[Which brings us to the exciting conclusion. Summer ends, and everyone’s future is in flux. The cottage has been restored, Esterina has been survived, but what else? There’s not much summer left these days. SB SM]
Deer Island
Shea is having a morning cup of tea, reading the Boston Globe, and the morning news on television is on in the background. It’s a warm day in late September, the kind you have to cling to if you want to make it through the winter.
Her attention goes exclusively to the television when a familiar face appears on the screen and she hears:
“At a press conference yesterday a group of Wampanoag Indians, led by Chief Joe Liquordup produced what they say is documentation to a claim to Deer Island, site of the state-of- the-art sanitation facility completed in the year 2000. According to Liquordup, the land was forcefully taken from the Wampanoags in 1685, in violation of a treaty signed just five years earlier, that gave them the land in perpetuity for use as a burial ground.”
Cut to Joe: “We just want what is lawfully ours. We want our property and our dignity restored.”
Back to announcer: “The group will march on Deer Island later today to perform ritual dances to honor their ancestors. Officials of the Wampanoags would neither confirm nor deny that they plan to open a gambling casino on Deer Island. This is Cynthia Tidwell-Kant reporting live from Deer Island.”
Shea smiles, makes the finger-wiggling gesture and says aloud to no one “So we were your warm-up act, the shakedown cruise. Say hi to Artie.”
Shea says this because Artie is at this moment enroute to Deer Island. Inspired by Sandy Beach’s latest forecast in The Boston Globe he has driven north of Boston to fish some recommended locations. He is running out of summer. He hasn’t achieved his goal of catching a legal striper, and within weeks the fish, most of them anyway, will be heading to warmer water.
He leaves early enough to beat the rush hour traffic and takes the Ted Williams Tunnel onto Route 1A. He goes past Logan Airport and drives through the cramped streets of East Boston. After years in L.A. with its endless freeways, access roads, and on ramps, this ethnic potpourri seems otherworldly. “Where are the fast-food chains?” he wonders.
He turns onto Shirley Street, following a sign to the Deer Island Sanitation Facility. East Boston morphs into Winthrop- By-The-Sea, a Victorian relic that seems getting ready to be rediscovered. It’s oddly familiar to Artie. At the age of ten or so, he would occasionally accompany his Uncle Bull and his cousin Cuzzin on Bull’s trips to the fried food emporiums. In addition to Howard Johnson’s and Dunkin’ Donuts, Bull sold his Gordon Filtrons to Mom & Pop drive-ins and clam shacks. It’s déjà vu for Artie. He’s cruising streets that he cruised, perhaps once, more than forty years ago, igniting small and well-buried images and emotions with each passing block.
He begins to catch glimpses of the ocean in between the converted cottages. Every inch of ground has been paved or built upon, like a larger Indian Mound. Artie is a South Shore kinda guy, with a South Shore orientation towards the landmarks of Boston Harbor. He feels as if he is on the wrong side of the world. All the landmarks are there-the Prudential, the Custom House, Long Island Bridge, Boston Light-but in reverse frame. And thye seem larger.
Deer Island, like most of the islands in Boston Harbor, is a whore to humanity, with a colorful, checkered past featuring great storms, heroic characters, despicable villains, and unspeakable beauty.
Islands and humans typically have wary relationships. Islands, for the technically-minded, are pieces of land surrounded by water. They are beautiful, romantic, idyllic and historically exploited worldwide. Islands are where society puts things that need to be contained. Islands, for instance, are good places to put convicts, because the sea saves the work of building fences that never work quite well enough.
Diseased people, too, are good to put on islands, as well as the deformed, the impoverished, the insane, unwed pregnant mothers, and the eccentric of all varieties and flavors.
Islands are also good place to stage the forbidden, the societal definitions of which change from decade to decade. Prostitution, gambling, prize fighting, cock fighting, and dog fights are all activities more suited to islands than downtowns, and all, at one time or another, have thrived on the islands of Boston Harbor.
Hm-m-m. Gambling.
Islands are also good places to dump any of society’s waste, whether it is of the excremental variety or the truckloads of dirt from The Big Dig. Islands are home to garbage and shit.
