Tales of a Seaside Inn continues below from Part One in April.
... Figurehead salvaged from the wreck of Captain Leander's ship 'The Virgin Queen'.
Not that Sam sensed a slight any more than he knows when clamming-up might be his best course of action. Over a lifetime of inspecting shellfish for Rowley he's acquired a similarly hard shell which serves him well. His career as fence viewer, an important post in this farming town, has also hardened his theory that, "Good fences make good neighbors," into an orthodoxy. Another Yankee, as you probably suspected.
And a Yankee, with a slight mental shrug, will say to himself, "People who have problems with me are simply people who have problems." This is our core personal affirmation. Denial figures first among our coping mechanisms. The Yankee knows a little of this goes a long way. But a lot goes even further and gets far better mileage.
The Clam can, I will give him credit, graciously take as good as he gives. Like sea water dripping from a ladle of steamers. He's that good.
"His saying puts fear first. 'Fear god.' What kind of way is that to live life? Frankly, it frightens me," Patience continued.
"Well it is weird, but we have modern minds. Their old ways aren't ours. Now, if we follow a faith, we're told to love god," offered Karen, "but life was harder and religion harsher back in Leander's day. Death and danger were far closer at hand in Elizabethan England, not to mention dirt and disease. That was the kind of life they lived. They often felt fear and they had the almighty fear of God in them."
Karen knows her stuff. She and her wife, co-pastors of the Yellow Springs Unitarian Church, met at the BU school of theology as passionate students of the roots of their religion.
"Plus Leander was one of those Puritans," Shirley added.
She's something of our town historian and knows the stories of all the old families, of which more than a few remain. The register book around The Revolution in the First Congregational Church on Main Street startlingly resembles the current phone book. She can quote my lineage back to Leander and beyond, almost to biblical begatting so it seems, something I certainly can't do.
"True Shirley, Puritans," Karen said. "The forefathers - and mothers - of this town's founders and my own church's traditions."
The wind in the chimney modulated from a whistle to deep moan and the inn responded, shivering lightly as a ship in a seaway. The fire flared with the searching downdrafts, the shadows dancing faster. Above, a window shutter had come unmoored and chattered from time to time against the clapboards like indecipherable telegraph code.
The past was present. "We are all at sea in an ocean of time. None of us are adrift very long and all are headed for the same destination."
Each of us paused to consider this intelligence carried on the wind.
"Puritans, they were, like, puritanical and shit, right'? Like, uptight about shit." Heath, my sister's son joined in.
Probably a wild guess, but with merit. Heath's the nicest kid, though not exactly what you'd call educated, or even tamed for that matter. If he ever took a history class, I'm sure there was snoring coming from under a slumped over hoodie at the rear of the room. But if the subject is baseball or muscle cars, he's your go-to guy, a virtual walking encyclopedia of stats and specs. And shellfish. He digs all the inn's clams, working away in any weather. Whenever the tides out, he's out on the clam flats.
Not the sharpest tool in the boat shed maybe, but a trooper all the same. And I'd much rather ship with one of those any day than some smart-mouthed, 'been there done that' know-it-all. Far better chance of survival.
"Many Puritans were, Heath, but some weren't particularly puritanical, especially those who followed the sea. "Leander, for instance, while a devout Puritan, probably couldn't be called that."
That's an understatement. Leander, as well as being an old seadog was just a plain old horndog with the saltiest of vocabularies and a penchant for sailing away on any spiritous waters a port-side dive might see fit to provide.
Seamen were men of the world and, as such, far more worldly in outlook than most landsmen. Although perhaps covenanted Christians, they had happily broken bread with Catholics, supped agreeably with cannibals on remote isles and lustily consorted in seaside taverns with many maidens of doubtful virtue but undeniable endowments and enchantments.
"They were great believers in their bibles, however, Karen continued." "For a Puritan, the bible was The Word, carrying timeless truths from God straight into his soul without churches, priests, bishops, rituals, dogma, or indulgences standing in the way of own his possible salvation. It was to be closely studied, memorized, meditated and pondered upon as a guide to the close examination of the state of one's soul and an ever closer direct communion with the Almighty."
