Blue In Green

Seeing that I will be “moving” to New York under more permanent circumstances in the immediate future, I suppose it hasn’t really sunk in. That is, until today. Perhaps, it seems as though my finding a job is somewhat anti-climatic. Although I’ve always wanted to get further away than Fairfield, CT, where I went for undergrad, I have some reservations about leaving Rhode Island. Not so much for Warwick, in particular, but more so Narragansett, the beach house, and familiar waters. I went there today, unexpectedly, as I had to get my laptop serviced in South County. If you’re familiar with the area, and the Rhode Island logic of making the “trip” worth it, even though it’s only 20 minutes away without traffic, of course I had to keep driving to Route 108. That’s where the beach house. Yes, the one alluded to in “Indian Rock Farm Road” and “Boston Whaler Blues” http://leaningtowerofsuburbia.blogspot.com/

I drove down the private dirt road, keeping it under 20 per request of the signs telling me to “Slow Down You Move Too Fast” and “Watch Out For Playing Children and Crossing Animals.” In the summer months, the road is dry from the heat and dusty from the elevated traffic. Today, perhaps as an after effect of the winter snows and subsequent melts, the road was quite smooth, although wet, and quiet when not bumpy. As today was overcast, the sky served as an appropriate backdrop for the gloom of leafless trees, dead foliage, absent grape vines, and pushed-over eel grass. I can remember as a child we would go down there as a family during the winter months, even if just once during the off season. There used to be a small deli, next to a small house and farm, where we would buy a rotisserie chicken or two on the way down Route 4. My parents and grandparents would also speculate that the family who ran the farm owned the deli. Either way, the deli is no longer there but the small white-almost-stucco color square building remains as, I would assume from the sign, a place that sells “ROSES.”

We would pick up fallen branches and sometime kick the dead seaweed that the tide dragged up on the lawn into the woods. I can remember peeing in an empty rust-ridden black and yellow Chock Full O’Nuts can, even though my brother and I had the necessary equipment to go behind the tool shed. The steps up to the deck would creek, the third one up, the first one down. The faded two-by-four railings often matched the color of the sky. From the outside, some people might be instilled with an eerie sense of absence the winter months bring to a seasonal tourist town. Not to me, it’s so much more than that.

We’d make our way into the house and it would be freezing. More often than not, we’d have to bring in some plastic chairs from outside to sit on because the couch cushions were put away in trash bags and taped up so the mice would not ruin them. Long before my grandparents invested in a gas stove, we would make a fire inside the black iron stove with kindling and the driest pieces of driftwood we could find, often browsing through the newspapers left in the summer months for just that purpose, before twisting them in knots and adding them to the fire. There we’d sit, typically without a table and sometimes unfolding the aluminum foil the chickens came as drop cloths for the thin beige carpet.

Even then, and despite the temperature difference between the area closest to the wood burning stove and the porch, I would just want to look through the windows out to the access road that leads to Galilee, the ferries, and Great Island. I can remember being scolded for wanting to lift the screens up to get the best possible view through fogged up panes of glass. That same window, the one closest to the back door to the deck, holds with it a memory of being started by a praying mantis and the window falling on my thumbnail as a result. Oftentimes, when I catch myself biting that fingernail, I remember how long it too to grow back that year. In a weird way, maybe that’s why I like biting them so much.

Today was different, as I felt quite alone. Two swans were out in the middle of the pond—too far off for me to see them clearly, but surely they were swans. There were no deer on the drive in. It’s not uncommon to see at least one, especially at this time of year. The ospreys, too, were missing. The water was still, even though there was a slight breeze, contributing calm to my pondering. Even in the on-and-off cool drizzle of mid-March, I had an almost uncontrollable urge to quahog. I even took a casual jog back to where I parked my car to check what types of clothes or blankets I had to console my would-be shivers and stink of salt pond muck. Last summer alone and this is not a boast, as I simply love getting quahogs, I must have gotten over 1,000 with my bare hands and feet. I love doing it and, as a process, it’s quite hard to describe. It’s as if my hunter-gatherer instincts kick in, I set a goal, and I’m in the water for hours. As kids, my grandparents and parents would try, unsuccessfully, to wave us in. During low tides, particularly after a full-moon, we were able to walk straight across the pond with the water never going past our chests, onion and potato sacks half full with clams, in one hand, and the other holding our bathing suits up, as we’d often stuff the pockets with other mud-gems such as conches, green-glass Coca-Cola bottles, and arrowheads.

These thoughts in mind, I strolled the shore looking at deer and coyote tracks in the sand. Picking up an occasional suspected arrowhead and skipping it into the blue-in-green water after it failed the quality control inspection. I was mad at myself for not having my digital camera in the car but managed to take several pictures of the pond, the shore, and what little wake there was. My younger sister and I have had many conversations about making enough money to be able to afford keeping the beach house around, in hopes that our kids might be able to commit similar experiences to memory. I would be lying if I told you that I don’t think about this nearly everyday.