Meaning a Life

by Mary Oppen

  IV

  In thick fog by the time we passed the bell-buoy, we noted the time, measured the distance on the chart, took a compass-reading on our heading, guessed at our speed and the speed of the current, and waited for Sylvester’s Cove to show up out of the fog: vaguely it appeared, but we were almost on it before we saw it. I chose to return on a reverse course, and to wait for the fog to lift. We waited at our mooring until two o’clock when the fog lifted suddenly and we set out again, but with an adverse tide. Visitors, headed for the 4th of July picnic on our island, waved to us from the mail-boat. We were near the bell-buoy for an hour, held by the current and the tide, but the day was fine and we were glad to be in the boat, on the water. The wind freshened and we sailed to Stonington, anchored near the old granite-polishing site under the quarry-derrick, and went in search of a room and a meal. After dark we walked to the main street to watch the fireworks, but the fog returned. The little street was jammed with people and with cars.

  Next morning after breakfast we sailed down Stonington Reach past West Mark, and past Scraggy Ledge, past the big red bell out in the middle of the crossing in open seas to Vinalhaven. We tacked back and forth with a southwest wind; on the oceanward tack heading out to the great granite tower which marks the entrance to Penobscot Bay, tacking back to Vinalhaven Island where we were becalmed as we approached land. On every tack we were stopped, although we could see the wind dancing on the water. The tide was sweeping us south where we wanted to go, but when we approached land we were stopped, we couldn’t move—a sea of glue. I put up our big, new, light jib and we worked out to sea to sail fast, but each time we returned to land—the sea of glue. In Vinalhaven at last, we anchored in front of our acquaintance’s house. He came out in his little sailboat to advise us on our mooring, and offered his pier for our landing. We left our canoe on Mr. Moyer’s pier and stayed for a drink. I asked him how old he had been when he played his first concert, “I must have been eleven years old, it was in San Francisco, three weeks before the great earthquake.” He played for us on his little spinet.

  In the night I awoke, thinking about the sea of glue, and realized that an upward pressure had made the water dance and that the landward breeze lifting over the high island had left a vacuum, creating the dancing waves.

  In the morning in a ten-mile wind, after a swift get-a-way like a runaway horse (we nearly ran down a moored boat that was hidden from our view by our sail)—we were in Vinal Reach with a beam-wind favoring us through islands: narrow passages, wondrously beautiful water with birds, islands, trees, vistas.

  Sailing day after day, the first sensations of sailing each year merge with other trips: the foggy day into Stonington on the 4th of July mingles in memory with the 4th of July when we had arrived in Stonington in thunder and lightning, in downpour, and the grocery-store lady, Mrs. Bartlett, found us a room. I awoke, in still another summer, not having slept soundly, in a room in Mrs. Robinson’s guest-house in Camden. The wind had blown hard all night. It was four-thirty in the morning, and there was some visibility. “Would you like to sail home now?” I asked George. The weather report had predicted heavy fog for two days, and it seemed to me to be not yet impenetrably thick. We left the harbor at five, wind still south to southwest, a favorable wind for home; the tide until eight would be in-coming. We sailed fast in a ten-mile wind for Job’s Crossing. We decided on compensation of 20° for safety’s sake. Fog became dense, we sailed fast, and suddenly there was an islet, low in the water on our right hand and a wooded island on our left! I am the navigator, and in such moments I must decide in a split second—hold off or continue, port or starboard—decide, fast, fast—remember which island is low in the water, which island has a long sand-spit out from it, which island has that bent tree? “We are down-wind from La Selle’s Island. Haul in the sails and hold up for Job’s Crossing!”

  George called out, “There’s a bell—on our right—”

  “Quick, George, quick! Hold up, hold up! This is Job’s Crossing and we are too far down wind, we can’t cross the bar so close to the sand-spit, we have to be at the five foot spot.” The current had been even stronger than we had calculated, or I had not held a true course when I had been steering. (The second time that summer I had allowed that to happen.) The egg-shell we sail in, the little Day-Sailer held up valiantly, we swept through the opening and held our course for home. Fog cleared suddenly, and as we neared Northhaven Island we could see clearly: Channel Rock, Fling Island, Eagle, and even Hard-head beyond Eagle and both Porcupines—and there was Robert Quinn, our friend, out hauling his lobster-pots. He hailed us with an arm uplifted from work, and we were home.