The Puritan outlook especially suited seamen. At sea there were no hierarchies or credos of any church close to hand, but there was always a feeling of being held closely in the hands of God, who moved mysteriously across the waters. A god who might storm, rage and cast one into the deepest depths at His pleasure like a spider between one's fingers suspended over a fire.
Leander was a particular student of his bible, every chapter and verse indelibly impressed upon his soul, and it was his pleasure to tell tales from the scriptures to a circle of fresh young faces around the fireside of a stormy autumn evening. His tales always had their own peculiar take on the traditional narrative, however, but once you had heard the captain's version you never forgot it and it tended to supplant that given in the either the Great Bible or the Bishop's Bible.
His telling of David and Goliath, for example, ended thus. "And the wee plucky lad did most prejudicially, nay lethally, with clever malice prepense and the deadly practiced aim of his hand-wrought wrist rocket armed from a sack of the smoothest beach stones, fatally smite that big friggin' bully Goliath - right between the fookin' balls." Such details tend to impress and linger in the unformed mind.
This caused some discomfiting confusion, however, at recitation in church. The young speaker who had sipped spiced cider and hung breathlessly on Cap'n Lees every word in front of his hearth was suddenly confronted with teasing out the captain's version from the more house broken, if duller, canonical version of the tale.
"... and David did smite that fo-fo-fool Goliath ..." Here his voice would falter as the speaker turned beet red and beads of sweat broke out over his brow furrowed in confused concentration. "... right between the eye-eye-eye ..."
"Balls!" A furtive back-bencher would hiss from under the cover of his cloak sleeve.
"B-b-balls. Eye-balls. Amen." The flustered speaker would at last blurt out to a storm of sniggers, followed by much rapping of wrists and caning of the blasphemer's bottom.
"Despite their sea-borne worldliness, the Puritan sailors followed their faith deeply," Karen resumed. "God was the meaning of their mortal life, which was a mere navigation way point toward an endless voyage through either heaven or hell. 'And God moved across the face of the waters', as Genesis says. A vengeful diety often wrathful and raging with storms at men's sins. A god to be obeyed, searched for signs of favor and above all feared, in the flickering hope of eternal life with Him and his elect, saved from endless torments by the Devil and his damned in bottomless pits of hell, fiery caverns far below the surface of the sea."
"I know that fear," Patience said. "The ocean terrifies me. They saw the sea as God himself and were afraid. I've felt that."
Patience, although a child of nature, is no natural sailor. She rarely ventures beyond the seaside except to reluctantly cross Plum Island Sound in Heath's Whaler for one of the inn's clambakes on a remote backside beach.
Everyone has at least one phobia, or is in fact multi-phobic, although many deny it. Heights, snakes, spiders, flying, hypodermic needles and German Shepherds (the last two mine), are just a few among a long and expanding laundry list of irrational fears, what with the DMS being devoted to pathologizing the least wayward quirk of human nature.
Thalassophobia, 'an intense and persistent fear of the sea', and especially the sea creatures which lurk below its surface in the depths, is a relatively rare phobia, especially in seafaring families. My mother, Justine, coming from the prairies of landlocked Nebraska and never having seen the sea until she married my father, seemed to have some anxiety about the ocean, but here's how Patience's full-blown phobia came about.
... Launching the surfboat on Plum Island.
My father, Captain Hector Morris, bought a classic 20-foot Coast Guard surf boat for 10 dollars as the only bidder at a military surplus auction soon after the war. He christened her the Sea Belle and carefully converted her into a sailboat in the inn's back yard, under the curious gaze of our guests, over the course of two years between voyages plowing oil tankers over the sea lanes from the Middle East to Gulf and East coast refineries.
The old surfboats were lifeboats, launched from the shore to be rowed through, say, a pounding storm surf breaking on a rock-ribbed beach and built like brick houses of double diagonal teak bent over stout oak frames.
The Sea Belle, or simply Belle as we called her, was a gaff-rigged ketch with a longish bowsprit, wheel forward of the mizzen mast, a retractable centerboard, referred to as 'the plate', and a flip-up rudder, or 'the door'. These features made her perfect for gunkholing idly around the shallows of the Sound, but still very swift and stable at sea.
