Wind Delay

Soon and soon and stare and stare, the sun and warm gentle air seem forever until soon and stare, the cold and the winds move in and take over... 

Our big departure date has come and gone and we are still sitting here on the Severn River at the end of a very long pier, anxious to get underway. We're kept back by a few final preparatory details, but mostly by the western wind, which is gusting up to 35 miles an hour. 

It's probably a good thing that we didn't leave yesterday, on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's big sojourn out into the icy Atlantic (although we may very well leave four days later, on the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's fatal rendezvous with that iceberg). 

 Luckily, we are not too big to fail or unsinkable, and there's plenty of room for all of Julep's passengers on our most luxurious of lifeboats.
  

                               

                           In the meantime, I wander the country lanes and tidal flats 

 

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees. 

 

-Adrienne Rich

Farewell to the Army of Northern Virginia

The pollen comes down in thick and lazy drifts from the pine trees. An unabashed yellow from a Third World preschool. A dull, pasty yellow that clings to everything. I find it on the door knob to the rusty marina bathroom, staining the dog's paws, swirling in puddles after storms, and stealthily topping each layer of paint I apply to the boat. We are unpacking and repacking: taking all our things out, and laying them one by one along the dock to sift through, even as the pines let down their bright dust, slowly and incrementally, to yellow the ground and all our earthly possessions.

It is April, and next week, as we set sail in our 26 foot sloop named Julep, we follow the spring up the coast. It is April, and it is Easter and it is the second anniversary of my little sister's death. When we leave, I will scatter some of her ashes here too, another place I have lived where I have loved and missed her.

We have readied for our voyage by bringing Julep around to a long pier out on the Severn River. Down the pier, where our friends run a boat carpentry operation and informal cat rehabilitation center, all is still. The earth is so flat that a topography of birds emerges. Little flighty bug eaters stalk and skim along the shortcut marsh grasses; crows flap past and into the trees; gulls, vultures and osprey send down shadows at this land's end. Out on the river, it is scarcely ever still, and we are kept up most of the night by the wild rocking of our little home and the ceaseless whine of the bumpers protecting the hull. 

Our days are blurry and shifting, chicken scratch lists on paper and orange violet moods: the thrill of imminent departure and the weight of a thousand chores.

We came to the Chesapeake in December with promises of work and a winter sail. Julep, a Maine-born vessel, had been languishing here for years. We arrived during the run up to Christmas, to a boat suffering the beginnings of mildew and rot, to a season of little work and we watched our trip funds dwindle and in February we came to terms with this being our winter destination. And so we made do with bloody marys on Sundays and slow cooked dinners and lately with the brilliant forest tapestries of flowering trees.

But this is a farewell song.  We've come to take Julep home. To return to our land of plenty.

Farewell Virginia, I see you in your closeup, I do not see you at all. 

My eyes are trained on northern nautical miles, on near and distant lands that do not bear your name. 

Farewell again, to my bright love, my fairy girl. 
Let us meet again someday on that warm and distant shore.

 

The Jameson's on me

If I were there, I swear, I'd have a whole bottle at the ready, just for you.  

It's been an auspicious day thus far.

I woke up

Looked around

and got to work on our sailboat's dinghy, which just last week looked much worse for wear than this: 

I got my deep spearminty green out. 

and got ready to work it

      thar she be

 

it's blowing a gale and now I'm covered in little green specks as i come in for lunch...

... and find shamrocks coming up in the spider plant on the windowsill!

happy shamrock day, hooligans!

The Homefront

"Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life." -Rachel Carson

The cold snap of last week somehow led into a moody and sporadic wave of heat, and now this profusion of springtime life. As I pass the drainage ditches, I catch frogstreak splashes into dirty water and in the creaky grass just inches from where I sit on the docks, crickets take up their chorus and far across the park, where a local has taken me to play frisbee golf there is a fawn grazing undaunted and every little twig is budding and pouring forth grace and lusciousness. Grass is no longer just grass, but every lawn and stretch of roadside has let forth a rambling medley of minute wildflowers. Less than two centimeters in height, there are tiny bluebells, miniature violets, others resembling orchids, all that remind me of the obsessively detailed flowers such as those that are found at the feet of saints in Renaissance paintings. Spring is a cruel and lovely awakening. Spring is a cruel and lovely disguise. 

