Our Best American Essays
Our Best American Essays: Shitdiggers, Mudflats, and the Worm Men of Maine
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Our Best American Essays
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Shitdiggers, Mudflats, and the Worm Men of Maine
by Bill Roorbach
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“Hard work,” says Dicky Butts, and we haven’t even started yet.
. “Get wet today,” says Truman Lock. He pulls his greying beard, squints out over the bay. The blast of an offshore wind (strong enough to blow the boat and its no-lights trailer halfway into the oncoming lane as we made the drive over) is piling whitecaps, spraying their tops, Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Field Notes on My Daughter
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays
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We moved from Cape Cod to Carolina about eight and a half years ago. I wrote this soon after our first school year in the South ended, when we returned to the Cape in June. It turned out we weren’t the only ones with a new baby and this is the story of how we interacted with another pair of parents and their off-spring. It was originally published in the great journal Isotope. Long may it live!
FIELD NOTES ON MY DAUGHTER
1. Fox
During these joyous days back on Cape Cod I am taking field notes on both the local foxes and Hadley. Hadley is now just over a year old, a completely different animal than the one who moved south: a walking, talking, gesturing hominoid. Last night she rode my shoulders to the beach, and we found that a fox family had built a den in the seawall rocks. Hadley pointed at them and said “cat,” the word she is stamping on everything these days. Still, if her term for them was not entirely accurate, she was close. The two kits, their legs covered with black stockings, ambled right up to us, and she could barely contain her excitement. Meanwhile, I tried to maintain my scientific sobriety, taking notes on their black eyes, their white-tipped tails, their foolish trust.
Hadley’s physical development, like those of chimps and apes, her closest relations among primates, is relatively slow compared to other animals, these foxes for instance. In humans, physical growth, height and size, is retarded because time is required for us to learn the complex, symbolic and ever-changing world of our species. But the mental growth is wild. You see it in Hadley’s eyes and her hands and in her intense interaction with the physical world. Not long ago I taught her how to snap, and now she moves around the house going at it like a Beat poet. Her prose poem of course is made up of that one obsessive word, “Cat,” though she inflects a hundred emotions from the sound. The other night she woke up from a dream and said quite clearly: “Cat. A cat.” The alliterative and vaguely homonymous “Cow” has also leaked out, so you get the feeling that a hundred other words are gathering, readying, almost a cloudburst. Continue reading →
Ultimate Glory
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays
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Well, Tommy, you asked for it. I know this one is old news to some of you, but here’s one I’m posting for the “Our Best American Essays” category. It is relevant to Bill’s post yesterday since it is very much an essay about my own experience (and memories) in Ultimate Frisbee, and the rest of the players (including some who occasionally comment on this blog) are relegated to bit parts. That said, I have had plenty of Ultimate players, including some who weren’t born when these events occurred, who have told me that this echoes their own ultimate conversions. Anyway, this is what I was doing while Bill played in bands.
ULTIMATE GLORY
A Frisbee Memoir
What you gave me you gave whole
But as for telling
Me how to best use it
You weren’t a genius at that.
Twenties, my soul
Is yours for the asking
You know that, if you ever come back
“To My Twenties” by Kenneth Koch
We labor over our big decision and big dreams, but sometimes it’s the small things that change our lives forever. What could be smaller than this: It is the first week of my freshman year of college and I, looking for a sport to play, am walking down to the boathouse for crew, resigning myself to four years of servitude as a galley slave, when I see a Frisbee flying across the street. The Frisbee, tossed from one long-haired boy to another, looks like freedom to me. Then I notice that there are several Frisbees flying back and forth between a band of young men, all wearing shorts, with cleats hanging over their shoulders. At the time I am quite shy but, uncharacteristically, I cross the street and ask them where they are going. To Ultimate Frisbee practice, it turns out, and I am going with them. Continue reading →
Winter Solstice
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Our Best American Essays
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From my book Temple Stream [then as now, though the dogs are gone, and a new one in their place, pretty Baila, Elysia not only born since (her birth part of the narrative) but eleven years old!]:
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Winter Solstice
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Starting as early as October, but more likely November in a given year [and not till mid-December in 2011], Temple Stream begins to freeze. Every day the ice changes, grows, shrinks back, advances.
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And every morning the dogs and I hiked down there to have a look, and hiked down again each evening, just to see what had changed. Ice paved the way: the muddy parts of the path were thrown up in frost castles, delicate keeps and crenellations of dirt and ice that collapsed with a satisfying crunch underfoot. The kingfisher was quietly gone, the mallard Continue reading →
Learning to Surf
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays
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We are in the process of converting and re-stocking are other categories, including ”Our Best American Essays,” which this is a part of. To read this essay in its original form as it appeared in Orion magazine (beautiful painting and all), click here.
LEARNING TO SURF
by David Gessner
Out just beyond the breaking waves, they sit there bobbing, two groups of animals, avian and human, pelicans and surfers. As they rise and fall on the humps of water, the pelicans look entirely unperturbed, their foot-long bills pulled like blades into scabbards, fitting like species-wide puzzle pieces into the curves of their throats. The surfers, mostly kids, look equally casual. In fact one girl takes this to an almost ostentatious extreme: she lies on her back on the surfboard, looking up at the sky, with one leg crossed over the other in an exaggerated attitude of relaxation. For the most part the birds and surfers ignore each other, rising up and dropping down together as the whole ocean heaves and then sighs.
Pelicans are particularly buoyant birds and they bob high on the water as the surfers paddle and shift in anticipation. There is no mistaking that this is the relatively tense calm of before, rest before exertion. Soon the waves pick up and the surfers paddle furiously, gaining enough speed to pop up and ride the crests of breaking surf. They glide in toward the beach where I stand, the better ones carving the water and ducking under and cutting back up through the waves.
We only moved to this island town a month ago, but I have been here long enough to know that those who pursue this sport are guided by a kind of laid-back monomania. Each morning I bring my four-month old daughter down to the local coffee shop, and each morning the talk is of one thing. It isn’t only the southern lilt that is new to me, but the surfing lingo. The ocean, I’ve learned, is always referred to as “it.”
Classic Bill: “Into Woods”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays
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Dave and Poppy, October 12, 2011
Gardening one day in the spring of 1992, first year in Maine, I looked at my dirty and freshly blistered hands, and thought of my days in construction. Idea for an essay. I wrote the words “my hands” on a seed packet and the packet went into the ideas folder. Another idea I’d had was to devote Saturday mornings not to the novel I was working on (eventually to be The Smallest Color) but to shorter work. I went into the ideas file–a bunch of paper scraps and napkins and coasters and pulled out that seed packet. The piece didn’t start out being about my father and Continue reading →
Royal Visitor
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays
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As the best writers in the world, Dave and I wanted to be sure visitors to Bill and Dave’s could easily find and comment on our work. So our web designer, Randy Skidmore of Subpar Design, has set up the Bill and Dave’s “Our Best American Essays” page, formally static, so that we can post work old and new, and readers can respond. I’m going to launch the new capabilities today with “Royal Visitor,” which I’ve read at a a number of public events and which appeared in Louisville Review #62. I also posted it on my old Down East blog. It’s my answer to the FAQ about the writing of memoir: what if there’s material from your life you really can’t use? The answer in this case is one word: metaphor. Continue reading →