The bottom sides were painted with an oxblood-colored copper anti-fouling coating, the topsides a pale yellowish-cream color, with oiled teak trim and seats. He added a small cuddy forward with louvered mahogany doors and fitted the boat with highly varnished spruce spars and ash oars, shiny over-sized brass fittings and a thick white bolt rope running around the gunnels.
Justine sewed a suit of red sails on her ancient treadle-powered Singer, following a pattern Hector had cut from a roll of butcher paper, densely scrawled with hieroglyphics of demanding specifications using arrows and diagrams as to seams, grommets and stitching.
In short, either under sail or lying at anchor, she was rakish as hell, turned all heads wherever we went like the Belle she was and still rowed like a dream, which was a good thing since Hector would never stand for a stinkpot hanging off her shapely stern. Plus she was beautifully balanced and well behaved. With the main dropped, storm jib backed, mizzen hauled flat and the wheel lashed hard to windward she'd ride peacefully nose on the wind while we fished for cod, flounder, bluefish, haddock or whatever was running that day.
One breezy, cloudless summer day with a light swell, we were flying along at a brisk clip on a broad reach out to Stellwaggen Bank to catch some bluefish. I, then ten, was at the wheel, Hector was preparing the gear and bait and Patience, then eight and bored out of her sophisticated mind, was somewhat tending the jib.
Suddenly the sea surged ominously, as it does before an earthquake, and a wolfpack of gigantic gray submarines seemed to surface all around us. We were surrounded and trapped in a pod of humpback whales, all blowing and spouting.
They were immense, two to three times the length of the boat, even their calves were longer than the Belle. The air was filled with their spray showering down on us. It had the odor of a rank sea cavern, "like the bad breath and boogers of god himself," I described it with glee when telling the other kids this tale.
I began shouting with excitement and real fear, the nearest was so close I might have jumped and ridden on his back. Hector was screaming, kicking the hull with his steel-toed boots and whaling on the gunwales with an oar to scare them off. As if. He tossed me the fog horn to blast, that while trying to steer through their immense wakes tossing us around like a truck inner tube in roaring rapids.
Patience was shrieking pure nonstop bloody terror with all the lung power a kid could possibly possess (she couldn't talk for days after). The whales, for their part, entirely ignored this manmade chaos erupting in their midst and swam on serenely and swiftly.
Then, in unison, they fluked, their mighty tails towering over the Belle's mast as they dove very slowly down, seeming to inhabit a different type of time altogether, their mighty tails flailing the air and drenching us with seawater.
As a parting shot they slapped the waves with their flukes, soaking us with another wall of water. The fluke of the nearest whale just grazed the boat by Patience and she fainted dead away in the bottom of the boat, now wallowing ankle deep with the chilly North Atlantic.
As suddenly as they'd appeared, they vanished again and the sea smoothed over all the traces of their passage as if they'd been mere phantoms passing in a feverish dream. They'd just taken a quick 'breather', breathing out stale air and inhaling fresh air for the next half hour or so under water into their lungs, which Hector later told us were, "... the size of the inn's pickup truck."
Refreshed, they continued unerringly northward full speed ahead toward their rich summer grazing grounds in the Arctic Ocean where they'd resume feeding after fasting all winter in the Caribbean, living off their vast stores of fat, "... called 'blubber'." He also explained that, "... Stellwaggen's just a short stretch in their yearly 16,000 mile round trip between the frigid polar seas and the warm tropical waters where they breed and give birth. Then they tack and return north with their newborn, called 'calves', just like the ones at Saltmarsh Farm."
Hector picked up the limp Patience, wrapped her in the storm jib - there was nothing else to be done - tucked her into the child-length berth 'below', as we called the cuddy, and baled out the boat with the bilge pump.
Then we too tacked and headed for home. No blues lost their lives that day. And Patience would never again set foot on the Belle, or seldom on any other boat, for that matter.
... Patience Morris, with braces, age 13.