Amanda wants bigger boobs. She is taking breast enhancement pills. She hands me the bottle to inspect. She is confiding in me because, 1) I am the only female around, 2) I have big boobs myself. She wants to know if mine are real. Like I might have some advice to offer. I wish that this were an entirely atypical conversation within the context of my Virginia life, but I am afraid to say that it is not.

The previous day I was visiting Amanda on her dad's boat as she sorted through a garbage bag of clothes that a "fancy" friend of hers had passed down. She was disgusted to find that Rocawear was plentiful. "I don't wanna look 'black,'" she told me, wrinkling her nose. When Amanda arrived at the marina a couple days ago, she had recently been discharged from an overnight stay at the hospital, where she was treated for an ankle swollen with fluid. She called out to me from across the small, curved parking lot carpeted in rust red pine needles. She was still on crutches, and still wearing her inpatient bracelet. Amanda is young and white, with a single braid crisscrossing her forehead, a volleyball player's build, and a put-upon expression.

She smokes and talks, sitting at the diner- style table that is the boat's centerpiece, surrounded by a light, non distinct clutter. Her eyes and words and themes of conversation merge and diverge and merge again. It's just hot enough today to give that rush of possibility that is summertime. And yet... I cannot get past the hard plastic sheen of her eyes or cheekbones or of anything she is saying. I have been spoken at like this before. There is a whole subsection of the population, a particular class of people within the social underclass who tell their tales to near strangers, unsolicited, in long, stringy tales of misfortune. I believe in this misfortune, I believe in her heartache. And I want to do something to ease these burdens, and I want to believe, that through my panic and claustrophobia, warmer feelings will come and settle upon my skin, as wild yeast will find its way to flour and dough, if all are left to their own devices.

My rising panic when confronted by the social mores I keep running up against here is not limited to my interactions with Amanda: 


I hear kids using "faggot" as a putdown at the supermarket. 



Women my own age and younger spark up conversations by asking me how many children I have; the peak of the conversation is when they get to complain about their husbands. 


The owner of the boatyard is around my age, and when he comes to hang out with us with his wife and baby, he goes out of his way to made crude jokes about her, to her frequent humiliation. 


I've set up a work station between the dock and the parking lot where I'm doing some sanding and painting to prepare for our sailing trip next month. The workmen and pleasure boat captains amble by in the heat of the day. They keep tabs on me, leer, greet me in overly familiar ways, and make condescending remarks like, "I see you've found a manageable project there, missy."


When I go to get my hair done, my stylist, who is black, spurs on a five minute salon-wide spate of "hilarity" hinging on how savage and weird Africans are. Apparently the stylists have a friend who is threatening to "run off to Africa," if her boyfriend doesn't hurry up and propose. The stylists have the time of their lives mimicking their friend as she "runs around in the wild" and "gets plates stuck up in her lips."

I am living in the state where Jefferson owned his 600 slaves. The state that has just legislated ritual shaming into women's reproductive choices. Living in the South, and living at a moment stamped in time that greatly resembles, if nothing else, a great crossroads in our national identity, I can't help but think, (every minute of every day), that with all our civil rights: for women, for racial minorities, and for gay and trans Americans, for everyone, we have come so far and yet all our rights now seem so utterly precarious.

I grew up in the generation of girls born into a world where women's rights felt mostly resolved. My predessors had battled for equal footing in society and had come out victorious. Certainly disparity and troubling attitudes remained, but we had reached a stage in which the issue seemed more academic than political. We had Take our Daughters to Work Day in elementary school, feminist books about puberty in adolescence and Gender Studies in college.

I confess that I don't know how to end this post. I find myself deeply troubled by the attitudes I encounter here, and deeply disgusted with the country's political landscape. I think of all the strong, smart, capable women in this country and I am furious that the Republican party in it's current state is even allowed to campaign for office. I think of the strength of women in Iran and Afghanistan and Syria, of the peril of their daily lives, and I'm scared for them and appalled at the thought of Obama's drones and U.S. armies (and U.S. contractors) taking lives. I draw strength in these times, by remembering the women in my own life, the ones I admire. I think of all of you, and all that you are and have become, about all that you stand for, and it's what keeps me going. I see you as a force for good, at my disposal. No need to deploy you, for you are already out in the world, making it more beautiful. 

