[Remember: If you’ve missed part of Stripah Love, or want to refresh your memory, the entire book is posted and available from the landing page on silverbackdigest.com SB SM]
Chapter 5 The Rising Tide
Think Like a Fish
Sandy Beach’s Fishing Forecast for June
The spring brings some of the strongest tides and some of the best fishing. If you are a newcomer to fly fishing, you will do well to spend some time thinking about, and watching, the tides.
There is no visible signal, no ringing of the bell to the changing of the tides, but the fish know when it happens and whet their appetites accordingly. On the high tide, this works to the advantage of the bait fisherman, the chunkers, who throw out a chunk of mackerel or pogie on a hook and hope for the best.
The changing of the low tide, however, belongs to the fly fisherman. If you have a chance, observe the tide change before you actually fish it. Look for fish. Sometimes you can see their tails as they dig through the mud, looking for crabs, worms, or clams. Sometimes they bulge the water from under- neath. Sometimes they make the surface “nervous.” Sometimes it’s the baitfish who break the surface, chased by the bigger fish. Cruising fish will create a wake that is visible, especially if it’s calm.
A good pair of polarized sunglasses will help, but there are also observation techniques that equal parts training and meditation. Let you eyes go out of focus and be aware of the perifery. Check the current, check the wind. Now wade, one step at a time. Small steps. Get your breathing aligned with your steps. Be aware of what is happening all around you. Gradually, you will become sensitized to anything that disturbs this wholeness. You will notice ghostly shadows as stripers pass over sandy bottoms. What you are looking for is something that doesn’t belong in the picture. It’s that simple.
Is it a fish or is it a dream? The only way to know for sure is to cast your fly.
From Think Like a Fish by Sandy Beach
1955
History has recorded little about Indian Mound. Native Americans of the Wompatuck tribe used it as a summer resort, a place to stay cool and to enjoy the bounty of the sea. They lived there barefoot and near naked, much as Artie remembers his own summers. Around Labor Day the tribe would pack up and head inland where there were more permanent structures and timber to use for fuel. Piles of clamshells, arrowheads, and a few human bones were discovered in the excavation of foundations.
As the English colonists arrived, the natives were pushed off into the hinterlands of the north and west, leaving The Mound to the seagulls and razor clams. For several generations it was part of the extensive estate owned by the descendants of John Adams and remained wild and undeveloped. When the farm was split up, the purchasers all had the same thought-to carve it into postage stamp-sized lots and sell them to the burgeoning masses spilling out of South Boston, the North End, and Dorchester.
Artie’s father and uncle knew about Indian Mound from duck hunting expeditions. Even though you could see the venerable Custom House across the water (still can), Indian Mound still felt wild and free. A trip from South Boston, all seven miles of it, took the better part of a day. The last hundred yards were across the mudflats. At high tide you were shit out of luck.
The Gordon bothers and relatives bought a total of eight lots. They built themselves a little duck hunting camps, one of which became the cottage that Artie is currently trying to salvage. Within a decade there was a burgeoning village of these camps. The camps were painted into cottages. Flowers and shade trees were planted, and a community was born.
But this community was unique in that it focused around play. Indian Mound stood apart from the nearby neighborhoods of Hough’s Neck, Wollaston, and Merrymount which were more straightforward extensions of the Boston sprawl. Because it was isolated by the ocean twice a day, you could put your workaday worries behind on the Mound. It was permissible, encouraged even, to be fanciful. Although the residents of the Mound were not wealthy, they adopted many of the trappings of the gentile. There was a celebration on the Fourth of July, with a costume parade, races, games, a bonfire, and potluck dinner to open the season. A corresponding one on Labor Day brought it to a close. Every Friday night brought an excuse for the Indian Mound residents to get together. There was an annual Lobster Dinner, a Bean Dinner, The Clambake, Gentleman’s Dinner, and a Potluck. Wednesdays were for the Bridge tournament. Once a year the men played penny ante poker.
The Indian Mound Yacht Club was more tradition than a reality. The men built a dock for launching the small sailboats that they raced Sunday afternoons and Tuesday evenings. The IMYC staged evening soirees with dancing on the beach and floating candle lanterns that bobbed romantically with the rhythm of the waves.
