Into The Realm

The Bluff From out of a deep blue haze of time, I come awake on a patch of lumpy crabgrass, looking up at the worn tread of a tractor tire swaying above me like a clock weight. The tire is attached to a knotted tangle of frayed hemp running up to a deep grove notched in the former hitching limb of our South Seas pagoda tree. I reach for the tire and hook my right arm through its center. Pushing with my heel-ends against the mossy ground, I rise upwards and back, then swing out over an arching bluff. My body extends above a distant tidal wash littered with barrier rocks and the decayed remnants of a long-ago wharf. The fingers on my right hand stretch the tire’s lower lip, forming a drooping scream within its gaping maw, and for that one instant I am flying, attached to neither sea nor landmass, and there is no sound, like being inside a vacuum. The world beneath me has rotated another thousand feet on its axis with the Earth itself having raced another twelve miles around its ellipse of the sun. Yet I have not moved. I am floating, Godlike, held aloft by a combination of velocity and something else that I’m about to put my finger on when the ever-reliable tug of crumbling rubber slings me back across the bluff and onto the lumpy sod. “I hope to be at least sixty before that rickety old tire finally gives out,” I say to myself. Tall beach grass whips about my knees as I walk out onto our bluff and stand on its precipice. Fresh sea air abounds as I caress my whiskery gullet. Raking back my rust-colored topknot with my nicked and battered hands, I look down at our small harbor that sparkles as if strewn with Christmas tinsel. It’s a view I never tire of: the swollen girth of the bay spreading to the horizon with its many small islands encapsulated within a thin strip of barrier beach. Beyond that, the frothing North Atlantic, or whom I like to call Second Mother, whose booming surf plays eternally in my mind. I’ve listened to Her flirt with Her landlocked lover since birth. I even hear Her when I’m pulling crab pots north of the Aleutians. She’s rhythmic, never-ending, with an almost percussionist-like cadence. There’s a thunderous bass that sounds when She comes crashing to shore. Followed by a thrumming of cymbals as She carries up the beach. And it is the tinkling of wind chimes that I hear when She finally lifts Her creamy skirt and bashfully recedes, knowing that one day She’ll bury Her landlocked lover within Her kelp-laced smock only to have His future landmass rise up and toss Her back into Her depths, forever and ever repeating. I feel lucky to have grown up on this bluff. The view from its precipice always strikes the back of my eyes. It is the same seascape eight generations of Forrest men and women have looked out at, and yet it remains new to me with each viewing. The bluff itself rises some sixty feet above our small harbor beach, where the now half-sunken wharf once fastened many a great schooner and whaling ship to its pilings. I continue to look out over the bay, watching the morning sun rise in the East to pull out the tide and make a frothy chop to call in the gulls. “Good time to let out,” I mutter. I turn my back on the azure splendor aswirl beneath me and start up the sloping hillside, the sorry bones in my feet cracking and popping from standing too many hours on steel decks, and yet I have just turned twenty-two, though my years working in the world of men having aged me. My head feels groggy, not knowing if I slept for a minute, a month, or a millennium. I must have jumped ship the night before, or was it the night before that? I cannot seem to recall, other than it is possible that I tied one on with the captain and crew, no doubt at the Chatham Squire, before passing out at the base of our pagoda tree. But it is of no importance as I mount a slight rise and come upon the ship’s bell mounted atop a fieldstone marker. There’s no inscription on the bell, inside or out, and nobody knows how old it is or what ship it came from, not even my grandfather, and he knows everything, or at least I used to believe that he did. Taking a knee, I tip the bell sideways, and grab hold of its copper clapper; then, releasing the bell, I let go of the clapper and send deep-bellied tolls reverberating across the bay. I do this to let Gramp know I’m in port, so he can tidy up some before my arrival. Coming over the first knoll, I catch sight of our dueling weathervanes turning listlessly in the light, hilltop breeze. Mimicking an in-flight harpoon angling downward at a breaching sperm whale. The vanes, made from hammered tin, are positioned at