Riding to Scarborough Beach
Last year I went down to Rhode Island for a couple of days, just to get out of Maine, where the winter had been so long, where the woods are dark and gaunt. Where history ruled in my neck of the woods, where nothing changes and you must bear the waiting. Traveling south was another country, the green grass, forsythia, all the the colors, and especially the early maple’s light rose red. Also the shiny cars, aggression, the speed. The Mercedes SUVs, leathery well kept women in Jags Scarborough seemed like some lost country, recalling childhood rides in the long Country Squire through the remaining farms of South County, past the horse pastures of the last Swamp Yankees. The recall of the colonial, Gilbert Stuart’s birthplace, stone walls. All gone now, all development, mall after mall growing over the tender earth, the green, all cement and gloss, everything represented, all the stores we did not have in Maine. How do people live with this? I thought. What I used to live with. Only Scarborough remained the same, the immutable sea, breakers forming, rising and cresting. No ghosts from long ago, just the sea, and the sea’s reality—the seaweed everywhere to the right, where Olivo’s, the private beach used to be, with its green and white cabanas.. The multicolored seaweed and the smell of it…and the sea’s violence—the dead gull, a spotted seal pup carcass among it the weeds, flies buzzing. Far off, the boats of Galilee, a nearby fishing village nearby, from which the Block Island ferry embarks, where my quiet grandfather was once stable master at the Ocean View Hotel. I never did go there, Ma was afraid of the ride across the bay, the sea’s currents. Near the ferry, between Galilee and Jerusalem, the other village across the strait, were the flats where my Aunt Gabe and I once dug for quahogs. Unbelievably, still there. The tide out. Thinking of her, her still-brown hair in a bun, her full body, cotton house dress wet at the hem, how she leaned down to fill the pail. Worker that she was, practical, intent always on providing. How the long afternoon would end as we dug, the pure white flash of an egret’s wing above the day’s long shadow.
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May 2024
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