  V

  We wake to the raucous clatter and din of a hundred eider-ducks, crows, and gulls. The beach is theirs at dawn and by the time I have watched the sun come up behind Hard-head, and have set foot on the beach, I can see who has walked here before me since the last tide erased all marks. I like to say that my feet make the first marks, but mine have never been the first. This morning a large deer’s tracks pointed up the beach with each step out of the water, to disappear into the trees: probably a buck to add to the does we counted in the early morning in the field below our windows, or in the dusk last evening, when they did not yet know we were here. This first morning a deer’s face appeared at our bedroom window, gazing in. On the beach bird-tracks and bird-noises are still loud, but the birds quickly move out, onto the water. Eider-ducks with flotillas of ducklings are quack-quacking in an interminable conversation between mamma and babies. They sit on the floating seaweed and dive below the surface for their food, the mother anxiously trying to keep her little ones close. If danger threatens the ducklings climb aboard mamma. Gulls attack them, seals attack them, sea-crows and cormorants too. If a mother duck brings two or three to adolescence from a hatching of twelve or fourteen, she is a good mother.

  To line the nest with eider-down, the mother duck plucks down from her own breast, and as this is also a time of molting for all the adults, while the babies are helpless, they too cannot fly.

  From the top of the island which is flat and cleared of spruce and pine, the maples, the oaks, and the birch and alder growth, I look out, turn slowly, survey the bay in a 360° uninterrupted view: after many summers here I can identify and name all the islands I can see. Into the far distance islands lie spread out in silvery water. Far away dark shapes are scattered across an expanse of Penobscot Bay as wide as one’s eye, reaching the limit of vision—islands forever, too many to count. I see Isle au Haute, pronounced here Isle “Oh Holt,” and there is even a small brown lump of a rock named Colby Pup, a reminder to me that my family sprang up here long ago during the great migrations from England. At the end of Merchants Row, a clear almost straight course for sailing east or west, the wind is abeam, and I can see on any day both sail- and motor-boats of summer visitors making their way homeward toward Portland and Boston, or sailing east to a summer-world that’s heaven. I look to the mainland and can make out the prominent peaks. The further distant are the mountains near Bar Harbor: Mount Desert, Cadillac Mountain. To the west are the Camden Hills.

  Almost as accurate as looking at the calendar, fog tells us it is July, fog makes an enclosed world, no one hurries and it is a time to talk. Helene comes to visit, to tell us of her life in the months we have been away. Fog encloses us, no one looks on and we talk, while our eyes are searching, searching, looking, seeing as far as vision permits: the sea, the wind, the fog are present in our vision and in our minds. As I write this, remembering, I return to that white light of fog and that deep, almost dreaming, almost unconscious state of being.

  On the mainland land surrounds us, land-peopled, busy. On our small island we are surrounded by sea until our opinions, even our prejudices seem altered, perhaps because the sea comes first, second things are touched and altered as are the ways of the sea in its tides: if not this tide, then the next will surely come again in a rhythm that requires my rhythm
s to change in some way too, a slower and surer order in my mind.

  We sailed to the island at the end of one summer to ask if a place could be found for us. Yes, the camp that was called “Two Bits.” We will put it together as three bits. Three 8' x 8' cedar rooms left behind many years ago by a summer visitor who could no longer come to the island. The three-room miniature camp was put together with aluminum foil insulation on the inner ceiling, and with bright green fiber-glass roofing that can be seen, a landmark for the mail-boat or other passing boats; a fine old wood, coal, and canned gas stove, a gas refrigerator and electricity, two water tanks, one on each side of the end of the building, to provide water—when there is rain enough, or we carry water from a fine spring on the lighthouse beach. Lighthouse Beach, where at one end at low tide we could see the pilings of the lighthouse pier, from the days when the lighthouse had been inhabited. The family had been provided for many years with good anthracite coal, unloaded in baskets and carried from the boat up the hill in baskets. In rough weather and with accidents a great deal of coal must have spilled into the sea, for on any day we can gather a bushel or so of coal, enough to keep our fire overnight when it is cold. George and I glean wood from the beach, from the forest, and with a sharp little Finnish saw we cut wood, trying to keep ahead of our daily needs.

