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How far from St. Helena to the Gate of Heaven's Grace?
There are good days, and then there are almost perfect days. Yesterday with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28 was one of the latter. We did not visit any of the places I had printed out directions for; we spent the day with beaches, lighthouses, and shipwrecks, fiercely bright and windy in the new year's sun, and brought home half the sand of Cape Cod with us. There were seals. I spent a lot of time with the sea.
We left Boston around nine-thirty, listening to Eugene Onegin all the way to the Cape; I think I fell asleep in Hyannis and woke up somewhere around Wellfleet, which was still less of the drive than I had expected to miss, given that I had slept between one and two hours the previous night. Fleur-de-Lis* had put on Portuguese radio while I dozed, so that I heard fragments of English surface out of words that sounded in my sleep like a cross between Spanish and Russian, and I dreamed from them. This was surprisingly undisorienting. The springlike haze from the morning had cleared off and left white twists and drifts of cloud and the weightless autumn blue you can fall into forever; at Head of the Meadow Beach in Truro, the waves were the heavy combed green of old ships' portraits, latticed across with the sky. A bunch of tourists as we started out asked us to take their picture, windblown and giggling. The sand was more like shingle, full of black seaweed and small crabs' shells, except that it poured into our shoes like an hourglass. Fleur-de-Lis had heard from a coworker that migrating seals could be seen resting on the sandbar, although he had no idea if they would still be there; we were two hours to high tide, and yet as we came around the next curve of the beach there were maybe twenty-five seals visible in the water, sleek and surfacing in various combinations out of the waves as we watched. (She has several hundred photographs from this trip. I forgot to bring my camera. Go bother her for pictures!) A small airplane went over and we waved. After something like an hour, we turned back at a jagged branch that stood like a salt-killed tree from the tideline, and this time hiked along the dunes and beach-plum thickets on the other side of the sand-cliffs that we had observed as we walked, ledged and layered like sandstone in the making. The sudden warmth in the air was as good as summer after the sea wind. A small pond or a salt-marsh channel reflected flatly blue among the late-fall rusts and greens. Cattails and dune grasses hissed under the wind, lighter than the waves roaring out of sight: but the seals were still there when we climbed back up, some watching us just as intently. Each time we thought the next rise would lead to the parking lot, it fell back down into more thorns and beach roses and we realized we had walked farther than we meant; Fleur-de-Lis thinks we could have easily walked into Provincetown if we had planned to. When finally we got to it, the asphalt underfoot was an alien sensation after all the shifts and slopes of sand. There is something weirdly satisfying about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil, especially when eaten in a car after a serious walk. I had also brought apples, but we never got around to eating them. Maybe we should have thrown them as offerings to the sea, I don't know. Manannán?
* Let me know either if this is not proper internet citation or if it annoys its object.
Evidently there was some kind of Halloween event going on at the Highland Lighthouse, because we entered to find a number of small children with parents, pumpkin festoons, a man costumed as a table (with a nicely seaonal tablecloth and I think some cups and a bowl of flowers), and a woman who asked if we were here to see the haunted lighthouse. Which we were not, but they let us inside anyway; at least that explained the transparent specter in the window that I had seen from the ground. Sixty-nine steps to the top of the tower, the last flight an iron ship's ladder. In each facet of the lantern room was a small lettered card pointing out some feature of the skyline, like the Jenny Lind Tower, which Fleur-de-Lis had told me about earlier in the day, or the radar dome belonging to a former U.S. Air Force base, or—our favorite—Portugal, admittedly invisible, but nonetheless the next piece of land in our direct line of sight. The storyteller explaining the history of the lighthouse was clearly disappointed that more children had not come up to hear ghost stories, as he had started telling them to the adults by the time we left. The woman who let us take cookies and candies from the table near the gift shop lost only a few points for hospitality by telling us there were no public restrooms closer than the Christmas Tree Shop twenty miles away; we found some in Wellfleet. Also some small art galleries, with mobiles I could not afford: stained glass and slices of nautilus shell, chambered inward to prisms; the oils in another shop made Fleur-de-Lis want to start painting again, which I hope I encouraged sufficiently. I was a little puzzled that Abiyoyo was not a children's book store, but sold things like sweatshirts with the town's name printed on them. Driving back along Route 6, we were distracted by what looked like a yard sale of antique glass, although it turned out mostly to be bric-a-brac, royal wedding memorabilia and little china figurines, and our efforts to follow signs for Corn Hill led us to the sea glittering with late afternoon reflections, not the Victorian plaque in the ground we had been hoping for. But also in Wellfleet was Newcomb Hollow Beach, and its shipwreck, and that I am not sorry we stopped to look for.
