Thursday, August 30, 2012

On Capturing the Surreal




It was like this. Surreal. The Outer Cape. Come Saturday morning there were barely a dozen bodies on the beach. No. Twelve exactly. I counted. There had been an electrical storm the night before, morning was grey, but by 9:30 AM the clouds were beginning to slowly disperse southeast over the Atlantic. At 10:30 AM, lunch in backpacks, we mounted our bikes and peddled along the sandy, narrow road, following the deep grooves of wide tire treads set in clay. At the top of the wooded hill, we could barely see the ocean but we heard it like we hear, from a mile away, the soft hum of a highway during rush hour. The pine-covered path that wound down, in serpentine fashion, took us through tall, dancing oaks and merry, berried bushes and out to a paved road leading to the ocean. Lulu piloted the way.

It was like this.

Surreal. The Outer Cape. Nearly every day (and on a few days, very soon after the storms cleared), in northern Wellfleet, abutting Truro, we set our low chairs, blanket and small cooler along the wide expanse of Newcomb Hollow Beach, where the forest, gushing out to sea, falls off in a dramatic one-hundred foot sand plunge, and its rosehip, bearberry and boulder strewn dunes tell a marly, striated history of life along the coastline. (These are the great dunes that Henry David Thoreau called "the backbone of the Cape.") Vegetation clings perilously to the edges of these sand banks, and at the foot of the fallen earth lie injured, traumatized, forest scrub.  It was on this beach, before the inexhaustible sea, that I read to my husband, from Thoreau's Cape Cod, "The breakers looked like droves of a thousand wild horses rushing to the shore, with their white manes streaming far behind; and when at length the sun shown for a moment, their manes were rainbow tinted." To which he, eyes still fixed on Richard Zacks's The Pirate Hunter, replied: Wow. Is that ever overwritten. (Which makes me wonder, now, if I am doing the same.) But the breakers, the gurgling white breakers, from a certain angle, did look like the streaming manes of a thousand wild horses rushing to the shore.

At least to me.

It was on this beach, too, where little terns scattered and herds of seals bobbed in the aqua froth, that Max ran barefoot every day--straight into Truro, along deserted ivory sands, way, way out of our sight. On one such run, as Lu and I ate lunch, I became aware that Max had been gone a long time. Too long. And I had grown concerned. Almost an hour into his run, my phone rang. It was Max. Mom, he said, Mom! And then, the phone cut out. Now, I was more than concerned. I tried reaching him several times, but there was no reception. (On the outer Cape, the valleys and hollows, including the shoreline, are almost entirely dead zones.) Moments later my phone rang again. Max had climbed one of the steep sand slopes--the only spot in which he could find a smidgen of cell phone reception. Immediately I asked if he was OK.

Yes! he hollered into the phone. But there's a seal! A beached seal, and I don't want him to die. I've been cupping water in my hands and tossing it over him to keep him hydrated.

What? Max hun, I explained, seals don't get beached. They're not whales--it's normal for them to come on shore. They can scoot back into the water. He's probably just resting.

Yes, but he's bleeding. His flippers are torn up. He said, too, that he was the only person on the beach. No one else in sight. Which is the way it is in lower Truro, where few roads lead directly to the coastline.

This boy. Kind heart. I felt his worry. (He is the boy who, once, as a four-year-old, eyeing the stations of the cross in church, cried out, What are they doing to Jesus! They're hurting him!) I told him that the seal would be fine. It would go back into the sea and the salt water would heal the wounds. And then I instructed him not to get too close to the seal, not to touch it, especially since it seemed hurt. And then--I don't know why, perhaps I felt deprived of mammal intimacy--I told him to take pictures with his phone, from a distance, to get off the dunes, where he was not supposed to be, and to run back to where I was beached.

When Max returned a half hour later he told me that he had zigzagged down the dunes--so as not to cause this great escarpment to collapse--and then ran toward the area where the seal had been resting only to find that his friend was gone. Returned to the sea. But before he called me from the top of the sandy slope, before he even thought to set his fingers on any buttons, or worry about collapsing dunes, he said, he sat face to face with the seal on the empty shoreline. Just him and the seal. The seal and him. And the seal barked ever so slightly, and Max gently said Hello back.