  Our camp is an acre or two of Maine in dense fir and spruce woods, growing so thickly that we can be lost when we step a few yards into them. We have tied pieces of white cloth to the trees to mark a path to the landing. In the old farm clearing, of which only the foundations of the earlier buildings can now be made out by depressions in the center of the field, eighty-year-old apple trees still bloom, and in a tangle of raspberry vines and tiger-lilies, we make out the garden of the old homestead. In the severe winters of Maine, a house that is not lived in and cared for disappears as rapidly as a house in the tropics. Nothing of the house and barn of this farm remain. The row of seven magnificent locust trees stands, and sprouts spring up each spring everywhere, and must be cut back if they are not to become forest again in a very short time. We built soil of seaweed and mulch from the floor of the forest, where there was no soil, only stones, and in the first year grew vegetables that helped to feed us and our few summer visitors. I have lived most of my life in cities, but in my early childhood I had a garden and when I can have a garden it is a return, it awakens memories I did not know I had.

  In the fog of July, George and I have been transplanting flowers and plants, a clump of Evening Primrose. (The moths like them because they stay open at night.) We took the most beautiful path on the island yesterday: the path to the lighthouse, where we dug a clump of Monk’s-hood for Joy Stewart. Later I washed them and separated the roots, put them in a mail-bag, and sent them off on the mail-boat. They will be beautiful near Pumpkin Island lighthouse.

  One fine evening, sailing from Swan’s Island into a fiery sunset, we sailed on as the full moon rose, sailing toward the blinking light which we saw all the long, almost windless night, flashing SOS—SOS, until at dawn we anchored in the little harbor of Pumpkin Island.

  Just to say “Island” brings to my mind the feeling that I love, cut off from the mainland, water on all sides, view unbroken in any direction. Sailing to strange islands we make acquaintances, who in subsequent visits become friends. The people in the outer islands in Maine have a sweetness—I use the word not in its present cliché, but to mean an attitude that prevails. On the islands in conversations we find this sweetness. Sometimes we anchor because fog has made it impossible to know where we are. The fog encloses us and we go ashore in an isolation as total as though we are visitors from another planet, and if we meet a citizen of this unknown place we talk in a privacy that makes conversation somehow without risk. I think that people who live their lives on islands, especially on small islands, live in a meditation, thinking about the world out there. The miracle of being here envelops them and makes for the sweetness I feel in them.

  George has written a poem called “Ballad”:

  She took it that we came—

  I don’t know how to say, she said—

  Not for anything we did, she said

  Mildly, ‘from God’. She said

  What I like more than anything

  Is to visit other islands . . .

  Nassau + My Trip to Visit Andy

  Two winters in Nassau with June, George’s sister, in an arrangement we agreed to try as we were casting about for a way to get away from New York winters, a way of trying another place than New York. It was a step toward our eventual abandonment of New York, but a joined household in Nassau proved to be an impossible arrangement. We don’t flourish in the lap of luxury.