Big thanks are also due to all the men who set the bar high......

i am so lucky.

Scientist party

Last weekend the boy and dog and I were invited to a friend of a friend's going away party. His name was Wolf and hers was something French and they were warm and a little crazed, which is what I look for in my hosts. It is the curse of the going away party that you finally meet people you like in the act of seeing them off. 

I've been invited to quite a few going away parties for people I don't know. One of them ended with the demise of a vodka-soaked watermelon and the host, no longer just a friend of a friend, morphing ever so slowly into the guy with the curly hair crying and mumbling into my shoulder that he would miss me soooo much when he moved to Portland tomorrow. 
"Who are you?!!!" The short French host with the fiery eyes yelled at me last weekend when I went inside to use the bathroom. I explained how I came to be standing in her house and she responded by grabbing my hand, demanding of her husband that he pour me champagne (into a shot-sized Dixie cup), pulling me over to the map of France affixed to a post in the living room (so guests could locate the couple's new Bordeaux-adjacent village), pointing to the bathroom, and finally throwing popcorn at me. She was the best host I've ever had the privilege of encountering. 

Back outside by the fire, I talked to a shark researcher. These were the people I had been hoping that I would meet here in Virginia. The marina where we're living is within walking distance of the Virginia Institute of Marina Science and every day when I cut through the campus to get to the beach I like to pretend that I too, am making important discoveries that will help reverse the damage that industrialization and intrusive fishing methods have done to marine life.  I asked the shark researcher a lot of questions. He was possibly annoyed by me. He told me that his dissertation was on the life span of deep sea sharks. These are determined, apparently, by tracking down sharks going about their own sharky business miles and miles below the surface and and hauling them up to check out their spines, which build calcium over the years in a way that is just as indicative as the annual rings on tree trunks. So, basically, in order to see how long these sharks have lived they have to KILL them. I suddenly became much less worshipful of marine biologists.

Turning back to the fire (which was smoldering and crackling and doing all that a good fire will do) from within a handsome wheelbarrow set in the middle of Wolf and Popcorn Lady's back yard, my thoughts darkened. I sipped on my cheap beer and seethed over the ethically dubious scientists I keep hearing about on the news, the ones contributing to drone proliferation as we speak. Were they not in the least concerned about their complicity in the race to create ever-more nefarious government spy technology? And did this shark guy lose any sleep, any at all, after his complicity in the deaths of dozens of large and astonishing prehistoric creatures in order to produce a bit of inconclusive data? It was then, that my ever-blacker thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of a caveman.

To say that he had come from nowhere would be highly inaccurate, because he had clearly just come from within the house. A blonde guy with close-cropped hair in his mid-thirties, he was barefoot and swathed in a very plush sort of torn fur getup. This was not a costume party, and nobody else was dressed up. Not even his tiny blonde daughter, whom he clutched in his arms as he stomped out the coals that had escaped from the fire with his naked feet. "Aaaaarrghh," he cried, and then stomped some more, before turning to me. "Hello, the caveman said affably. "My name's Peter."  I shook his hand but I never did find out what the deal was with his costume, because soon after I was engaged in conversation with a hippie-looking guy (mid-forties, clear aviators, long & messy grey hair) with a cup in each hand- one for beer and one for him to spit his gnarly"chew" spit into. The caveman's wife threatened to leave without him and he ran to catch up. The tobacco-chewing hippie's 7 year old, in bright red-framed eyeglasses, hucked pine cones at the fire from behind the rock garden. The party eked on, like a quiet techno track that never reaches its crescendo and soon the boy and dog and I were headed back through the icy night, hoping dearly that our old car would not take too long to start. 

Escape Plot

February is beginning to take its toll and I want to escape. 

