Coming into the End Zone

by Doris Grumbach

  Our contractor, Tracy Sampson, who has done all the painting inside the house, reconstructed the study, built an island in the kitchen, and is now engaged in various electrical and carpentry chores, arrives at nine. The gas man delivers his two canisters of natural gas, the oil man fills our tank, Don Hale, our neighbor who picks up the trash, comes on his first visit to remove packing boxes. We start the endless task of unpacking while Tracy’s assistant puts together the bookcases and we begin to fill them.

  I would be happy merely to thrust books into shelves to reduce the number of cartons, but the librarian in Sybil will not permit such unprofessional arrangements. Fiction must be shelved alphabetically, the rest of the collection according to subject. I sigh but accept her edict. The emptying of boxes proceeds much more slowly.

  First indication of a new environment: Our mailbox is across a rather busy main road. Traffic, we discover, travels at forty-five miles an hour. Sybil is worried. In two weeks, when she returns to her job at the Library of Congress and to the bookstore, she thinks I will be almost instantly killed crossing the road to get letters and the New York Times, which I am having delivered by mail.

  We questioned the former owners about this weighty matter. They reported they had asked for the box be moved to their side of the road, without success. So they trained their children to listen for cars, and then dart swiftly across.

  We decide to ask again. The Sargentville post office is in a corner of a private house less than a mile from us, a little cubicle of a place with a devoted postmistress who introduces herself at once to us as Frances. We introduce ourselves to her, but it is unnecessary. She knows our names, where we have come from, exactly when we moved in (‘Saw the van coming to work,’ she says), knows we are having work done in the house, hopes we will like it up here. ‘Folks from away generally do,’ she says. It is the first time we have heard that phrase, used for anyone not a born Mainer.

  Having been instructed to stand back, say nothing, and look a bit daft, I do so, while Sybil explains to Frances that she would be grateful if the mailbox could be moved. ‘My friend,’ she says, ‘is somewhat deaf and may not hear the traffic when it approaches. And she is no longer able to dart across the road ahead of it.’ Her implication is that those two difficulties are only the beginning. There are my mental infirmities. I continue my look of somewhat dazed antiquity, and say nothing.

  Frances, herself a lady of a certain age, studies me. Then she says: ‘I think it can be arranged. I’ll speak to the postmaster at Sedgwick [the town nearest to us, and a larger station] and to the postman.’ The next day she telephones to say that both gentlemen have agreed to the change. The postman will dig up the letter box himself and replant it at our driveway. In a few days it is done, civilly and without any further reminder, thus, to Sybil’s way of thinking, saving my life.

  Reading has taken on a new quality for me. Before I left Washington I told my editor/producer that I would be doing no more reviews for National Public Radio. I had collected what seemed to me to be good reasons for retiring from the job I had held for more than five years. Maine was far from Washington and required long travel in order to tape; I have grown tired of having to have an opinion on every book I read; I am losing my hard-won fluency of speech, and the fear that I will stammer or slip or mispronounce has grown to the point that every review is both a challenge to perform and an expectation of failure. In the past, I have had a series of reassuring editors who helped me through these self-doubts. But the new chap, very nice but even more nervous than I am, serves only to make me do badly.

  I’ve noticed that persons on radio or television who make one slip of the tongue will invariably make another in the next few sentences. This happened to me at my last taping. So I gave up the difficult monthly chore that I had come to dread, said goodbye to my friends at the station, and left, feeling unburdened and free. I told Alice Winkler not to bother to forward mail or books, another gain that will cut down on correspondence, invitations, and thank-you notes for inscribed books I did not request and could not figure out what to do with.

  Before I left Washington, I asked the post office to return all books sent to me. I wrote to thirty publishers who had been good enought to provide me with their books for review, asking them not to send them any longer. Now, in Sargentville, my mail is reduced to human scale. I am no longer troubled by the arrival, every day, of ten and more brown-boxed books, the disposal of wrappings, the perusal, even scantily, of their contents, and the close reading of two or three for every one I had airtime to review.