  George had a native sailboat from Turk island waiting, tied to the dock, when I arrived. We sailed with the owner and his wife aboard. Local sailing boats are from each island, each with its own characteristics, all made of native woods, sails are sewed by hand, still made of heavy canvas, these boats are sailed with great skill, and, of course, with the local knowledge necessary in these coral-filled waters. These boats are sailed long distances. Boats from Haiti come with reels of braided grass for the manufacture of hats and bags to sell to tourists, food from every island, fish for every day consumption, these boats came in every day through the entrances to Providence Island to unload at the town market, boats without motor, they were the craft of very poor people who made the boats themselves or by barter, exchanged labor or their labor’s products. Sails were cut deep, with an overlap that swept the cabin-top, every time the boat came about, the sail had to be helped overt the cabin-top. A man or woman stood forward keeping an eye on the bottom which changes continually with the currents and the growth of coral-heads, in the strong currents that sweep around and between the islands a sailboat needs every bit that she can gain on each tack, but the person in the bow says, with a calm voice, “Go-o-o back,” and the helmsman sweeps the tiller because one more yard would mean catastrophe. The person forward lets go the jib, someone, usually a child, helps the sail over the house, and the boat goes slowly over at the very last minute, to the other tack. Sails slowly fill and she veers away from the shore or from the underwater coral-head.

  For a week we sailed with this boat. Linda and Alex sailed with us, Alex and I fished. When a fish was caught it was quickly gutted, scraped and thrown on a bed of coals that was kept glowing in a box full of ash forward of the cabin where a pot of beans simmered. A fish caught and cooked immediately on hot coals has a taste I’ve never tasted since.

  For the rest of the season we sailed a fine little Snipe, a borrowed boat. I learned to read the bottom by the color of the water. If it was clear as the lines on my palm, I knew the depth was at least four feet—yellow, then green, then shades of green out to blue indigo, deep, deep blue at ocean depths, five hundred feet deep in front of the reefs of coral. We sailed around the two islands, in the channel, and occasionally we poked out into the ocean. A trade-wind blows strongly every afternoon, it is to be depended on, and the strength of the wind for our little boat made very lively sailing. Our second winter in Nassau we found a sixteen-foot O’Day day-sailer, very modern and fast. We bought it and began to learn all that it already knew of fast sailing.

  Three of us lived in the large house in a garden on Hog island across from New Providence island. During the holidays we invited our friends and family and made a small society, at Christmas, Linda and Alex, June’s daughter and her child, Andy, our niece, and her four children. We swam, snorkeled, and collected shells from the myriads that wash up on the beaches, conch was the most common shell as it is a staple in the diet of the people. Conch is a fast growing mollusk that travels on the bottom in colonies, feeding. The discarded shells pile up in dumps which, in time, wear away to become the famous pink sand beaches of some of the islands. In other places pure-white bleached old conches wash up to form white sand beaches. A fresh dump across from Nassau near the tip of Hog island was
bright pink with fresh shells dumped daily on the Queen’s land, this place was called the “Queen’s Bottom.”

  June bought a little red Triumph automobile that was fitted to become a boat, two propellers drove it in the water, waterproofed and sealed underneath, it was a better boat than car, but as it had been planned for fresh water so it deteriorated very fast in our use of it. It was a very stable boat rather like a small raft, but with great power. When it touched sand the wheels helped it move over ground until one could shift back to wheel-drive. The headlights of the Triumph at night as the craft came across the channel caused a stir, little boys raced on bicycles to see the Triumph creep into or out of the water. On land the propellers caused the same excitement, boys pursued us until we lost them, hoping to see us enter the water.

  We had brought our bird, a parakeet, named Bird, who always traveled with us in a tiny cage that Linda had made for him. I carried him in my purse. When we arrived at the airport we put him in a locker until plane time to insure that he was very soundly asleep in the dark place. He sometimes squawked during take-off, but by then it was too late for the stewardess to do anything about his being on board. He remembered places he had been before. When we released him from his cage he zoomed around the room through doorways and back to his cage, never knocking into things. We had to hang something over windows for a day or two until he discovered that there was glass. June had a cat and even though we kept our bedroom door locked and only let the bird fly in that room, somehow the cat sneaked in and George hearing a commotion, turned to see the cat swallowing Bird. George hit the cat, the cat fell off the table and Bird flew out, daunted but unharmed, lacking a few feathers, but alive.

  I spent my days fishing: little golden fishes ran in schools in the canal off the beach of Hog Island. Larger fish were in the channel off the end of the dock facing Nassau. Needle-fish rose to my cast in the shallows on the North side of the island. Fish were visible in the waters everywhere.