9-23-11 1550 Green House. Rainy bullets pounding on the porches and the sky is darkening grey. Sixty eight degrees, a summery kind of rain. It was grey earlier, the kind of high stratus grey that lets a lot of light onto the sea. Long wavy lines of reflection, making the view take on immense importance. The seawall forms a kind of extended stage for the grey on grey horizon line. A lobster buoy poking through the shimmery gray in solitary angular splendor centers attention. Far off to stage right, a sailboat under power with bare spars sails out of view.
Yesterday was not so scenic. It was a somehow more oppressive grey, perhaps due to the light rain cum heavy mist, perhaps due to my mood somehow? I managed to get down to the boathouse and out in the Looksha 4 Fiberglas kayak by a little after 10…a virtual meeting at 9, and tea with my sister before that. The ebb tide carrying me smoothly down a beautiful smooth tongue of water pouring out of Great Harbor and South into Buzzards Bay. It was near flat calm, no sea at all running, and the grey made it hard to see the just barely submerged rocks as I paddled along the shore of Uncatena. Without the suns wash of light, the rocks along the shore can’t show their contrasty color and edginess…greys dominate, and in some way the details become less interesting, perhaps as they are less well defined. I paddled along though, still enjoying the paddling, remembering to push as much as pull. Wonder if I remember physically even when I am not remembering mentally. How does that transfer thought to action occur? It’s been known for a time that our brain commences quite a few thousandth of a second before we start to move. We are marvelously slow compared to machines. Moving hydrated salt atoms across cell membranes IS slow…perhaps a literal explanation of the phrase ‘give me time to think!’.
The things I do that I had formal lessons to learn; very few. The things I started doing and then received corrective help; also pretty sparse. The number of things I did, kept doing, and probably have some weird energy inefficient and mentally taxing way of doing; probably huge. Sometimes it becomes clear with practice…I don’t mean improvement, I mean pain. Cocking my right wrist, for example, definitely is where my right ‘golfers elbow’ came from. (‘tennis elbow’ is pain in the lateral (outside) lump at the elbow..the lateral epicondyle of the humerus (upper arm bone), and it’s the extensor carpi radialis brevis muscle which originates there and is involved in lifting with the palm down and, yes, tennis, that is often the culprit. My problem is pain on the inside of the right elbow, the medial epicondyle, which has extensor muscles involved in movements of the hand, such as paddling a kayak). Still, paddling yesterday went well..my shoulders were pretty tired after 6 hours, but it was that kind of Germanic ‘good’ pain.
There were plenty of fish, mostly small to medium striped bass, hanging out near the surface and close to rocks along the shore. You can often see their fins moving slowly through the mirror of the surface. As they become aware, there’s a carangiform spasm of the tail and they’re gone. There’s no current to stimulate them here along Uncatena; perhaps they are meditating. Perhaps they are always meditating. What if Buddha is a porpoise? Or at least, that the historical Buddha achieved nothing more or less than marine mammal brain function? What if whales are so relaxed they are always, well, Buddha? ( Of course, I imagine Sala responding, and you are too!)
However, what often happens to me with attempts at sitting meditation is not enlightenment, but sleep. I have completely fallen asleep paddling in the past, and when I do that I wake up already past the point of saving myself by a quick brace with the paddle..Yesterday was more like those times in the car that I would rather not admit I have. And as in the car, it’s generally enough to motivate a renewed wakefulness. It also helped that the kayak just then went grinding and gritting across a flat barnacle covered rock that was a few inches under the surface..Nothing like the sound of $10 an ounce epoxy gelcoat being macerated to bring skinflints like me to full wakefulness.
Fully awake, I paddled on. Push/pull and push/pull. Let the movements come from the thighs, the hips, the lats and pecs as well as the arms. Let the boat develop a rhythmic sway from side to side..it helps to align the paddle strokes. And let the overall effect be relaxation ( enlightenment wouldn’t be bad either)...and please not sleep!