  My sense of relief is immense. I bought a thirty-six-volume set of Charles Dickens recently—each novel divided into two, three, or four most satisfying little volumes—and have begun Bleak House, sitting in a chair on our thick, green lawn, and taking not a single note as I read.

  The lawn: A miraculous transformation has taken place, between April when we came to Maine to ‘close’ on the house, and now. What appeared to be a large expanse of shredded wheat, dead, crisp, brown, extending from the driveway and sweeping around the house and down to the high meadow before the cove, has metamorphosed into soft, green lawn. Tracy and her helpers mowed it before we came back, because it had grown high enough to harbor hordes of black flies and mosquitoes.

  We are both charmed at the sight and horrified, having vowed never to own a lawn mower again in our lives, disliking the smell the machine creates, the noise it makes. Now we are faced with a choice: to allow the lawn to go to seed and sow it with barley, wild flowers, wheat (not shredded) or rye, or to have someone come to tend the surprising greensward.

  I wake at six to a glorious sky, go down to make coffee, open a front door. For reasons of providing an ample sea view the house is built on a sort of staggered system, so we have two front doors, one slightly back from the other. The air is cold. It seems, after the pollution of Washington, to be original air, so I breathe deeply and think: I am home. Suddenly I know what to do about the lawn. I will go to a flea market and find an old-fashioned lawn mower, the kind you push, the kind that easily clogs with grass cuttings, the kind that stops dead in the presence of stones and sticks, the kind that makes no odor and very little noise. Little by little I will keep the lively-looking grass cut. At the same time I will be getting the exercise I badly need. Double-dipping. Tracy tells me that cutting grass is as good as playing tennis for that purpose. A dangerous state of self-satisfaction settles over me.

  The dirtiest words spoken in Hancock County: land developer. One enterprising fellow bought up a large parcel of land on beautiful and beloved Blue Hill, a handsome mountain about ten miles from us, put in a road, and began to build what promised to be a complex of little houses. His plan was to ‘develop’ the town. Consternation overtook the inhabitants, who never before had felt the need or the desire to zone the area. His activities were stopped by injunction, to gain time for the town to confer about legal means to stop development. This is the state of things now: a half-finished house, a half-used road, and angry looks on the countenances of year-round Mainers whenever they raise their eyes to the half-accomplished work of the (grimace) land developer.

  We buy two local papers, both of which come out on Thursday, the Ellsworth American, conservative in opinion but well written and well edited, and Blue Hill’s Weekly Packet, slim and determinedly parochial. Natives and visitors buy them to keep abreast of local news and for the announcements of library sales, church sales, garage sales, yard sales, and flea markets that are omnipresent and bountiful on weekends.

  I read the Packet for its illuminating accounts of town meetings. This week there is an extensive report of a special one held in Sedgwick on June 8, two weeks ago. The proposal: to authorize our selectmen ‘to trade in the present grader and backhoe/loader.’ Twenty-three interested Sedgwick residents attended, to ‘rehash,’ in ‘lively’ fashion (the words of the printed account), what had been said at the town meeting in March.

  I was not, of course, present in March, bein
g at that time still ‘from away’ (as I always will be, of course), nor was I alert enough to be aware of this meeting, but the reporter made it up to me. Why, asked Ray Carter, was the town getting rid of the loader? Butch Gray asked why the equipment purchased just two years ago, the grader in particular, was no longer any good.

  The responses by selectmen were both autocratic and irrelevant. To Ray Carter, Brian Perkins replied that they were authorized to sell equipment, and further, authorized to buy new equipment. To Butch Gray, the road commissioner said: ‘When the equipment was bought two years ago, it needed repairs and no repairs were made.’

  If the grader was traded in, Jerry Kelly wanted to know, how could the Carter Point Road be graded with a backhoe? Would the town need to buy a new grader? ‘The old pull-behind grader would be adequate for grading dirt roads,’ said Carter. But ‘it does not have enough weight’ for other grading, someone pointed out, and further, if the newer road grader is not broken down why is it being replaced? Butch Gray remembered that they had bought the grader for snow removal and ditching and wondered why we had bought it in the first place. Said Ray Carter, the present grader can not plow snow nor can it be used for ditching ‘due to a broken part.’