The ecosystems of islands are fragile and easily altered. From the shoreline at Indian Mound, the islands of Boston Harbor looked wild, exotic, untouched by human hands. Now,
Artie has learned, they are quite the opposite.
Deer Island’s has been so thoroughly blasted to smithereens that there is no telling what it was like originally. The first things to go were the trees. Those early English colonists loved to denude the landscape. After stripping the wood, they would bring grazing animals, generally sheep, to make sure the forests stayed away. They also, wittingly and otherwise, introduced species like rats and cats, that thrive on the island to this day. Deer Island, because of its proximity to Boston and ease of access, has been perhaps the premier waste repository in Boston Harbor. It is now connected to the mainland by a causeway. As the residents of Indian Mound have learned, the umbilical to the mainland comes with its own price.
Artie parks in a small access lot. He puts on his waders and selects flies for the day. He walks towards the eastern side of island. It’s mid-afternoon on a perfect day. His plan is to spend a few hour scouting, then to start fishing approximately two hours before the low tide at 5:46 pm. The days have grown shorter, and it will be approaching dusk. The water temperature, he notes, is almost ten degrees cooler that it was in mid-August.
He enters the water near an exposed mussel bed on the south side of Deer Island. The rocks are round and slippery, coated with a greasy moss. In front of him, only a mile away, is Logan Airport, with two active runways, and planes stacked up as far as the eye can see. He watches a Lufthansa 747 touch down, followed by a colorful jet from Southwest, then Emirates.
“Welcome to Beantown,” he mutters.
He releases his fly and tries a few short casts, then strips out more line and begins working his way out one step per cast. It will take him about thirty minutes to work his way out to the end of the exposed point. This will put him at the furthermost point at dead low. He will then work his way back on the incoming. He’s just exploring, but might as well have a line in the water.
A cargo ship, decks piled with colorful containers, seemingly close enough to touch, passes before him, heading for the open ocean. Destination unknown, although Artie can read the home port of Liberia on the stern. He has to jump to avoid being swamped by the wake. Numerous other small craft are playing about, as everyone wants to cling to the last gasp of nice weather. The white sails contrast gaily with the blue waters, while the distant skyline is settled in shadow, backlit by the descending sun.
Impressed as he is by the panorama, Artie is thinking like a fish. There are birds about, but nothing is actively working the surface. Artie can sense stripers lurking just beyond the drop off to deeper water. “These guys need something to wake them up,” Sandy Beach tells him. “They’re fat, dumb, and happy from gorging all summer. Try a Crab Gurgler and make as much noise as you can.”
The Gurgler is a surface fly that plows through the water with the grace of a drunk Bruins fan. “What I don’t understand,” says Artie, “is how a Crab Gurgler can work. Crabs are creatures of the bottom. A crab on the surface makes no sense whatsoever.”
“That’s not true,” says Beach. “Blue crabs, for example, do some of their feeding on the surface. Around here we’re more likely to find calico crabs, so stop arguing with your guru and tie one onto your line. We have a bass to provoke.”
Artie can’t see it, but several hundred yards behind him, the view blocked by a steep slope of granite blocks and a seawall built to fend off the North Atlantic, rise the massive “eggs” of the wastewater treatment plant. Here more than one billion gallons of water containing the body wastes of more than two million people passes daily. The sewage arrives through four massive tunnels, more than one hundred feet underground. Pumps lift the sewage into primary treatment clarifiers where scum is removed from the surface by giant skimmers and sludge that settles at the bottom is pumped out for removal to a landfill.
The remaining liquid is then pumped into one of the twelve, 140 foot tall egg-shaped anaerobic digesters, where additional organic matter is consumed through a biological process that mimics the fermentation that occurs naturally in the stomach, or the brewing of beer! After “digestion” what remains are methane gas, carbon dioxide, water, and solid organic by-products. The methane is burned to provide power for the plant. The solids are barged to a plant not far from Indian Mound where it is pelletized into a fertilizer product. The carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. The water is sanitized with sodium hypochlorite, then dechlorinated with sodium bisulfite before being discharged into a 24 foot diameter, 100 foot deep tunnel that runs 9.5 miles out into Massachusetts Bay.
Nine point five miles!