I think that I would not even particularly mind being airlifted out of here and taken against my will to a mysterious Himalayan monastery where life revolves around peaceful contemplation, the acquisition of wisdom, forbidden love and escape plots. This is the premise of the 1933 James Hilton novel "Lost Horizon," which inspired a 1937 Frank Capra opus two years in the making, a 1973 cult musical with songs by Burt Bacharach, and the common use of the utopian catch-all name Shangri-la. 

For most people these days, Shangri-la is a synonym for a Caribbean vacation. In China's Hunan province, where paperback copies of "Lost Horizon" are ubiquitous, the government has adopted the name for restaurants, resorts, and even a town, in the hopes of competing with neighboring Himalayan nations for "Shangri-la tourists," if such a thing really does exist. 

My favorite adaptation of the "Shangri-la" conceit takes place in the paradise I pine for... New York of course!: see this article about the Lost Horizon Night Market Delivery Truck Circus

The night market delivery team states on their website:

You may contact Those Who Choose the Place and Time using the form below. We are particularly interested in hearing from those who wish to contribute an Establishment to upcoming Markets, or start a Market in your own town.

I want them in any town that I am ever in.

For now, alone on my boat with only a snoring mutt and the internet as my sources for dazzlement and wonder,  I'll search for my own Shangri-la between the bars of a rhyme:

the shangri-las: remember walking in the sand

the kinks: shangri-la

duane eddy: shangri-la

                                                                    billy idol: shangri-la

m.ward: shangri-la

Give me liberty or give me olives!

All week I look forward to Sunday drives.  

Here, in mid-coast Virginia, monster trucks charge down Main Street, which is also a highway, skidding from one red light to another below the graceful dark vultures at home in the highway skies. There is much and little to see along the vaguely pleasant stretch between universities William & Mary and Mary Washington. During the week, on our way from errand to errand, we go along Route 17/Main Street. We pass the guns, tattoos and donuts complex; the mega church with an electronic lighthouse sign; the ominous- sounding One Way Counseling Center; a tree nursery; Powhatan Drive; Piney Swamp Road; and all the little highway-facing houses nearly consumed now by vines and shrubs. 

On Sundays, we venture further out, taking side roads off into the country or to the edges of a city never quite glimpsed. This is such low, swampy land. The ditches fill with oily, brackish water and the chalky dirt is covered with crab grass and pine needles. The big genteel estates, as in the Old Country, are hidden away down straight, mile-long, cedar-lined driveways. There are plenty of homes hugging the deeply grooved dirt roads, though, and in one of these roadside front yards, I glimpse a lawn jockey. I am disturbed. Not surprised. Okay, a little surprised. Later, I find the most satisfying synopsis of the object's history and the implications of ownership here from David Pilgrim (curator and founder of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University).

Wherever we wander, the countryside hints coyly at its previous incarnations. These mid-Atlantic coastal backwaters are dotted with names and zip codes alluding to the villages that once formed the center of American Indian and Virginian lives. As we drive, we skirt the site of the 2003 Werowocomoco archeological dig into Powhatan's Chiefdom, and then follow the fingers of land abutting Mobjack Bay, passing through places with names like Glass, Aquilles and Guinea. These three wisps of villages and their flat ample land share an old time general store, complete with rocking chairs on the front porch. Achilles has a high school and a post office (and absolutely nothing else in the way of buildings). Guinea breeds fishermen, whose dialect, some say, evolved directly from Cornish, and is now nearly incomprehensible to all outsiders. 

On another drive we head away from the coast into Newport News on a mission to find Asian groceries. We're on another crosstown highway, this one tree-less, lined with places like the diner called Sam and Steve's House of Beef, a gentlemen's club called Chico's Chiken Palace n Grill,  the A- framed Hot Dog King, a football-sized flea market, and the imposing lot of Hockaday's Used Cars. We finally find our groceries next to a storefront hookah lounge with deeply tinted windows. 