Past a nineteenth-century schooner, the wreck is still unidentified: its ribs angle up out of the grey sand like a fossil, the disinterred bones of a leviathan in the shadow of the cliffs; you expect bony fish and ammonites in the sand, not lumps of iron rusted brown and clementine-orange. You can see pegs and sheared timbers, salt-whitened. Dried seaweeds in sprays are caught in the wood; a proper drowned ship. Somehow it surprised me that it felt, physically, when I stripped off my gloves, no older or more weathered than a wooden climbing structure like the one that used to stand out front of the Cambridge Public Library, the same waterlogged and wind-dried smell. I don't know why no museum or historical society has excavated the wreck. We were more than prepared for the sea to have pulled it apart or the sand covered it over again. Instead it lies there on a cold strand in November, a piece of human memory that the elements disregard. Through a gap in the dunes, the last strong light before sunset illuminated the waves gilt on green, the surf flowering honey-white against the shore and the tide curling over. A paraglider lifted away from the dunes as we got there; Fleur-de-Lis may have some shots of him, black with the gulls against the dimming sky. We sang along to the Revels and Peter Bellamy all the way back to New Bedford. For my birthday, Fleur-de-Lis took me out for fried shrimp; I finished Tim Pratt's Dead Reign (2008), which has kickass katabasis; I fell asleep possibly before midnight and slept through relocated Daylight Savings. I came home on the buses today still thinking about the cold light and the water.
And I got back to discover that my story "The Mirror of Venus" (originally published in Sirenia Digest #30) is now online at The Harrow and my poem "Anon" has been accepted by Not One of Us. My traditional good luck is in October, but I will not complain of November: it is also autumn. And clearly, it is also a month of the sea.
fleurdelis28 was one of the latter. We did not visit any of the places I had printed out directions for; we spent the day with beaches, lighthouses, and shipwrecks, fiercely bright and windy in the new year's sun, and brought home half the sand of Cape Cod with us. There were seals. I spent a lot of time with the sea.We left Boston around nine-thirty, listening to Eugene Onegin all the way to the Cape; I think I fell asleep in Hyannis and woke up somewhere around Wellfleet, which was still less of the drive than I had expected to miss, given that I had slept between one and two hours the previous night. Fleur-de-Lis* had put on Portuguese radio while I dozed, so that I heard fragments of English surface out of words that sounded in my sleep like a cross between Spanish and Russian, and I dreamed from them. This was surprisingly undisorienting. The springlike haze from the morning had cleared off and left white twists and drifts of cloud and the weightless autumn blue you can fall into forever; at Head of the Meadow Beach in Truro, the waves were the heavy combed green of old ships' portraits, latticed across with the sky. A bunch of tourists as we started out asked us to take their picture, windblown and giggling. The sand was more like shingle, full of black seaweed and small crabs' shells, except that it poured into our shoes like an hourglass. Fleur-de-Lis had heard from a coworker that migrating seals could be seen resting on the sandbar, although he had no idea if they would still be there; we were two hours to high tide, and yet as we came around the next curve of the beach there were maybe twenty-five seals visible in the water, sleek and surfacing in various combinations out of the waves as we watched. (She has several hundred photographs from this trip. I forgot to bring my camera. Go bother her for pictures!) A small airplane went over and we waved. After something like an hour, we turned back at a jagged branch that stood like a salt-killed tree from the tideline, and this time hiked along the dunes and beach-plum thickets on the other side of the sand-cliffs that we had observed as we walked, ledged and layered like sandstone in the making. The sudden warmth in the air was as good as summer after the sea wind. A small pond or a salt-marsh channel reflected flatly blue among the late-fall rusts and greens. Cattails and dune grasses hissed under the wind, lighter than the waves roaring out of sight: but the seals were still there when we climbed back up, some watching us just as intently. Each time we thought the next rise would lead to the parking lot, it fell back down into more thorns and beach roses and we realized we had walked farther than we meant; Fleur-de-Lis thinks we could have easily walked into Provincetown if we had planned to. When finally we got to it, the asphalt underfoot was an alien sensation after all the shifts and slopes of sand. There is something weirdly satisfying about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil, especially when eaten in a car after a serious walk. I had also brought apples, but we never got around to eating them. Maybe we should have thrown them as offerings to the sea, I don't know. Manannán?