  There was more talk, mostly about costs, trade-ins, etc., but the proposal to trade in the grader and backhoe loader was approved. Six voters abstained, apparently having been unable to make up their minds.

  But this did not end the matter. Someone asked: ‘Is the present backhoe/loader so bad that it cannot be used?’ Turns out the equipment in question is sixteen years old with a life expectancy of ten thousand hours. It needs three thousand dollars’ worth of repairs. ‘Is it unsafe?’ someone else inquired. The road commissioner put an end to all further argument. ‘Yes. The brakes and ball bearings have not functioned for two years.’

  The meeting ended with the unanimous passage of a puzzling (to me) article that required very little discussion: ‘to establish a perpetual care fund for a lot in the Camp Stream Cemetery.’ For whom? Why? I mean to inquire of my selectman about this matter at the next town meeting.

  I like this town. Sargentville is ruled by Sedgwick, being too small to have a government of its own. It has a post office, a general store with a gas station, a veterinarian, and a place to leave UPS packages. I sympathize with its major concerns—roads, snow removal, a new school, the town landing and ramp, raw sewage, taxes, fire equipment, and other similar, vital matters. Like its post office, it operates within the range of my very limited comprehension of matters of government (I failed the Civics Regents in high school). It appears to serve my needs. It is not too big to lose sight of me and our property in its considerations, should I require such concern.

  We are becoming acquainted with our cove. It is full of clam and mussel shells, and we think about collecting mussels and going clamming. But Tracy warns us to check with the Sedgwick environmental agency to be sure the red tide is not still a threat. We decide against such activity this year.

  The rocks and flats, the coast across from us, the trees at the edge, and the long line of stones that, at low tide, separates the cove from the deepwater mooring (Sybil has noticed it resembles a crocodile) are all lovely. As soon as Sybil returns for her vacation in August we intend to launch Lenore Straus’s old canoe loaned to us by Peggy. We wish to make a journey of inspection around the cove to Eggemoggin Reach, a body of water running parallel to our beach and connecting Penobscot and Blue Hill bays. Apparently that is what a ‘reach’ is. On clear days we see to the reach and beyond, to the low green shores of Deer Isle.

  Shall I miss the alley life that my carriage-house windows supervised in Washington? I think not. At first we found it amusing to oversee the lengthy fights and loud arguments of the chaps who lived across from us. They had a pool in their backyard that I often envied, and a Jacuzzi, both of which were used mostly in the early hours of the morning. Years ago, during the time our house was being renovated and we used the carriage house to live in, their fiery activities, with other young men who bathed and swam and flirted and fought, kept us awake.

  After we moved out and into the main house, things seemed to quiet down back there. The property was sold, and the new owners were a decorous and sedate couple. But often during hot afternoons I would walk away from my desk to cool off, vicariously, watching Ron splashing around in the pool, and his wife standing still at the shallow end reading the Washington Post.

  I will not miss my voyeuristic experience of those gay young men’s watery lives, or the sounds of our neighbor’s two young boys. Our wall was contiguous to theirs. We heard rather than saw the children grow up. The smaller of the boys was what Sybil termed a screamer. At all hours of the night he would wake in, apparently, a state of terror, and cry for a long time. Nothing seemed to quiet him. We never found out whether he had terrible dreams or whether his older brother provoked him, or what caused his nightly fright.

  But here there are no neighbors, no human sounds that are not my own (at a distance I am told the traffic hum can be heard, but not by my failing ears), no sights but the wonderful, calm sea and the woods on every side. How does one measure the boundless wonder of such isolation? What are fitting words of gratitude to have found such a haven, a hermitage, a place of quiet privacy and solitary silence?

  National Public Radio is still airing tapes of reviews I did last month. In the market I meet a chap who is behind me in line. He hears me speak to a clerk, and recognizes my voice.

  ‘Are you Doris Grumbach?’ he asks.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Well, I want to tell you. I listen to you in the morning on the radio while I pee.’

