It is impressive how rapidly and thoroughly the act of clothes-shopping can cause my mood to crash. I have exactly one pair of corduroys which are not shredding at the seams due to age and wear and one pair of non-corduroys ditto. After getting back from the Cape this evening, I went to look for some half-decent pants at the nearest mall. After nearly three hours, I came away with one pair of clearance jeans with which I was able to come to a mutually wary détente and a discount-bin Criterion DVD of Delmer Daves' 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and a terrible state of mind.
Grays Beach in Yarmouth has a boardwalk out into the salt marsh: I walked it at high tide, when the channels were filled and the cordgrass waved under clear water like the meadows of the Lowland Hundred, stiffened here and there with glassworts and sedges, skittering at all levels with green crabs. One of them had colonized a drowned baseball cap, lying half-filled with sand on its side so that I couldn't read which team it was a fan of. Two more had discovered a ball of white string that by the time I walked the other way they had unraveled in loops and cat's-cradles across the silty floor. More than once I saw larger crabs defending either themselves or their territory from smaller ones; I don't know what the behavior meant, mating, nesting, showing off. Tiny fish as quick as water striders flickered under the surface throughout. The marsh dropped away at the end of the boardwalk and the open water was a cloudy lime-juice green, sun-shot and silt-dusted; my shadow and my reflection did not fall in the same place. There was a family with a canoe drawn up on the sandy spit on the other side of the inlet, a small golden-hulled boat with a white triangular sail and an outrigger gliding past the floating dock at the end of the slip. I think I sunburned finally with the light reflecting off the rocking green water, Tom Waits' "Gun Street Girl" stuck in my head.
That was all much better than trying to find new clothes.
Grays Beach in Yarmouth has a boardwalk out into the salt marsh: I walked it at high tide, when the channels were filled and the cordgrass waved under clear water like the meadows of the Lowland Hundred, stiffened here and there with glassworts and sedges, skittering at all levels with green crabs. One of them had colonized a drowned baseball cap, lying half-filled with sand on its side so that I couldn't read which team it was a fan of. Two more had discovered a ball of white string that by the time I walked the other way they had unraveled in loops and cat's-cradles across the silty floor. More than once I saw larger crabs defending either themselves or their territory from smaller ones; I don't know what the behavior meant, mating, nesting, showing off. Tiny fish as quick as water striders flickered under the surface throughout. The marsh dropped away at the end of the boardwalk and the open water was a cloudy lime-juice green, sun-shot and silt-dusted; my shadow and my reflection did not fall in the same place. There was a family with a canoe drawn up on the sandy spit on the other side of the inlet, a small golden-hulled boat with a white triangular sail and an outrigger gliding past the floating dock at the end of the slip. I think I sunburned finally with the light reflecting off the rocking green water, Tom Waits' "Gun Street Girl" stuck in my head.
That was all much better than trying to find new clothes.
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