Coming into the End Zone (28 page)

All these facts are taken from a brochure the novelist Mary Ellen Chase compiled for the use of the museum. She was an inhabitant of Blue Hill, was proud of the town and of Jonathan Fisher. The town seems to be proud of them both. It is good to think that men like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Jonathan Fisher are our true ancestors, Renaissance men who, more than generals, politicians, and ‘developers,' represent the early American love of art and learning we seem now to be losing.

The postmistress, Frances, says she noticed a road had been cut into our property. Frances misses very little that happens in Sargentville. I tell her, yes, we are preparing to move Wayward Books up here into a new building on the acre within sight of our house. Perhaps we will call it Wayward Books Downeast, I tell her. She seems pleased.

She gives me a huge bundle of mail. In it is a letter from a friend in Los Angeles, to whom I wrote about my new house. She sends me a clipping about Dylan Thomas, who spent the last four years of his life in the tiny seaside village of Laugharne in South Wales. He lived in a boathouse, which he called ‘my seashaken house on a breakneck of rock,' now a museum. Above it is a small shedlike building, which he called his ‘wordsplashed hut.' It overlooks the bay and, according to the newspaper report, is in danger of sliding off the cliff into the sea. Dylan wrote to his friend who had rented it for him: ‘This is it, the place, the house, the workroom, the time. Here I am happy and writing.'

In his hut, after a morning spent at the local pub, as his wife, Caitlin, described it, he would ‘bang into intensive scribbling, muttering, whispering, intoning, bellowing and juggling of words.' Laugharne is an English-speaking town, whose mayor goes by the ancient title of ‘portreeve,' and whose inhabitants distrusted outsiders. ‘We used to throw stones at him,' one resident said. ‘Why?' the reporter asked. ‘Because he came from Swansea.' Swansea is twenty-seven miles away.

So Dylan too was from away. But he loved the place. It was, he wrote, ‘the best town, the best house, the only castle, the mapped, measured, inhabited, drained, garaged, townhalled, pubbed and churched, shopped, gulled and estuaried one state of happiness.'

My friend must have thought my new place resembled Dylan's. In some ways it does. But the distance from the sea is greater and there seems to be no danger of my study falling into the sea. True, mine is a place where juggling of words takes place. True, for me ‘This is it: the place, the house, the workroom, the time.' Sadly, I doubt I shall ever achieve, as he did, what he called ‘the mystery of having been moved by words.'

None of the bookcases in our house stands erect. The floors are all uneven. So we buy what are called ‘shims,' wedge-shaped pieces of wood to insert under the bookcases, making them level. Tracy, the frugal carpenter, laughs at our purchase—‘You actually paid money for those?' We are embarrassed. People from away do that sort of thing, buy what prudent Mainers acquire from the land or from construction leftovers.

My revenge comes later in the week. Tracy runs out of small pieces of wood, and asks if she can have two of our boughten shims. She blushes. I grin with malicious delight.

The many birds that live in our cove, or visit it, make up for the small number of land birds in our woods. We are going to have to put up attractive feeders to build our bird population. After the first day, even the Maine state bird, a black-capped chickadee, has deserted us. The fucking jays are here no longer.

But at the shore: There are many gulls, families of ducks, and cormorants—here called ‘shags,' a native corrected me. I am told shags plunge into the sea at the rate of sixty kilometers an hour. Occasionally I spot a sandpiper. Loons make their august progress across the water from one shore to the other. One day, Tracy identified a mysterious (to me) bird as a plover. I have seen one eagle, gliding toward what I hope is its nest in Rebecca Peterson's trees. I look for nests of any variety wherever I walk, having been told on early-morning radio it is a myth to think that touching a nestling will keep the mother away. But I have never seen one.

Sitting in the sun on the deck, clipboard on my lap, binoculars in hand, I am sometimes stopped cold from writing by all the winged action on the water at the end of the meadow.

At last: a hummingbird in a great hurry stops at the colored sugar water I have put out in a feeder among the new boxes of impatiens on the deck. Perpetually in motion, it drinks as it runs, and leaves in a rush. I wait a long time, not daring to move, but it does not return.