A Community House was built, complete with tennis court. This necessitated tennis tournaments, and a tennis ladder, and, subsequently, ferocious competition, Indian Mound-style. No one wore tennis whites or other trappings of the rich and privileged. Artie won a tournament for his age bracket playing barefoot and wearing the same bathing suit that he wore every day of the summer. Dead tennis balls were the rule more than the exception, as errant shots inevitably landed in the wet salt marsh. No matter, the balls were equally dead for both players.
At dawn and dusk an American flag was ceremonially raised and lowered at the flagpole on the waterfront. The honor of this chore was accorded to a young man of the age of passage (twelve or thirteen). Artie, Tubby, and Cuzzin had all had their summers as flag bearers. By the time Liam was twelve, the community had transformed, and the rituals of summer had disappeared.
Labor Day was bittersweet. After celebrating in the morn- ing, everyone packed up and left at once, the time of departure determined by the tide. The sight of everyone walking barefoot across the mud flats, carrying suitcases and boxes, was both the sad end of a magical season and the promise of another.
Artie, ever the filmmaker, saw it through the camera in his mind’s eye:
That will look great on film. Longshots of hundreds of people all walking the same direction on the mud. Then, a fixed camera, about knee- high, as people walk by. How the hell are we going to lay a track on mud? Maybe we can get away with plywood.
Do the costuming up big- men wearing straw boaters and fanciful facial hair. (Maybe I’m getting confused with Victorian. Remember to fact check.) I see women in billowy dresses set against the sea. The overall impression is like a painting of Manet or Monet or Renoir. One of those guys.
The causeway was built in 1955. Everyone was in favor of it. Unanimous. They’d be able to get to the Mound more easily. You could shoot down for a weekend or quick overnight in the spring or fall. You could commute to your job in Boston! In hindsight, you’d think someone would have resisted. You’d think a Cassandra would decry a future without a precious summer, where air conditioned homes and air conditioned cars mean climate-controlled life, where kids would play video games at night instead of sitting by the sea wall counting shooting stars.
Growth and progress were accepted unconditionally in 1955. The first cottage was winterized in 1956. Before that, no human being had ever spent the winter on Indian Mound. By 1960 all but three of the cottages had become full-time homes. By 1975 Artie’s was the last holdout.
By this time, however, Indian Mound had receded into the dim recesses of his past. He was in L.A. now. His folks retired and bought a condo in Florida, coming to the Mound each summer. When he visited, usually for only a day or two in between the demands of his new life as a fledgling film mogul, he spent most of the time bemoaning how built up everything had become. The cottage was the same, but the world around it had changed. To make matters worse, the water quality in Boston Harbor had deteriorated badly, attributable almost entirely to the human waste being dumped into the water via modern “sanitation plants.” You could no longer eat the clams, and the beaches were routinely closed due to high coliform counts. The reason for this was simple. The suburbs were burgeoning and the population collectively needed to pee and poop. Not wanting to bear the responsibility for cleaning up after themselves, they did what human beings do with waste everywhere: They dumped it in the ocean and let the tides deal with it, just as earlier they dumped it in the rivers to let it be carried to the ocean.
Simultaneously, the fisheries collapsed. Hough’s Neck, the onetime “Flounder Fishing Capital of the World” suddenly came up empty. Everyone blamed the factory fishing ships that the Russians and Japanese operated offshore. These ships dragged the bottom, scraping up every living thing, then processing the fish right on board. Breeding stocks fell below mini- mum thresholds. Suddenly, there were no more fish. What few remained couldn’t be eaten because of high mercury content. As with the clams, it was moot whether you couldn’t eat the seafood because it was polluted, or because it was non-existent. With the construction of the causeway, the salt marsh no longer received a twice-daily cleansing of salt water. The chemical balance of the wetland changed entirely. Within a few years strange new grasses were invading the salt hay that had been there for eons. In its place grew Lythrum salicaria, more commonly known as purple loosestrife, and ultimately referred to as the “purple plague.” At first people were delighted at the colorful flowers, but eventually its devastating effect on surrounding plants and animals became apparent.
