My Retreat Journal
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Fixing the hot tub during the blizzard
Tuesday January 21
The hot tub guys came out tonight during the blizzard. Dave Rotman was visiting and he talked them into it and at first they seemed to enjoy the whole adventure. I brought them two Harpoons and hung out for a little while. But it turned out they had to work in the crawl space under the tub and they were soon soaking wet and, not long after, their clothes were frozen.
At least it was for a good cause. “Not wind nor sleet nor snow…” The service they rendered is just as valuable as the post office’s. By morning I will be soaking in near boiling water as the snow continues to fall.
Snow has been a theme here since I arrived on Cape Cod on Saturday. Saw the second owl of my life on Monday, the third on Tuesday up in a tree. That bird flew over to sit atop an osprey nest that sat atop one of those blue greenhead/mosquito boxes on the marsh. I was only eight yards away and after the bird flew off I asked Dave to take a picture of the nest so I could have the details needed to write about it later.
One of the photographers with a ten-foot long lens said, “That’s an osprey nest,” thinking we thought that the owl had just built the thing for the winter.
Thanks, dude.
Uncle David
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Monday was my first day alone on Cape Cod and my plan was to go on a quest for the Snowy Owl. But then life intruded and another quest was necessary first. I learned—through Facebook no less—of the death of David Sears. I decided the owl could wait, and instead went for a walk to a place that I’ve known all my life as the Sears Beach. Oddly, I had spent the morning working on a Cape Cod novel I’ve been writing for over thirty years, and had revised a scene starring a fictional version of the 40th birthday party that David and my father threw for my mother. The fictional David was fully in his element during that party, driving his and my father’s boat from the harbor, anchoring it off the shore of his beach, swimming in to oversee the building of fires and cooking of lobsters and, of course, the grilling of meat. Back then grilling was a relatively minor activity, not the magnificent obsession it would become later when multiple grills would blossom in various corners of the deck. David, of course, was in the center of it all, obvious master of the house, but he was also a kind of inspired servant for the rest of us, making sure we had just what we needed, be it meat or fish or booze.
Even when someone you know dies it is hard to break out of the narcissistic hamster wheel of your own thoughts. But as I walked closer to David’s beach and house, dipping through the wind break of the dunes and following deer tracks in the conservation land that I used to call, in my fiction, “the land-in-between,” I turned my mind toward David. I remembered one game of craps in his house that went until two in the morning, with David and my father staying, and playing intensely, until the very end. Over the years I lost more than I won as a craps player, but that night I would end up partly funding a trip to Europe. David was a great sport and while he might curse when he lost, he did so comically, with no meanness. He and my father had a unique relationship. They seemed to communicate in a special language that didn’t involve much actual talking. Drinking was a bond, of Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Epicure’s Lament” by Kate Christiensen
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Kate Christensen
Hugo Whittier, protagonist of Kate Christensen’s beguiling novel The Epicure’s Lament, is an incorrigible cad to rival any similar miscreant in recent American literature. Hugo is not a criminal exactly, unless we are talking about moving through life without the slightest regard for the basic laws of social niceties. What he is, is brutally honest, without artifice or any semblance of regard for the feelings of the various targets of his invective. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: John Lane
Bad Advice Wednesday: Toss the Noodle at the Wall
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Snow and Snowys Part II
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The snow has started in earnest now. Just got back from West Dennis beach where I watched a snowy in a tree. They are such a vibrant white that they shine out against the pale landscape, but if we get the expected snowfall the bird’s camouflage will be working again tomorrow.
From the tree it flew to its next perch, pictured below. After it flew off again, I asked David Rotman to take a picture of the nest from up close so I could write about it later. A guy nearby thought that we thought it was the owl’s own nest. “It’s just an osprey nest,” he explained to me.
The Snow Owl
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I am back on Cape Cod (“where I belong” are the next words that spring to mind.) Saturday was my first night here and when the light shafted down on the beach and bog after a day of rain I fell right back in love. Color and light like nowhere else (except maybe Iceland, where I looked out during a stopover on a flight to Europe and swore I was in East Dennis). My goal here is to, in Melville’s words, “take a book off the brain.” It has been a long time since I have spent full days writing to the exclusion of all else. It isn’t easy–this morning was a bitch until I had a “formal” breakthrough–but it’s undeniably great. I was worried I might go crazy being here alone, and while I still might, I am excited about the big writing days ahead. My companion in all this is Buddy, who I am dog-sitting for.
While writing is my top priority here, I thought it would be nice to have a complementary quest. I’ve always loved quest books where the quest is never quite completed. The Snow Leopard comes to mind. And since I had heard there were snowy owls here, I decided that I would not just write a book but see an owl. I had seen one once before on my beach off of Sesuit Harbor fifteen years ago. It was just sitting there in the sand not ten feet away from me, an ambassador from the arctic.
So today I set out after a morning of writing, binoculars in hand. But the thing about quests is that they are supposed to be difficult, sometimes to the point of being impossible. My quest for the next three weeks will be a failure I’m afraid, not because what I sought was unattainable, but because it was too easily attained. What do I mean? Well, here are the results from day 1 at West Dennis Beach:
Getting Outside Saturday: The Garden Keeps on Giving (a photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Purple Peruvian Potatoes
Guest contributor: Katherine Fritz
Bad Advice Wednesday: Why, Thank You Sir. I Do Have Great Tits!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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I was walking along the side of a road in rural Maine, on a hot July day. A rusty pickup truck, its rattle announcing its presence before the man in the driver’s seat became visible, slowed as it approached.
“Hey, big ol’ titties!”
I stood there, shocked, as the car sputtered off into the distance. Not because of what had been said. Because I had spent years living in a big city and it suddenly occurred to me that this was the first time in weeks that something like this had happened. Continue reading →
Howling with the Trickster: A Wild Memoir Part I
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Coyote by Hadley (a couple of years ago she wants me to add)
PART I. TRICKSTER IN THE CITY
Here is how it begins:
I am driving from Cambridge to Cape Cod to get my last load of belongings, my final trip before our move to the city. I am resolved to make this move, despite some apprehension. The sun is out and the snow melting when I start the drive, but by the time I reach the bridge at the canal the clouds have bulked up, and fifteen minutes later I am in the midst of something just short of a blizzard. Right after exit 8 the car in front of me slows and I slow to see why. There, by the side of the road, stands a beautiful black and gray coyote in its full winter coat. The coat gives it the illusion of great bulk, so that an inexperienced observer might think it a wolf. Snow swirls around the animal as it waits patiently at the very edge of the highway, waiting for a gap in the traffic to cross. I glance to my left, the north, toward the woods that are its destination. Then, before I pass, I get one last look at the coyote’s eyes. They shine orange. They are intelligent, watchful, intent.
It is that glimpse of the eyes that scrambles something inside me. Before then I had resolve, plans, deadlines. But the eyes introduce uncertainty. Somehow they change everything.
Guest contributor: Michael McBride
Getting Outside Saturday: Flying in Alaska
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Michael McBride
The throttle moves smoothly forward with the pressure from my left hand, as my right hand pulls the control stick back between my legs as far as it will go. The engine roars like a startled lion as it advances to twenty-three hundred rpm, and the floatplane lunges forward across the still surface of the remote mountain lake. Continue reading →