I am told, although I have not seen them, that in some parts of Maine, green stamps, long since gone from city stores, still exist. When you have collected them you take them to what is called, with no theological implication, I am sure, a ‘redemption store.'

I tend to lose sight of the unpleasant truths that lie just beyond our blessed acreage. This state is not an Eden for everyone. Thirty-seven percent of the population of Hancock County live below the poverty mark; ten percent are said to be functionally illiterate. The county is rural; its unemployment rate is thirty-one percent higher than it is in the large cities like Portland and Bangor. The high school dropout rate is very high, the number of students going on to college very low. In this week's issue of the
Weekly Packet
there are pictures of the twenty-two June graduates from Stonington–Deer Isle High School. Four signify they are going to the University of Maine at Orono, one to Northeastern University in Boston, a few to the Maritime Academy in Castine; the rest expect ‘to be employed.' A number of these specify fishing or construction as their future occupation. Some say they do not know exactly what they will do.

The great curse of the population in these beautiful hills and beside the bays, coves, and rivers is alcoholism. The newspaper reports numerous tickets or arrests each week. A large majority are for drunken driving, or OUI, as they abbreviate it, operating a vehicle while under the influence. The crimes we left behind in Washington—homicides, drug pushing and addiction, break-ins, muggings, beatings, and rapes—do not seem to happen here. Someone says to me: ‘Yet.' So, while I feel safe in my house and on the streets, and never bother to lock my car, I am reluctant to drive the very dark roads at night.

I have been looking through a book about the work of the painter Marsden Hartley, who was born in Lewiston, Maine, and died twenty miles from where we now live, in Ellsworth. In his youth he traveled widely, to New Mexico, Paris, Bermuda, Berlin, New Hampshire, New York, unable to find a place to settle. The commentator on his paintings writes: ‘No place was his place, each proved as lonely as the last. At the end of his life he learned that man's sole strength is in himself.'

The paintings done in and around Ellsworth are his best. His subjects were drowned fisherman, eroded shells, dead plovers left on the beach after a hurricane. Despairing, desolate, hopeless visions, they reflect his desperate desire for death and oblivion. He wrote, at the end of his life:

… And let men have the sea

Who want eternity.

Bruce Chatwin (with Paul Theroux) has a new book,
Patagonia Revisited
. Before I read it, I reread
In Patagonia
. Looking at ‘the enormity of the desert or the sight of a tiny flower,' Chatwin writes, ‘the choice is between the tiny and the vast.' In our landscape there is no such necessary choice. Reach and cove, spruce and small berry bushes, giant rocks and beach pebbles, meadow and narrow, beaten path, all coalesce into one harmonious whole. I cannot separate the small from the vast, the evergreen seedling from the enormous horse chestnut tree that shades part of our lawn.

I go down to the cove, carrying my beach chair, intending to work there. But I find I am restless and want to walk in one direction or the other, exploring the little inlets I haven't seen. I think of T. S. Eliot:

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still.

Sometimes, when I listen to silence in the early evening on the deck, I imagine I hear the whine of police cars and the sirens of ambulances, the whirring of an overhead helicopter searching out a local miscreant, the honking of impatient home-goers held up on North Carolina Avenue by a slow driver, the shouts of teenagers ‘hanging out' in the alley.

When quiet descends again, I know I am away from the distressed city and have conjured up the intrusive noise, perhaps so I can better relish the sensation of silence.

I am invited to a cocktail party at the Sargent House, which stands in the middle of the village. Abby Sargent Neese Kelly is a native who now lives outside Philadelphia during the winter but comes back faithfully to the house her grandfather built, and where she was born, in the summer. Her house is filled with fine possessions of her ancestors, including a ‘nurse's chair,' connected to the cradle so that as the nurse rocks, so does the baby.

I meet Abby's cousin, who tells me about our house. It seems it once belonged to her great-aunt, Ella Byard, a ‘spinster schoolteacher' who, at the beginning of this century, advertised in the newspaper for a husband. Captain Willis White presented himself, and was accepted. However, he turned out to be a poor choice, being a ‘terrible womanizer.' Abby and her cousin were not allowed to visit their aunt in the Captain White House, as it was called even then, without a chaperon. Abby's cousin promises to call on me and acquaint me with stories full of terrible details about the infamous Captain White.