So the seal is fine. I said.

Yeah, he's good. He smiled.

You had a moment with the seal. That's pretty special, don't you think?

I do. Yup. I do. And then he dug into the cooler and pulled out a water and a turkey sandwich.
It was like this.

Surreal. The Outer Cape.

During an eight-year span in the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau set out on four walking tours of Cape Cod. Two of these tours were solo, and two were with the company of his friend and poet, William Ellery Channing, whom had previously advised Thoreau to go out into the briars and build a hut. Thoreau took Channing's advice in earnest. The book that followed that excursion is Walden. The book that followed Thoreau's Cape Cod jaunts is Cape Cod, which is the book that I read on the sand bar that is Cape Cod. It seems that these haunting, and haunted, sands are the closest I may ever get to experiencing a real desert. The Cape Cod National Seashore, in fact, is a kind of desert island. One can sit on the seashore for hours almost entirely alone, even in the hottest, dog days of summer. This graceful arm, especially its soft, sandy wrist to fist, has a history of luring artists and writers to its shores. In the dunes of Provincetown, through which we biked, we were reminded of the writer's shacks of years ago. A few still remain. Eugene O'Neill and Norman Mailer both, at one time, lived in these dune shacks. From a tiny, grey hut overlooking the Atlantic (so the story goes), Tennessee Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. Here, on the Outer Cape.

Surreal.

And then, a friend of my husband's, who had led us, on our bikes, through several miles of hilly dunes at the tip of the Cape tells us that Mary Oliver is a Wellfleetian. Imagine. Mary Oliver in Wellfleet. (I hadn't heard or read this before, or if I had I'd forgotten.)  I wanted to imagine that I would run into her the next morning while sipping coffee out on the deck in front of The Flying Fish in downtown Wellfleet. But then, I looked her up--the Bard of Provincetown--to find only a P.O. Box number in P-Town. Maybe I misunderstood when he said, "She lives right here." But we were sitting on the brick patio of a Main Street, Wellfleet, restaurant. Right here, on the Outer Cape, may mean almost anywhere on the Outer Cape. (Oliver's bio on Poets.org states that she currently resides in Provincetown.)

We had dinner in Truro the night before we left the Cape. Most nights had been cloudy and threatening, but this evening, our last, was clear and dry. Before we returned to our rental in the woods we stopped by Newcomb Hollow for a last look at the falling sands, the beach, the breakers. Along the shore a few bonfires blazed, some had been abandoned and smoldered. We listened to crackling fires, to waves piling up against what seemed the edge of the universe. The night was very dark, black-dark, and we proceeded carefully down the slope, onto the beach, where we stood under the flawless dome of a flickering galaxy.

No. It was more than flawless. Impossibly beautiful, it was. Astonishing. To the left, to the right, north or south the sky pulsated, fiery dots shot through the sky, auditioned, as if they had waited for our reflection, for our very being so that they might demonstrate their capabilities. I think, truly, they were playing with us.

On the shore, by a pit of orange embers, I pulled out my cell phone. One photograph of the shimmering Milky Way and I understood that the evening could not be captured this way. It could not be digitized, put under any unnatural process, reimagined elsewhere. It was only here--Midnight under the Milky Way--below this celestial canopy under which its myriad characters glint and transmute, on the Outer Cape, land of the surreal, that this beach, this sky, this ocean, this sand was real. Very real.

40 comments:

  1. Beautiful writing and beautiful pictures.

    As for experiencing a true desert, you know you want to come out someday to Arizona, California or Nevada - don't you?

    I envy you being so close to the ocean. I envy your son's experience with the seal. And you've made me miss the East.

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    1. Hillary- I've been to Nevada and California, but not the desert. Arizona is a place I would love to go, and definitely to the desert. Maybe some day... but I've so much to first knock off that bucket list.

      Max is the kind of soul who was born for these moments. They seem to show up in his life with some regularity. Perhaps he is hyper-attentive to magical moments, or the possibility of magical moments. :)

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  2. Absolutely beautiful, Jayne! I understand what you are saying from experience. And I know that Milky Way and will never forget it. That part of the Cape is special beyond belief (it can never be overwritten) and your children are so lucky to have experienced it. And even more so with you because of the way you love it and sharing that love with them.