Now, Karen's a very skilled sailor. Hector taught her, so she learned from the best. Like any sailor who values survival, she respects the power of the sea, dreading and fearing its awful anger. Any other attitude is sleep leading to suicide. And there actually are many who don't fear and respect, don't deign to dread until all is lost, when they're crying in vain to god for salvation and only awaken when drowning.
Her family used to 'summer' with us back in the day, now long lost, when many people still summered and summering - lovely word that - was an important, perhaps the most pleasant and memorable, part of life.
They stayed at the inn from June to September. Her father would leave the Milk Street office of Pan Arcadian Assets early on Fridays and after a brisk walk just catch the 4:45 train on the Newburport Line from North Station. Hector met him, and all the other summering dads, at Rowley Station across town and they'd pile in the back of the inn's pickup, silk ties now loosened, sitting in their gray or blue linen summer suits on fragrant bales of fresh hay or salty hanks of frayed cordage.
The summer of the whales, with Patience having left the ocean forever and Hector having lost a seafarer in the family - the first defector anyone could remember - Karen asked him to teach her to sail.
"Captain Hector, do you think you could teach me to do that?" she asked, pointing toward me sailing smartly away from the dock nudged by a hay-scented land breeze. "Can girls do it too?"
Hector scratched his beard. "Well, I guess. Sure. Why not? I mean Harris can do it. Some kind of OK. If he can, anyone can. Girls too, I guess." This being a typical Yankee back-handed vote of confidence in one's progeny.
The inn kept three sailing and rowing dinghies for guests to use - the Pinta, Nina and Santa Maria. So Hector said, "Well, lady Isabelle, let's go. Time waits for no man and tide for no woman! Let's get him." He hoisted Pinta's sails and they set off after me, following a brief hail of basic training.
"Perch there to port, left side. Handle this line, jib sheet." Which looked nothing like a sheet, although the luffing sail did sort of look like laundry flapping on a clothes line. "When I say 'haul', pull in hard on the sheet. 'Ease', let her out slow.
Even after my head start and their time out for a rapid fire 101, with Hector at the helm the Pinta quickly blew by me on a broad reach leaving the Nina to eat dust, falling ever further behind in her wake. Karen tended the jib with rapt, thrilled intensity as Hector suggested subtle changes in its trim. He was soon certain a new life-long sailor had been born into the family.
Our small fleet was built at the Melanson Boatyard, up the Rowley River just below the dam where it turns tidal. The yard had a boat barn straddling the riverbank, fronted by a long floating dock where a fishing boat fresh down the ways and fitting out, or one returning to its birthplace for repairs, might be berthed.
They were ten feet long, beautifully crafted of canvas-covered spruce in an Indian canoe-style of construction, with tall wire-stayed sloop rigs and varnished spruce spars. Like the Belle and all of our boats, the sails and hulls were deep red with light cream colored topsides and mahogany brightwork. This was our signature writ gracefully upon the waves and made them easy spot on the Sound among all the other craft and keep an eye on. They drew only a few inches of water and, with a centerboard and removable rudder, could explore anywhere in Plum Island Sound and far up its shallowest tributary streams.
They sailed together often that summer and Karen, always a quick study, learned the ropes fast. By August Hector had enough confidence to let her solo within line of sight on the Sound. At the end of the summer he took the two of us and Herb in the Belle down the coast to the Misery Islands off Manchester. She was at the wheel most of the time, long brown hair flying out behind her on the stiff smokey southwest breeze, looking like she was glimpsing an illusion of heaven, somewhere just out of sight over the horizon.
Patience picked up on our meandering course of thought, which did sort of seem at sea, although enjoyable all the same and interesting for its drift.
"Puritans, if I understand my family, saw the sea's storms and their own particular sufferings as punishments sent from a God angered at their personal sins and mankind's inherently sinful nature. And they saw that nature of sin, an inheritance passed down from The Fall, as no more separable from man than slime from a fish."
As we've seen, she has no special fondness for fishes or any other denizens of the deep.
"Part of that outlook on life I agree with, actually. The god part, I don't know. I'm agnostic about lots of stuff in life and God's one of them. Although I guess she's on my bucket list. Or maybe post-bucket list."
Tales of a Seaside Inn continues with Part Three in July.