The causeway brought the automobile, and Indian Mound’s three streets became jammed with cars. The long, thin playgrounds of Artie’s memory became ribbon-shaped parking lots. The dust problem from the dirt roads was solved by paving in 1957. Great. The ensuing noise, clogging, and even speeding problems were worse than the dust. The arrival of cars also meant the end of the spectacle of bare-footed families carrying their belongings across mud flats on Labor Day. Now, there were days when the pavement was so hot that you could not walk to the beach barefoot. The days of the shoeless summer were over.
Boston Harbor, by the late 1970s was an open sewer. Artie still showed up occasionally to visit his parents or to drop off Liam for a stay with Grandma and Grandpa, but Maui and St. Barts were now where he wanted to be.
Perennials
Three weeks have passed, and the cottage has been possum- free. Artie thinks it’s time to turn his energies towards the more civilized aspects of life, such as cosmetics.
Painting. That’s simple enough. Buy a can of paint and a brush. Dip the brush in the paint and put the paint on the wall. Maybe to speed things up, use a roller. He goes back to visit his technical advisor, Atherton, his friend at The Depot.
“Have you prepped?”
Artie hesitates. He couldn’t possibly be asking whether or not Artie had attended prep school. The hesitation is long enough to communicate confusion.
“Have you scraped and caulked?” “Uh, no.”
“Powerwashed?”
“Uh, no.”
“And you say this is an old cottage?”
Atherton takes one of those “You are so stupid” breaths. “An old place is going to have lots of loose paint and accumulated grime. If you paint over it, things will look better for about a minute, but then it will all start flaking off. They key to successful painting is in the prep work.”
“And what do I need to prep?” asks Artie.
“Lots of elbow grease. The old fashioned way is to scrape everything down, sand down the edges of the flaked parts, and fill any holes and gaps with caulk. More and more, however, people are using power washers. This justs directs a high powered water spray that blasts off loose paint and cleans the surface for the new paint. We rent them here.”
“Can they be operated by a dummy? I’m referring to myself.”
Atherton is taken aback by Artie’s openness. “Just point and pull,” he says.
Shea grimaces as her New Age mood music is overwhelmed by the staccato burst of the compressor. Artie points the wand at the cottage and attacks. For the rest of the morning it sounds like the Gulf War is taking place on Indian Mound. Shea goes inside, makes herself a cup of Valerian tea, put two Argentum nitricum under her tongue, and sits it a recliner, an eye pillow and headphone protecting her from the noise next door.
The power washer does a nifty job removing the grime and loose paint. It does an equally good job of removing loose shingles and tatters the screens on several windows. By the time he is finished, Artie has created several more days of work and given himself several new skills to learn.
“I think you’ve sold me defective paint. The wood just drinks it in and it looks like I haven’t even painted. It’s taking me forever, and it looks crappy.” Artie is back with his friend at The Depot.
“And you’re sure you’ve primed it?”
“Yes,” Artie is somewhat indignant. “You’re the one who rented me the power washer.”
“You don’t prime with a power washer, you prep.”
“Priming and prepping are different?” He gets his answer from Atherton’s expression which is asking, “How can someone who can direct a Hollywood film not know how to paint a cottage?
“You know what?” Atherton offers brightly. “You should consider spray painting. It’ll go much faster, but it’s a two person job.”
“I knew you’d have the answer.”
“Just bring your problems to your friend at The Depot. We’re going to whip that cottage into shape if it takes all summer.”
“And a million dollars,” adds Artie.
Two days later, Artie and Liam have hauled all the furniture back onto the front yard. They have masked off the windows with newspaper. They have donned white protective body suits. They are good to go. Shea is back in her recliner with the ear phones and eye pillow. She takes a Melatonin, hoping that assisted sleep will help her survive the commotion.
It is late afternoon with the sound of the sprayer stops. The cottage has been bombed, inside and out, with white paint. Artie and Liam are covered with nearly as much paint as the cottage. Paint is everywhere, on the grass, on bushes, and the floor. Artie and Liam are chortling with joy at all they’ve accomplished. “Look at how much brighter it is,” says an ebullient Artie. “And so clean,” observes Liam.
Shea decides she can no longer live her life in a chair, and goes to practice deep breathing on the back deck.