    Your last photo captures the feel of the outer Cape perfectly.

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    1. I still have that Milky Way in my mind--it's going to linger like last' night blue moon.

      Ok Linda- So you and I will be booking a bike trip together soon, right? Imagine the Outer Cape in the fall... I'm looking into an art weekend. ;)

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  3. Absolutely wonderful, Jayne. I mentally stuck my tongue out at your husband for poking at Thoreau.
    The photo of Max running is my favorite. It is absolutely surreal, like something out of a dream.

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    1. Ha! Nessa, I think Michael was right on--it is a bit overwritten--but it sounds even more so out of context.

      This was the first time Max really ran barefoot on a beach. He loved it. Nothing quite like it--Chariots of Fire theme song ringing in your head, surf washing in and out... such a beautiful rhythm to it. Sure beats hitting the pavement. ;)

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  4. I like the photo of what I assume to be Max running on the beach. Surreal. Cool kid. Good outlook on stuff. Saying hello back to the seal was clutch. Thoreau always had some poet bud giving him shelter, didn't he? Bearberry is such a classy little groundcover. One of the all time best Latin names too. Nice writing.

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    1. It is Max, Scott. He got a much better workout running in that sand, too. I think it improved his time--sure helped with his varsity soccer tryouts! I'm kinda bummed he didn't get a pic of that seal, but then again, I like imagining that moment--In my head I can picture it vividly.

      True about Thoreau. It was cool walking on the Wellfleet beaches, wondering if I was stepping on his footprints. :)

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  5. This was worth the wait! I like your hubby's succinct comment, heh. Gorgeous GORGEOUS piece. I may need to get my bum to the east coast next year for a visit, haven't been to CC since I was 7 years old.

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    1. You must get your bum out to the Cape, Ms. EcoGrrl! The nice thing about the Cape is that while it's changed (it's crazier in the summer than ever) it really hasn't changed too much. Establishing the National Seashore was one of the best things ever done for that magical spit of land. ;)

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  6. Loved this! Thanks for sharing the seal story and Max! I was there with you in my mind... Great writing!

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    1. Thanks, Loree. Now that I think about it, I wonder if the seal had been bitten by a shark. They're swarming in the waters now!

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  7. Thank you for writing of Cape Cod. Some places just get into your soul, don't they? You've captured its essence perfectly.
    What a unique experience for Max! I can imagine his teacher giving that age-old, back-to-school writing assignment, "What I Did On Summer Vacation". Oh, he would have things to tell!

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    1. Leonora- Yes, and in New England (which is rich with such places), aside from the Green and White Mountains of Vermont and NH, the Cape is most special to me. It's where I met my husband and was married, where I traveled as a child and where we have family. I think I could write a lot about it, but that is already done by much better writers.

      Oh, if Max were only still in elementary school! That would be a great story, but as a sophomore this year he hasn't been asked. Can you imagine? If I were a teacher I'd be asking all my kids, no matter how old, to write about their summer!

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  8. Jayne: Such a beautifully written story, that it allowed me to escape my work at the keyboard, feeling as if I was transported to where your son was on that beach. This will be a special memory for him, and you were a part of that very magical day! Have a nice weekend!!! :)

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    1. Michael, I'm glad this took you away from your work, if only for a moment! And I'm sure you're right--Max will keep this in his heart for some time.

      We're having a gorgeous weekend! Hope the same goes for you. :)

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  9. "It was only here--Midnight under the Milky Way--below this celestial canopy under which its myriad characters glint and transmute, on the Outer Cape, land of the surreal, that this beach, this sky, this ocean, this sand was real. Very real." Lovely piece, Jayne, and yes, not surreal, in the end, but real. Very real.