  I thank him, thinking that this must be as much fame as I will ever achieve. What greater recognition can come to me? I pay the clerk, who is now staring at me, for the cooking sherry and ginger root I have bought, and leave, quickly.

  Late this afternoon, at low tide, I walk down to the edge of the cove. Two small sailboats are anchored in the deep water; a few unpeopled houses dot the shore across the way. The cove is solitary. Trees, rocks, water, a few gulls, a single cormorant drying himself off on the snout of the crocodile rock formation, a family of ducks trailing from Jeannie Wiggins’s side of the cove across ours to Rebecca Peterson’s, but nothing else. And no one anywhere in sight.

  Low tide: It makes me think of the great controversy on Moody Beach twenty years ago. At that time it was a small family beach, inhabited by middle-class owners who were fiercely protective of their property, not only against the assaults of the ocean on their sand and seawalls, but also against the invasion of day visitors who walked across ‘their’ sand from the public beach and throughway, put down their chairs and towels, and stretched themselves out to sunbathe, swim, have their lunch, and often their dinners, cooked over the little fires they built.

  Most owners resented these uninvited guests, because they regarded the entire strip of beach in front of their houses as exclusively their own. But the most deeply offended was a man whose house stood at the very edge of the public beach. For years he tried every means he could think of to keep invaders from crossing ‘his’ beach, sitting on it, dropping their trash there. He erected a fence; the beach cleaners took it down. He put up a long chain; walkers stepped on it until it broke. He built a wooden barrier; one night someone burned it down.

  The law offered him no protection. It clearly held that owners of shore property owned only down to the high-water mark. We left Moody Beach after many happy summers there with our children, so I have no idea what became of that fellow, or if he is the same fellow who made history last year. A suit was won before Maine’s Superior Court declaring that property holders now owned down to the low-water mark, thus preventing trespassers from walking, sitting, and sunning themselves on ‘private’ beaches unless they wished to do these things while submerged in water.

  This decision is still widely debated in Maine. To many, the right of citizenry to walk the seashore should be assumed, never
questioned. I remember my fury, years ago, trying to get to the beach of the Atlantic Ocean, in a city named Miami Beach, and discovering that one hotel after another had fenced off its shore space so that passage along the edge of the water was impossible. Further, if I entered the beach area through a hotel and sat down on the sand, I would be asked to leave, unless I was able to produce a towel of the hotel’s color, proving I was one of its guests.

  I know well: Should I see someone clamming or walking on the shore of the cove I would do nothing, having decided that no one (or everyone) owns my part of the coast, a decision made firmer by a discovery I made after I moved here. Three of the five Maine judges who were responsible for the infamous decision are seashore property owners. There is much talk of an appeal.

  Odd. In the years during which we came to Moody Beach no one anywhere seemed to have heard of the place. Now, everywhere, the name immediately brings glares and sneers to the faces of inland Mainers. Shorefront owners, on the other hand, grow very quiet when the Moody Beach law is discussed.

  I have become a member of a very small communion of Episcopalians who meet for services in the American Legion Hall in Blue Hill. Most of them are sturdy, healthy retirees, professionals who have left cities all over the country and moved to this peninsula to live out their lives. There is not a black, Hispanic, or Oriental face among them. Through this homogeneous church, the thirty or so families have become friends as well as parishioners. After Sunday-morning Eucharistic service, they stay to have coffee and cakes and to talk about the ‘outreach’ programs many of them engage in. One works in an old people’s home on Saturdays, another is active in a program to build houses for homeless families, one is concerned with helping Hancock’s adult illiterates learn to read. On the whole, they are well-to-do and extremely active. I am of the belief that Maine residents live a long time because, unlike Florida retirees, they rarely sit down. They walk, sail, garden, shop, go to the library, the post office, the bookstore, visit and assist their friends, go to restaurants, movies, concerts, lectures, classes in crafts. Yesterday I heard a neighbor talking about a friend in Camden who had died, ‘prematurely,’ she said. Turned out the gentleman was eighty-one. Not to reach ninety up here is regarded as a disappointing act of carelessness or accident. The slogan here seems to be the old German saw Rast ich, so rost ich. When I rest, I rust.