Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [86]
The houseboat had been the only craft of its sort in the harbor, and for good reason; a simple room constructed atop a boat, square and unhappy on the water, it did not seem a seaworthy craft. Unballasted, its boxy shape made it a plaything for any wind, turning and turning in the slightest breeze. I couldn’t imagine anyone living aboard.
Cast up, it was ungainly, elephantine, its green bottom painted with big red lines which resembled ideograms, oddly serene, like a huge Buddhist billboard. The storm tore away part of one wall, as if determined to crack open the unwelcome and unwieldy house.
Just down the shore, a dinghy which belonged to our neighbor, the Italian restaurateur, had also been beached, its cheery red and white centered in a bed of blackened seaweed as if it were the centerpiece of an antipasto. Its green interior (Franco had painted it in imitation of the flag of his mother country) was filled with water, and seemed a sort of marvelous aquarium: above a drift of sand sculpted by ripples, a clutch of sea lettuce floated. Dozens of minnows darted, confused by their sudden containment in this smaller, watery globe. Their world was suddenly green and diminished; they could circumnavigate their entire sea in seconds.
The storm cracked open and upended the containing house, and constructed a new house a hundred yards away, one that contained life more gracefully than the houseboat ever did. House became boat became wreckage, open to tides and fish; boat became the fishes’ temporary house. So the world’s order is constantly open to revision. The day’s lesson was delivered with wit and surprise, as if the sea delighted in nothing more than contradiction and metaphor.
This is the sort of pleasure which makes me want to live here forever. There are few ways to make a decent living here, and urban centers which offer more opportunities are hours away. There is no movie theater, in the off season, and even in season there’s no place to buy a computer ribbon. Town government is, to be polite, antediluvian, a complex, inbred system of rivalries and affiliations, Florentine in its complexity. Every season we must endure the deluge of hordes of tourists, and our own attempts to sell them all the T-shirts and lobster dinners they can consume. We exhaust ourselves in the process, and they exhaust us further, and we become increasingly rude and exasperated by the crowds, uneasily so, since we know how much we depend upon them. No one has fun in August. One can wait in line to buy a stamp, and negotiate a maze of pedestrians, bicycles, and cars rivaling Singapore to get from one end of town to the other.
There are substantially good reasons not to live here, and just when they descend on me in force, something—be it the low call of Long Point Light perched at the tip of the harbor like the Pharos of Alexandria, or the sight of a pair of teenage boys comfortably holding hands downtown, perhaps for the first time in their lives, reminds me why it’s worth it. We’re face to face with a raft of contradictions, both natural and cultural. Here, at land’s end, in the superb setting of this landscape, our gems are the rich possibilities of human love, human pleasures, the splendid diversity and sameness of our longings. It is a place worthy of pilgrimage, where the elements arrange, as they conjoin, small tableaux of miracle and reversal.
Accident
But as the season turns, darkening into a late but raw winter, so do we. Our golden autumn’s gone gray and severe. Our neighborhood, out at the end of town, is empty save for us, the windows of summer houses shuttered tight. The dry canes of the climbing roses rattle, and wind whistles in the wires in the masts of the moored catamarans,