arm-flopping in the hot July night of the Bluefish run, up to Bolton’s for sandworms in a little cardboard box filled with shredded black seaweed, those terrible annelids from the days of dinosaurs with pinchers on their faces that came out of their heads like a dog’s dick comes out of his pecker-hole. That’s lock-jaw for life.
It was a day. It was a night. It was a time. Lived for one whole second in the music and the light. We stole a Bowman’s Point dinghy and rowed out past the fleet and had ourselves a breakfast of RC Colas and buttered rolls. We smoked a Winston and a Parliament.
Row back to the swamps, where stripers feed on plump killies. Go back deep where nobody goes, behind the reed beds where horseshoe crabs grow big as manhole caps and live to a hundred and five. Fish all day and come home after dark. Find a secret island. Get some more cigarettes and a baloney hero from Sabbie’s. Hold our hands in the bait-well and feel the pointy minnows. Row out to Garvey’s Point and dig for paint-pots. Never go back.
No comments:
Post a Comment