Here at Nucking Fuff we finish all jobs in one day. That’s right, one day guaranteed. We can make this guarantee because we are so damned efficient. Take painting, for instance. Some people complicate their lives by using different colors. Here at Nucking Fuff we use only white. Plus we use the latest technology, sprayers, powered by electricity. No more time-consuming cleaning of brushes and rollers. We just cover with plastic whatever doesn’t need to be painted and let it fly. You’ll be amazed at what can be covered in a single day.
Arthur and Liam Gordon
The paint dries and Artie removes the masking. He is amazed to discover how un-thorough they were in their prepping effort. There is paint over dishes, appliances, windows, door knobs, light switches. The floor, once a slate grey, now is a Jackson Pollack of white footprints. Artie considers just leaving it as is, but ultimately decides to repaint the floors. It takes the rest of the week to recover from his one day of spray painting.
We don’t cut corners as Nucking Fuff. We paint right over them. All work is done to our incredibly low but inconsistent standards. Forget to remove or cover the electrical outlet? Paint right over it! Doorknobs? They look good painted, plus they still work But it’s best to wait until they dry. Windows can be painted shut, so here at Nucking Fuff, we don’t go near windows with paint. At Nucking Fuff it’s always close-e-fucking-nough.
Artie’s major outside project is to recover what was once a perennial garden but is now a tangle of vines and weeds. He attacks the project the way he attacks everything–with every brand name turf builder, weed killer, and herbicide that The Depot carries. He becomes demonic whenever he starts the weed wacker. He is observed with amazement, amusement, and horror by Shea. Their disagreements have gradually become less barbed and less personal, but not less frequent.
“May I give you a lesson in gardening?” asks Shea politely after Artie has completed an epic frenzy of ejaculatory weed whacking. He is covered from head to toe with flecks of vegetative matter. Artie is frustrated enough at his lack of progress to throw the device into the salt marsh, so he is glad for the break.
“First, you don’t accomplish anything by hacking the weeds into submission. They’ll come right back. Instead, you need to sort out the plants that you do want from the plants that you don’t want. Remove completely, roots and all, the plants that you don’t want and compost them. Later, you can add the com- post to the soil to bolster the organic matter.”
“Whaddya mean?” Artie loads the chip onto his shoulder. After all, he is a Guy, and Guys know intuitively about lawn care. “This is going right over my head. I’m more of a technology kinda guy.
“Come over here.” She waves Artie over to her compost bin. “I put all my raw green vegetable matter in here. I layer it so that it can breathe, and water it to help it decompose. The goal is the break it down to organic matter that can be returned to the soil. That’s what it’s all about-healthy soil. Healthy soil makes healthy plants, and healthy plants don’t have bugs or blights or diseases. It all comes back to the soil.”
Artie looks at Shea as if she is speaking in a foreign language. “Technology gives us Scott’s Turf Builder, and Miracle Gro, and Ortho Weed B’ Gone, and you say I should be sticking with rotten grass clippings? I put my grass clippings in that big, brown Depot Yard Waste Bag and leave it on the street for the trash collectors. I bought all this stuff. I’m going to use it. Man has dominion.”
And, with a yank, the weed wacker whines back to life.
Shea’s thoughts on dedicated tools: Forgive him, Mother Earth, for he knows not what he does. This guy has bought into the American dream, which is that “he who dies with the most toys wins.” For guys the drug of choice is tools. They’ve got to have a separate device for every purpose. My favorite is the leaf blower. Now, there’s a great invention. Tell me what a leaf blower can accomplish that a rake or broom can’t do better and cheaper? I feel sorry for Artie. He doesn’t even realize what a pawn he is in someone else’s game. How can I get the message through to him without making him defensive or belligerent. He’s such a dope!
Liam has a day off and comes down to be a member of Nucking Fuff. The cottage has been cleaned out to the point where people can actually start living there. Artie has invited Cuzzin down for dinner. His plans are simple enough-he is going to steam 4 pounds of clams, melt butter, and call it done. He has plenty of beer on ice. For hors d’oeuvres he serves potato chips.
Artie’s to do list for June
- Call Elaine for update
- Take Liam to Red Sox game at Fenway
- Replace torn screens
- Paint floors
- Revive perennial garden (ask Shea for help)
- Fix leaks in roof
- Invite Meiko for visit