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    1. Susan- Do you ever have those moments when you're standing under a magnificent sky, or overlooking miles of rolling hills, or an ocean at the edge of the universe, and think: Is this real? I don't know, maybe most people don't have those moments, maybe they do, but I have them whenever I'm out on the top of a mountain, or dune, or simply sitting under the stars. It's a fascinating world. :)

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    2. I absolutely do, and this is part of why what you've written is so moving. Perhaps one of the most magnificent gifts I've been given is to photograph a sky I thought beautiful and send it on to my poet-friend Elaine, who then wrote an utterly gorgeous poem inspired by it called Only Sky. That poem was published in Salamander, but is not yet available online. Here, though, is another, that is indicative of her style: here

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    3. Susan- Elaine Sexton. My goodness, I've read her poetry in the past, and it's quite beautiful.

      What public transportation can evoke... Thank you for that link, I hope everyone here takes a look at her work--her musings/observations of NYC (and its inhabitants) are uncanny. Especially her haunting Lower Manhattan Pantoum. I'll look forward to reading Only Sky (it's on my radar!); will your photo be included in the publication?? :)

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  10. "But the shore will never be more attractive than it is now... A man may stand there and put all America behind him." Well said (both you and Thoreau).

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    1. Oh I love that, April. I love two, a sentence within that same paragraph: A storm in the fall or winter is the time to visit it; a lighthouse or a fisherman's hut the true hotel." I really do love Thoreau.

      Thanks for stopping by. Nice to see you here. :)

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  11. You seem to be a natural-born contemplator and muller-over of things real but mysterious. (Gee, I wonder where Max gets his soulfulness?)

    Funnily enough, this post presents several nice metaphors for the experience of visiting Suburban Soliloquy. (And no, timorous beastie, I do NOT refer here to The Husband's appraisal -- right or wrong -- of that Thoreau passage.) I first read it the day you (a) posted it and then (b) peeped about it (or whatever ;)) on Twitter. Then I ran off on the sand of a couple days of work-work, and a couple days of long-weekend-preoccupation, and here I am back, still trying to catch the breath I haven't recovered since Thursday...

    We went to the Atlantic coast for a couple days last weekend -- only the Florida version, not Cape Cod's, but still. The Missus grew up on the Florida Atlantic and goes into withdrawal if she doesn't get to hear surf and seagulls, and smell saltwater, at least once a year. (The Gulf coast, closer to us, just doesn't cut it, although it has its own charms.)

    Unfortunately for her, she married a man whose appreciation of the beach is reserved for post-sunset. (And yes, those wheeling-overhead Milky Way moments.)

    As always, thank you for sharing these gems online. It rather peeves me to know that someone, someday, will come across your site and arrange for you to write professionally for him or her -- or them -- whereupon we'll see the last soliloquy here. (And there you'll go, cut and bleeding, to swim with the sharks. :))

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    1. Ha! JES, thank you for clarifying the reference. ;) Things real but mysterious, yes, I'm afraid this often proves to be a bit of a quagmire in which I can become glued for days. Not quite the same, but this makes me think of Alex Stone's new book Fooling Houdini, which I can't wait to get my hands on (after I finished Wild.

      You know I love the gulf side of Florida, though the Atlantic, the sand is so soft and sparkly--as I recall--though I haven't been in, oh, 7 years at least. (But there's a writer's conference on Sanibel Island in November which just may draw me back down there.) And post-sunset, when sands have cooled, is a pretty magical time at almost any shore, and especially the ocean's.

      Swimming with the sharks. Heh-- shouldn't we all have a chance at that? Oh, the odds! ;)

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  12. great pics Jayne - you make it feel and look really exotic like a hidden paradise.

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    1. Hidden paradise it is, David! At least some parts. :)

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  13. what a powerful experience for your son to share with the seal - i just returned from the beach myself (a little further south on the eastern seaboard) and am missing it terribly. that last image will stay with me.

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    1. Ah, Amanda, nothing like time at the beach to fill the spring, eh? And for Max, this trip was very special, yes, it will stay with him for a long, long time. I would say he's a pretty spiritual kind of kid--which makes me smile because moments like these are never lost on him. :)

      I miss the beach, too!

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  14. Jayne, this was such a gorgeous post. You brought me back twenty years to a similar Cape Cod vacation with my children. I forgot about those images, downloaded and saved on the blurry pages of my soul, until you shared yours. Thank you.

    Your writing is alive.

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    1. Oh, Leah, I'm so glad this sparked those Cape memories for you and yours. Next summer, the little man will probably be working, and not as available to get away. I'm glad we took more time this summer... those little babes will be flying too soon.