* Let me know either if this is not proper internet citation or if it annoys its object.
Evidently there was some kind of Halloween event going on at the Highland Lighthouse, because we entered to find a number of small children with parents, pumpkin festoons, a man costumed as a table (with a nicely seaonal tablecloth and I think some cups and a bowl of flowers), and a woman who asked if we were here to see the haunted lighthouse. Which we were not, but they let us inside anyway; at least that explained the transparent specter in the window that I had seen from the ground. Sixty-nine steps to the top of the tower, the last flight an iron ship's ladder. In each facet of the lantern room was a small lettered card pointing out some feature of the skyline, like the Jenny Lind Tower, which Fleur-de-Lis had told me about earlier in the day, or the radar dome belonging to a former U.S. Air Force base, or—our favorite—Portugal, admittedly invisible, but nonetheless the next piece of land in our direct line of sight. The storyteller explaining the history of the lighthouse was clearly disappointed that more children had not come up to hear ghost stories, as he had started telling them to the adults by the time we left. The woman who let us take cookies and candies from the table near the gift shop lost only a few points for hospitality by telling us there were no public restrooms closer than the Christmas Tree Shop twenty miles away; we found some in Wellfleet. Also some small art galleries, with mobiles I could not afford: stained glass and slices of nautilus shell, chambered inward to prisms; the oils in another shop made Fleur-de-Lis want to start painting again, which I hope I encouraged sufficiently. I was a little puzzled that Abiyoyo was not a children's book store, but sold things like sweatshirts with the town's name printed on them. Driving back along Route 6, we were distracted by what looked like a yard sale of antique glass, although it turned out mostly to be bric-a-brac, royal wedding memorabilia and little china figurines, and our efforts to follow signs for Corn Hill led us to the sea glittering with late afternoon reflections, not the Victorian plaque in the ground we had been hoping for. But also in Wellfleet was Newcomb Hollow Beach, and its shipwreck, and that I am not sorry we stopped to look for.
Past a nineteenth-century schooner, the wreck is still unidentified: its ribs angle up out of the grey sand like a fossil, the disinterred bones of a leviathan in the shadow of the cliffs; you expect bony fish and ammonites in the sand, not lumps of iron rusted brown and clementine-orange. You can see pegs and sheared timbers, salt-whitened. Dried seaweeds in sprays are caught in the wood; a proper drowned ship. Somehow it surprised me that it felt, physically, when I stripped off my gloves, no older or more weathered than a wooden climbing structure like the one that used to stand out front of the Cambridge Public Library, the same waterlogged and wind-dried smell. I don't know why no museum or historical society has excavated the wreck. We were more than prepared for the sea to have pulled it apart or the sand covered it over again. Instead it lies there on a cold strand in November, a piece of human memory that the elements disregard. Through a gap in the dunes, the last strong light before sunset illuminated the waves gilt on green, the surf flowering honey-white against the shore and the tide curling over. A paraglider lifted away from the dunes as we got there; Fleur-de-Lis may have some shots of him, black with the gulls against the dimming sky. We sang along to the Revels and Peter Bellamy all the way back to New Bedford. For my birthday, Fleur-de-Lis took me out for fried shrimp; I finished Tim Pratt's Dead Reign (2008), which has kickass katabasis; I fell asleep possibly before midnight and slept through relocated Daylight Savings. I came home on the buses today still thinking about the cold light and the water.
And I got back to discover that my story "The Mirror of Venus" (originally published in Sirenia Digest #30) is now online at The Harrow and my poem "Anon" has been accepted by Not One of Us. My traditional good luck is in October, but I will not complain of November: it is also autumn. And clearly, it is also a month of the sea.
no subject
I agree with you absolutely about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the beach, and it helps if a little sand gets into them, too.
Glad it was such a great day.
no subject
I don't think it was an actual haunted lighthouse; I think they were still celebrating Halloween. But it was the oldest lighthouse on Cape Cod (if not, reasonably, the original structure) and therefore cool.
I agree with you absolutely about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on the beach, and it helps if a little sand gets into them, too.
There was enough in our shoes to furnish a new promontory . . .
Glad it was such a great day.
It was awesome.