Uncatena is just a little blip off the Northwest end of Naushon. Naushon is more substantial..about 8 miles long. The shore is mostly granite boulders, and in the water on a clear calm day, many of they are under water, often coated with seaweed; wavery bulky mysteries to the passing kayak. Sometimes there are fishes circling way down under, sometimes it’s just the current coiling around this obstacle, running it’s hands through the seaweed as the tidal flow continues on down Buzzards Bay. The ebbing current lasts will well past noon. Now its suddenly foggy, can barely see the rocks on shore, which are suddenly exciting, the face of an old lover imagined in the crowd. Now it’s misting… such heavy mists that some spoilsports might call it rain. Buttoned up with a waterproof top and a spray skirt, it doesn’t make much difference.
Another mile along, past some very attractive collections of flotsam..plastic fish boxes, fragments of net, and fewer and fewer beer cans and plastic bottles every year…a series of white sand crescent shaped beaches relieve the ongoing boulders and cliffs. Each one has a large sign beginning with PRIVATE PROPERTY. And it is; the whole string of island except for Cuttyhunk at the end is owned by the Forbes Trust. They do allow ‘seasonal visitors’ to land at three of the beaches, though you are not supposed to stay overnight . And it’s OK to land on Wee Peckets island, which is my first scheduled stop.
Wee Peckets is actually three islands. Two are tidal rockpiles, the most southerly is a sand hill with poison ivy and spartina grass, and a rookery for sea gulls in the spring. When I used to work for MBL on the Supply Department crew, we would occasionally have an order for seagull eggs..Dr S. had a special license to work on the (otherwise protected) birds. Those visits, during the hatching season, were merry mayhem; adult gulls shrieking overhead, battering wings when we came too close, already hatched fuzzy chicks running through the little gull paths in the grass, and of course the heavy odor of guano baking in the sun. One year, several weeks after the egg hunting, I took a small power boat to dump all the discarded biological material out in Vineyard Sound. As we arrived at the dumping area, and cut the noisy engine of the boat, it became clear that some of the discarded eggs were hatching…two gull chicks were in fact free of their shells and staggering around in the garbage pail, all bright eyes and optimistic peeping. Against both common sense and legal practice, I took them home, and in that distant and more relaxed era, my mother and younger brother raised the two gulls, named Gulliver (of course) and Blake ( Susie liked his poems). This summer, my brother reminded me of his long ago gullfather summer job, and that one of the gulls made a practice of walking down to town along the road. Eventually, imprinting on my brothers running and flapping, they learned to fly and left us groundlings behind.
There were a few gulls on Wee Peckets white sand beach (most were away at work at the Falmouth dump), and for once it wasn’t too hot. The rains have washed away the gull smells too. There are a few shells, of the subdued New England variety, and a few stray feathers (not the blizzards you encounter during the squabbling and molting of nesting season). Then the misty wisty sky comes back down, and I take refuge in my buttoned up Kayak again.
Later the tide has changed, and I start back with it towards Woods Hole, paddling in open water now. No rocks to avoid and Uncatena is still several miles ahead.
Reflecting on my work in progress; communications between couples. For the first time this summer, I have been able to hear the content of Sala’s reaction to my writing without being swept into some angry wastebasket state by my reaction to her reaction. Constructive criticism is so rarely encountered (even in a hundred thousand million kalpas (as the Buddhist invocation says about enlightment), and so why am I so ungracious about it when offered by the person I can probably trust above all others? Because…well…because of all the rest, years of kitchen table conversation, the fear of rejection, or at least of not succeeding. All the bits and pieces of metaphorical nest making material that form ego. The stuff we never agreed on, public vs. private school for example. The stuff we always agreed on but never discussed; interracial divorces, for example. My preferences for sleeping in strange places, hers for coffee in bed. So, it’s good to think that we are expending the areas where it’s safe to offer a real opinion, rather than a platitude.
Back at the boathouse, the mist is definitely rain, no kidding. On the way to dinner, I bike across the golf course. Here’s this beautiful stretch of grass, so carefully tended, so expensive of space and chemicals, and to ride full speed down a steep green hill, knowing there is no need for caution…in the rain…it’s pretty exciting. I crossed the golf course with Fuji during Hurricane Irene…with seagulls and swallows flying in amazing fast swoops, magical fish swimming in the currents of upended weather. Last night it was quiet in the woods. I guess we were all listening to the raindrops moving through the leaves. Where do the crickets go when it rains?
Alan
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