each end of the house with a widow’s walk conjoining the two. The ‘perch’ was put up so the women of the house could look out over the marine layer to see the tall ships as they sailed for port and thus get a head start to the taverns to drag their men home lest any debauchery be committed on their long-awaited return from the sea. Not that my forefathers went unawares. Those seadogs knew their women as well as their woman knew them. So, whenever a long voyage deemed a reward of village grog, Captains Forrest would tie up in Wellfleet Harbor on the Cape Cod Bay side or, if they really wanted a scurrilous night ashore, they’d lash their lines to the fish-littered piers of Provincetown, or Hell town as it was known in those days, a place where the crew could gamble away their wages and hopefully get in a knife fight or two. Mostly though, Captains Forrest would sail in and tie up at the Chatham Fish Pier, where they would unload their catch, get paid, and return home, choosing the comfort of their women over any vile-tasting village grog. I summit the last knoll and the house proper comes into view. With its storm shutters hanging at odd angles and roof and sides cloaked in silvery, weathered shingles with patches missing, the house appears to be abandoned, and it is in a way with only me and Gramp residing. I would fix it up if I had the time, but I’m mostly at sea these days. Truth be told, I would rather raze it all and start anew, only the house has been around a while, and I’d no doubt need an Act of Congress to replace the gutters, the Chatham Historical Society being who they are. To Gramp, the house is a living mausoleum dedicated to those who went before, but to me, it’s a place where hallways dip and roll under your feet like a carnival fun house, with doors that won’t close properly and windows that let in drafts that chill to the bone come winter. And yet, with its sad and crooked smile, I am always heartened when come upon her, as I am on this day, in the Year of Our Lord 1988. Approaching the house, I am again reminded of how every board, beam, and brick has a story to tell. It’s a known fact that the side of the house facing the bay once served in the British Royal Navy. The story goes that, during the War of 1812, an English gunboat dropped anchor in Nauset Harbor with captain and crew going ashore to drink grog in what they believed to be a Tory-friendly tavern in Eastham, and it was on that same night that my long-ago relations rowed out to the ship and cut its anchor line. Upon their return in the early, predawn light, the brigade found their ship listing on her beam-ends, run aground on Barley Neck. Realizing their plight, they marched through the streets of Chatham with their muskets c****d and loaded, listening to the townspeople snicker at them from behind closed curtains. Walking along the darkened edges of the King’s Highway, now Route 6A, the brigade finally met up with a band of truly sympathetic Tories and boarded another British warship anchored safely off Blish Point in Barnstable Harbor. The Eastham tavern boys took the masts and sails with the men of the Forrest clan taking the rest, leaving only the ship’s bones to bleach in the sun and salt. In other words, it was business as usual on Cape Cod’s Outer Reach. Fact was, much of the wood used for building houses in Chatham in those days came from the various schooners and frigates that would break apart on the ever-shifting shoals along the Cape’s ‘Backside’ whenever a hurricane or nor’easter hit, the timber and cargo carried by the wind and waves to the shore where area Mooncussers, like my forefathers, would hitch up their wagon teams and drag the booty across the moonlit dunes, never exchanging a word. “The Dark Work” is how Gramp refers to it, saying to me once, “And if any of ’em poor scullions washed up on our harbor beach, you can bet their graves would’a been dug deep. This I know because every Forrest would want the same for his remains should he go over the side one day. Ain’t no sin to take what the sea offers, Caleb. Sin is not to take it. That don’t mean you should light a bonfire and dance around a-hoopin’ and a-hollerin’. No! You take what you need and make use of it! That-a-way the circle continues as it will when your day comes, many, many sunups from now.” Brick, blood, and bone is how Gramp sees the house, and as I hike up the last knoll, I quicken my pace, fighting back the gnawing memory of a murder I committed on this very soil one year ago to the day, only I don’t see it as ‘murder,’ per se, but rather ‘survival of the fittest,’ and I believe Darwin would agree.