Perhaps we should repaint the mailbox to change the name to the Ella Byard House.

An addition to my store of evidence on the longevity of Maine residents and visitors: Anne Chamberlyn, who is over sixty, tells me she owns six bicycles, some in Washington, some in Maine. Every day she rides about forty miles, wherever she happens to be.

In Ellsworth, where I go once a week for groceries, a well-tanned, slim, elderly man in a yacht club cap engaged me in conversation. We were standing at the magazine rack of a store called Mr. Paperback. I was looking at a book called
Basic Sailing
.

‘Do you sail?'

I admitted I was only beginning to learn. I have been out in Peggy Danielson's boat three times and am a late convert to the art of moving across the water by wind and sail, in the direction you wish to travel.

‘I am a sailor,' he said, with some pride. ‘Have been one all my life. Never had to work at anything, so I sailed, first my father's boat, and now mine.'

I tell him how lucky I think he is.

‘Well, I suppose. But now I'm thinking about becoming a writer. What do you think of that?'

‘What do you want to write?'

‘Stories. I want to write stories. I read that there are thirty-eight plots. I'll pick one, change it around a little, set it on the coast of Maine, and write it. I used to know someone who worked for
The Saturday Evening Post
. I'll send it to him.'

Every time I hear the number of plots there are in the world the amount changes, covering a spread from nine to, now, thirty-eight. I refrain from saying that there are as many plots as there are writers narrating them, that the voice telling the story is what matters, and that I rarely see
The Saturday Evening Post
on the newsstands.

July 4. Today there was a celebratory parade in Blue Hill. Sybil and I drove into town and stood at the edge of the road with a sparse, strung-out collection of L. L. Bean—clad onlookers and impatient children. The parade was touching. The band of the local high school led it off, there was one car carrying a very old army veteran, several groups of Girl and Boy Scouts, three or four naval veterans from World War II (no women, of course, but then, I hadn't volunteered to march), a thin line of young children on their bikes, and, at the very end, a little boy riding a donkey, carrying a small American flag, and wearing a hat that rested on his large ears.

The parade stopped at the first bridge, a member of the band played an agonizingly off-key Taps on his bugle, and a naval lieutenant, senior grade, threw a wreath into the bay. The little girl beside me dropped her ice-cream cone and started to cry. Her father picked her up. With the other onlookers, he started walking with the parade toward the next bridge, where the same ceremony was to be performed. Sybil and I went home, feeling patriotic and chastened by the simplicity and good intentions of it all.

Alone in the house (Sybil has gone to Washington and will not be back until the end of this month), I feel the
extent
of it, the number of rooms I never go into unless there are guests, the number of entrances and exits, the lawn and meadow and woods stretching out in all directions, the deck blacked out at night, the circular driveway, the damp, granite cellar down a flight of rickety steps, the half-foot-sized narrow back stairs. All this I inhabit, alone. It seems too much, it has far too many dark holes and ragged edges. I pull it all in around me, close the blinds, light one lamp, read a book, and wait for it to be time to go to bed.

July 12, 1989: No longer am I burdened by the weight of my years. My new age today, a year later, does not worry me. Alone for most of the day, until the promise of dinner with friends tonight, I went for a swim in the cove, conquering its temperature (sixty degrees) by thinking it was not as cold as I expected it to be.

Nor is this day as painful as I thought it might be. I seem not to have grown older in the year, but more content with whatever age it is I am. I accept the addition, hardly noticing it. There may well be the enduring challenge of the 365 steps up the face of the Temple of the Dwarf at Chichén Itzá, but the certainty that I shall never again climb them no longer disturbs me.

O'Henry's last words are said to have been: ‘Turn up the lights—I don't want to go home in the dark.' I've begun to try to turn up the lights on what remains of my life.

Waiting on the deck for Ted, Bob, and Peggy to take me to a birthday dinner, I watch my unknown neighbor bring his sailboat to anchor in the cove, furl and wrap his sails, and stand for a moment in the prow looking out to the reach. The light is dimming, the water flattens out from grey to dark-blue calm, the sun sets, coloring the sky like an obscured klieg light, out of my sight.