This is the last piece in a three-part series.
Pleasant Beach
(South Thomaston, Maine)
Sometimes a place seems to come to you, as though the world has tilted and you find yourself sliding towards it through no effort of your own. It happened to me this way at Pleasant Beach, a little scoop of a cove between Rockland and South Thomaston along Maine’s midcoast, a short paddle from the mouth of the Weskeag River. There on a thin lip of rock stands a small yellow cottage that has been in my wife’s family for well over a century, and my convergence with it twenty-four years ago has made an inestimable difference in my life. Without this place, undoubtedly, most things would be very different for me today, and I would be a very different man. Of course, I can only speculate as to what those differences might be, but I can say for certain that I would not…
- know very much about the high, roaring tides of the North Atlantic
- know very much about the habits of lobsters and lobstermen
- from a distance, be able to distinguish a loon from a cormorant (visually, that
is; the loon’s cry is unmistakable)
- know how to drive in fog so blinding you wonder if it is not inside your own skull
- know how to drive in heavy snow and ice
- etc.
You see, after ten summers as “rusticators” here, we became full-time residents of Maine in 2006. Nearly fourteen years later, it still seems that first Strawberry Moon is just now emerging from the sea.
After all of this time, even under winter’s blanket, the magic of Pleasant Beach in the summer asserts itself. Where do I begin to tell of its charms? In the morning, if I am up early enough, I can walk out to the porch of the yellow cottage and witness the beginning of the day. If the weather is clear, the sun makes a king’s entrance, glittering across the Gulf of Maine wearing a golden and bejeweled crown, as the birds begin their songs of worshipful ecstasy. And if it is low tide, when the shiny mud reaches out toward the channel like fleshy hands, the seagulls begin their aerial ballet, an artful ritual of coldblooded killing and savage feasting. The gull knifes downward and plucks a crab or a snail from the exposed seabed, then wheels up and in toward the shore, hovering there, and then airdrops his prey thirty or forty feet to the big rocks below, where it explodes with a meaty crack, and the seagull plunges down to enjoy its breakfast. Imagine all of this from the point of view of the unsuspecting crab, though: is he terrified in his own juices, or does he simply accept death-by-smashing as a vocational hazard?
When the carnage is over and the sun lolls in the vast blue air, the fishermen come out with the tide, some of them solitary, purposeful, each one a lonely traveler in the old quest to haul from the mystery below a living, a livelihood, a life; still others roar past us indifferently, commanders concerned with more important matters, radios cranked up, the better to blast above the big engines their country music and classic rock. They don’t gaze over at us, but the posture of each crew member clearly says to us, “Fuck all you shore people.”
But we don’t care. For a while, we have the sun and the breeze, and the slow but extraordinary shifts in the light and the cloud-shadows as the day makes its journey. There is no regret in this, for the day lives its life fully - proud, sorrowful, coming, going, briefly crowning the western treetops in homage to itself and then fading off down the Weskeag River, bidding “Goodbye!” to us and to the sea and moving on into the valleys and the hills beyond, as the lobstermen return to their home ports, trailing their gouache wakes. We will miss you, Day, but welcome unto you, Night; let us see what you have in store.
Someday, when I am a very old man, I hope, that full moon that rises over the gulf (and especially over our little cove) will be at the beginning of my very last book; or maybe it will be the ending of it, but either way, it will be as prominent a marker there as it has been in my own life. I have looked upon it and seen the sad furrow in the brow of the woman I love, and I have seen my children’s eyes. So many nights we have built our fires on the edge of the world, giving shape to the wildness of the sea and the uninhabited islands that rise black and humped against the burnished pewter of the sky. This is where all sound begins, in an audible perfection that no recording studio can ever reproduce because one is in the midst of it: the cracking of the flaming wood, bright and round against the rolling cymbal of the tide upon cretaceous bedrock. So deeply did the glaciers etch the record of their journey that the dark eyes of the crevasses watch us hungrily, like the fissures in our dreams, into which we dare not step.
Above is the same sky that Adam saw and wondered at, and our hearts find the old lines, the old zeniths…but only for a few minutes. Aside from the brave passage of a satellite every so often, it is a drama of absolute stillness, a cloudburst of lights frozen by the breath of God. Down here we are small, wandering seeds, grateful to be in the world at all - the only world we are certain of, at least. Finally, though, our gazes must come back to the horizon, and to the things that perhaps lie within our ability to comprehend: the dark slab and glowing green points of a tanker passing out in the channel; the racing silver sliver thrown by a lighthouse against a far-off fog bank; and something that looks like a coffin seeping along on the current just beyond the wharf.
Now our beds begin to call to us, but they must wait as one last beer puts its fine sheen on the evening. Be careful on the short path up to the cottage - there are loose rocks there. Take a last chestful of that air that was nowhere else so precisely contrived to bring us the yearning we will feel in February, when summer will be someplace between a forgotten dream and a melody we cannot quite hear yet but whose strains we know well. So to bed, finally, to fresh sheets and warm quilts, having opened the windows to the cool July night and to the gnashing of the tide. The water comes so hard, we will wonder, in the morning, that all has not been washed away.
Soon, though, it doesn’t matter, for I am not here anyway. I am out there, in that little white dinghy that is always moored beside the wharf, the one no one ever uses. I lie snugly along its bottom, arms folded, marveling that a mere two inches of weathered wood separates me from the cold Atlantic water, and staring upward into the sky once again, wherein I can now plainly see the unending story of a billion years. I am not even a snail dropped from the beak of a seagull. Then, slowly at first and now faster, I am moving, for the dinghy has somehow slipped its moorings and I am simply drifting, headed for who knows where.