      Thank you, Leah. :)

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  15. we stood under the flawless dome of a flickering galaxy....fantastic work!
    this is great stuff Jayne..very personal and evocative....more more! ;)

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    1. Truly, Dan, flawless. The last time I saw a sky, a very different sky, that remarkable I was sitting on my deck in our backyard at home (5 years ago maybe) and I saw a comet burn through the sky. Really, I thought we were in for, well, some serious scene. That comet was on fire and coming down quickly! Crazy what goes on up there! And down here, too. ;)

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  16. I'm with the husband on WW, that Walt Whitman and not Walter White, and that beach looks amazing, though i wonder how warm the water is, you see after Costa Rica i need my oceans in the 80's so i can play in it for hours at a time without turning blue... as for that Max kid, he seems like a gem.

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    1. I concur, Kono--a gem. But all our kids are gems, aren't they?-in their own special way. My daughter's the opposite. She's not impressed by much. But I know it takes her longer to process... or she delays processing...eventually things (moments/events/milestones.. good or bad) catch up to her and reflection ensues with much more drama or emotion than her brother. Vay. Gems. They are precious. ;)

      The Atlantic was jarringly cold the first day, but warmed to a manageable temp. Warm enough for me to get in on the boogie board (w/out turning blue!)--which doesn't often happen in NE waters. Though I've never been, I can imagine those warm Costa Rican waters. I know the warmth of island waters and the Caribbean Sea, it's hard to come back to a cold ocean after a taste of that.

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  17. Thirteen on the beach (including you)? Does it mean bad luck? Probably not. Thirteen is my favorite number >;)

    Great picture at the top. I wold call it art.

    Cold As Heaven

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    1. Thirteen would be your favorite number, Cold! And you're good with numbers, so I'll trust you that it's good luck, rather than how it's commonly perceived.

      I've been working with a couple of different photoshop applications. I can take an picture w/my iPhone and rework with an application without ever sending it to my laptop. Pretty cool stuff. Whoever said you can't teach an old dog... heh.... well, you know the rest. ;)

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  18. Jayne,
    You write beautifully. It makes me miss that part of the country. I'm guessing you are tied to the ocean just like I am. Only more so, seeing as how you live there. Thanks for this amazing read.

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    1. Joe-
      *blush* I thank you kindly for your generous comment, and I'm honored to have you stop by.
      I am, yes, tied very much to the ocean. It'd be hard for me to leave New England, to leave the sea, the mountains, the seasons, the scent of these old states. But I admire you for hopping on a bike and leaving it all behind. For the grand adventure, and for making it work. Don't think I don't have fantasies like that.

      The pleasure's all mine. ;)

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  19. '(He is the boy who, once, as a four-year-old, eyeing the stations of the cross in church, cried out, What are they doing to Jesus! They're hurting him!)'

    The seal with the bleeding flippers already had me perilously close to breathlessness but this ...

    Jayne, I'm sitting here with a blinking cursor thinking how does one properly respond to such fine-grained writing? I'm not sure. It's like your words are always tinged with exquisite but silent suffering. Not like a martyr. More like life rendered with very sharp edges of light, too much for the eyes to sustain too long. I come here and I read with a tightness in my chest, released only by the surprise of perfect words like 'marly' and firm, clear grasps of the real amidst the surreal like the Milky Way's resistance to digitization, my!

    (I just sighed and shook my head. I absolutely love your banner, too.)

    xx
    -S

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    1. Suze- "...exquisite but silent suffering." Hmm, you know I've been wracking my brain searching for the general theme (as if there is one) that runs through my work. I always seem to end up with anxiety as the overriding theme. I wonder what percentage of my blog posts are labeled with "anxiety" or "stress," heh. (Yes, she's wracked by anxiety, immobilized at times!) But, yes, well, life is full of silent suffering, isn't it?! The entire world, the natural world, its inhabitants suffer silently... yet it is suffering despite, or in spite of all the beauty.

      Thank you for you thoughtful comment--go me thinking! And the banner--I can't stop tweaking it, but I'm glad you like it--I may keep this one a while. ;)

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