Our other Sunday tradition calls for a brunch with bloody marys. These days we make egg sandwiches on the boat and then head to a tavern just across the river. This last week the Yorktown Pub is closed for renovations, and as our GPS is outdated and has taken us to half a dozen extinct destinations, we wind our way further inland again, mapless and with some trepidation. As we head to the highway, we pass through Yorktown. The empty park, with its trenches, grassy blockades, bamboo thickets and well-kept lawns, looks for all the world like the elaborate course for some golf-like game still undergoing preliminary testing. We find the bloody marys we are looking for, in a smoker-friendly sports bar at the Patrick Henry Mall (who knew that when Patrick Henry made a stand for liberty or death, his true legacy would be mid-range retail and beer-battered chicken wings?). Although discount bloody marys generally come unadorned here, it turns out that Southern hospitality can always be prevailed upon, and in no time at all, the bartender brings us plates of heaping pickles, olives and celery. 

The boatyard

I'm spending these mostly mild winter days living on a small sailboat docked in Virginia, accompanied by boy and dog. We are what's known as live-aboards. Here for just a few months, we glimpse a boatyard existence that parallels our own, if only for a moment. 


On this vessel, home is reduced to its absolute essence:  two long narrow bunks for storage and sitting, a cabin for sleeping, a tiny galley, a compact hand-pump operated toilet, an open-faced closet. One low stair and then a steep one lead back up to the unsheltered cockpit in the stern. 


In tying up to a boatyard dock, the freedom intrinsic in a wind and motor-powered existence  is diminished, and one grows accustomed to the amenities (showers, electricity, an internet signal) only offered at the boatyard.  Still, continuous fresh water and bathroom usage must be sought offboard, and everything within the living space must be constantly aired, cleaned and shuffled in the ongoing battle that pits marine-inclined human against the mold and mildew that adore a wooden boat. 


Let me make it clear from the very start, the boatyard where our sailboat is docked is nothing like a yacht club. A few fishermen come in to unload their catches in the late morning and late afternoon, and on the weekends, middle-aged couples wander about the yard, boat-gazing and taking snapshots of themselves by the water. But mostly, the life of the yard is that of the workmen. They haul out boats in the off-season, maintaining and restoring them. Their sanders, grinders and drills sound across the creek. It's a slow time of year for the yard, though, and more often than not it's the rhythmic creaking of the lines fastening our sailboat to the dock that punctuate my hours. 


There are several other boats with live-aboards here, scattered about the crooked, meandering piers. One guy goes mostly unseen, and I only know of his existence from the references people around here make to his boat. The deck is barren and the entrance, boarded up. He's suspected of inviting thieves into the yard, but no one is eager to track down and evict those already leading life way out in the margins. 


Dave, for one, thinks he should go. Dave lives on an old sportfisher with double rebel flags. "I'm gonna be a die-aboard," he announces with gruff, dark cheer, "'cause I ain't never gonna make it off that boat!" It's easier to make these proclamations at night, and this occasion was a rare gathering in the dusty parking area, with a bottle of Dominican rum making the rounds. 


Two boats away from our small vessel is a double-masted one, home to a staunchly forlorn couple. He, of the stiff, decrepit cowboy walk.  She, of the loose sweaters.  He edges by us in black like a Johnny Cash impersonator. She frowns briskly out of a Lucille Ball bouffant. When the tide's low, they leave their boat and head out to the grocery store. I am at my low tide vantage point. Through the portholes of my boat, they appear above me like an Atlantic City boardwalk mirage.


In the world of boats, extremes are not the exception, but the rule. I have spent time at the yacht club. In these winter months, the club members frequent the bar to drink scotch and soda backlit by the late afternoon glow off the marshes coming through expansive windows. After a couple drinks, club-goers indulge in a stroll around the docks, as the sky bruises and the light fades, they gaze fondly at their power boats.  


The day- to- day meanderings of those who populate the corners of working class boatyards are quite different. They bring the economic downturn back into focus as another Great American Depression.  They are the adventurous turned destitute: possibly foreclosed-upon, unwilling and unable to make rent, eyes wide open dreaming, embittered,  tobacco-stained,  quick to show the streak of shame gleaned from years of being poor, staunchly defiant, and hugely proud. For, the micro-world with its micro-climate of pure sanctity, of perfect refuge that a boat acquires when it becomes a home is truly an unadulterated source of pride.  
The live-aboards. As for me, I am proud to be counted among them.