The Anecdotal Life Part. 84
The other evening I was talking with a friend about out of the ordinary, nearly out of body, visual experiences. I immediately remembered my few years on Deal Island on the Chesapeake. How beautiful it was, and how tough it was to live among a group of watermen, and hunters. How lucky I was to have good neighbors like the Peaks who led me through the social mores. It's a "whole nuther culture" down there on the Eastern Shore. How they dealt with the mosquitoes or the green flies that bite you til blood runs down your arm... is beyond me. Sometimes how they dealt with each other was also beyond me. Yet you couldn't help but love these tightly knit people. They stood on Friday nights down at the General store and told wry stories about each other and about their past. They stood back to back through every kind of disaster, many of them self made. The churches were always having gatherings supporting some poor soul who was failing miserably, health-wise or financially.
But as I said, the reason this all came up was that our conversation dwelt in the main about simple sights one sees in the world around, sights that make us stop , drop and gaze. One of my strongest visual recollections on the island was of a delicate pink dawn barely grazing the land it was so early. Early enough that one could hear the watermen's trucks and cars pouring down to their makeshift marina. It never looked anything but hastily erected for them to just clatter aboard and head out to a day's work on the Chesapeake. On that morning I had been awakened by my Siamese cat, J.T. ( whose initials stood for my favorite writer, James Thurber). I wanted to see the dawn now that I was up for it. Cat and I ran downstairs to the huge cathedral-like windows that I, thank God, had put into the front of house , shaping it like a prow of a ship, and facing the Chesapeake only 50 feet away. To the left I could still see the fading lights of Crisfield and the channel leading from the marina that was but a skip and a hop from me down the road. At the mouth of the channel the moon and a star were in direct vertical alignment while at the same moment, the black outline of one of the old skipjacks emerged. The tall mast pointed straight up to the trembling new moon and its erstwhile celestial friend, tentatively backdropped by the pale rose-hued sky and they all hung together for a few seconds in time. It would never happen again. Soon none of it will ever happen again. Not even for all of those brave souls who cherish and cling to their raggedy, rollicking life on the water. They, too, will soon be driven from their unique existence by the thousands of gallons of poisonous debris sent to them on a daily and dispassionate basis by neighbors on the western and northern shores of the Bay. Soon buyers will and have come to offer them huge amounts of money for their property so that condos can be built and filled with other dispassionate soilers of the land. But for that moment , as the precious warm hues of dawn died, it was all just for me. No one could have seen such a view except from where I was. It was worth building and losing a house for.
Copyright: September 6, 2008
But as I said, the reason this all came up was that our conversation dwelt in the main about simple sights one sees in the world around, sights that make us stop , drop and gaze. One of my strongest visual recollections on the island was of a delicate pink dawn barely grazing the land it was so early. Early enough that one could hear the watermen's trucks and cars pouring down to their makeshift marina. It never looked anything but hastily erected for them to just clatter aboard and head out to a day's work on the Chesapeake. On that morning I had been awakened by my Siamese cat, J.T. ( whose initials stood for my favorite writer, James Thurber). I wanted to see the dawn now that I was up for it. Cat and I ran downstairs to the huge cathedral-like windows that I, thank God, had put into the front of house , shaping it like a prow of a ship, and facing the Chesapeake only 50 feet away. To the left I could still see the fading lights of Crisfield and the channel leading from the marina that was but a skip and a hop from me down the road. At the mouth of the channel the moon and a star were in direct vertical alignment while at the same moment, the black outline of one of the old skipjacks emerged. The tall mast pointed straight up to the trembling new moon and its erstwhile celestial friend, tentatively backdropped by the pale rose-hued sky and they all hung together for a few seconds in time. It would never happen again. Soon none of it will ever happen again. Not even for all of those brave souls who cherish and cling to their raggedy, rollicking life on the water. They, too, will soon be driven from their unique existence by the thousands of gallons of poisonous debris sent to them on a daily and dispassionate basis by neighbors on the western and northern shores of the Bay. Soon buyers will and have come to offer them huge amounts of money for their property so that condos can be built and filled with other dispassionate soilers of the land. But for that moment , as the precious warm hues of dawn died, it was all just for me. No one could have seen such a view except from where I was. It was worth building and losing a house for.
Copyright: September 6, 2008
posted by The Anecdotal Life at 4:52 AM
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