The digesters dwarf the score of Wampanoags beating drums and dancing at their base. Artie hears them before he sees them as he works his way up the shoreline. The dancers are greatly out- numbered by onlookers, most of whom are carrying cameras. A tiny Joe Liquordup, wearing his full headdress, is surrounded by people asking questions and taking notes, among them Cynthia Tidwell-Kant. Artie shakes his head, “Goodness … gracious … great … balls …of … fire!, he says aloud to no one.
Cast, step, cast, step. Artie feels his way along the slippery bottom. He is in water that comes just over his balls, which is how he knows that the temperature is ten degrees cooler than a month earlier. “I am blessed,” he says “to be living in this world of fish.”
A United jet, laden with businessmen, streams in from Chicago, followed by an Aer Lingus 707 from Shannon. A party boat, with a live Dixieland band, approaches. Its top deck is heavy with Japanese men wearing identical dark suits who are doing their collective best to drink too much. The boat comes so close that Artie thinks he can reach it with a perfect cast. The people on board wave and shout in Japanese. September is Boston’s busiest time. The students return. Baseball transitions into football. The nice weather is on borrowed time.
The tide is now dead low. There is only an instant of stillness, then he feels the current moving in the opposite direction, pulled by the moon. He is on plan. He begins to fish the opposite side of the bar. Step, cast, gurgle, gurgle. He is buoyed by the spectacle before him, the birds and planes overhead, the boats on the water, the striped bass just below, the people in the skyscrapers shitting and pissing, their wastes passing many feet beneath him enroute to sanitization and the 9.5 mile flush into the Atlantic.
Within the next few seconds several important events take place. A 42 inch striped bass approaches Artie’s Crab Gurgler, its gaping mouth seemingly wide enough to engulf Deer Island. Artie sees it perfectly. A commuter ferry passes by, its occupants deep in thoughts of workaday events and waiting martinis. And Artie steps into a hole. Although the hole is less than two feet deep, it completely upsets his balance. Just as he feels the first desperate flight of a fish attached to him by the thinnest strand of transparent line, his feet lose contact with the bottom and there is water everywhere-in his eyes, in his nose, in his lungs, and in his waders. He hand sets the hook just before submerging. As he goes down, he hangs on to his fly rod and inhales a lungful of salt water.
The wake from the commuter ferry hits, the camera spins, there are bubbles everywhere. The waders are filled with water. He can’t move. He still clutches his flyrod.
Now, there is an abrupt cut, as if the director doesn’t mind you being momentarily confused.
Artie is, without explanation or warning, sitting on the granite riprap that lines the southern shoreline of Deer Island. Even though it is dusk, the blocks retain the warmth from baking in the sun all day. He’s dry and tranquil. Next to him is the woman he met on the mudflats near Indian Mound who introduced him to fly fishing.
“Hi Arthur. You’ve gotten pretty good at fly fishing.” She’s casual, inviting. Artie’s habit is to quickly assize woman for sexual desirability, but Cassie is equal parts next-door, apple pie, and distinguished mentor. But, curiously, sexy, too. Artie knows he should be confused, but he’s not. He still has his wits.
“I don’t know about the ‘fishing’ part, but I’m definitely better at the ‘fly’ part. I had a good teacher in Sandy Beach.”
“A teacher is only as good as the student’s willingness to learn. Looks like your’re in a bit of a pickle,” she says, gesturing to the water.
Artie looks out to see himself struggle to his feet, his right arm holding his bent fly rod high. He’s hacking violently from the ingestion of sea water. Just as it looks as if he will reach vertical, another wave from the ferry knocks him below the surface again.
Artie looks to the woman. It’s Cassie, right?”
“That’s right. Cassandra Arthur, or just Sandy.” She offers her hand. Artie takes it numbly. “Are you familiar with the mythological Cassandra?” she asks. Artie studies her face, radiant and inviting. “Something to do with the Trojan horse?”
She laughs. “I’ll give you partial credit. Cassandra was blessed by the gods with the ability to foresee the future, but equally cursed by the same gods who then made it so that no one would believe her. There’s more to it, but that’s the executive summary, because you don’t have time.”
“And why’s that?”
She points to the water. Artie sees himself flailing to find his footing, gasping and choking, but still holding his fly rod. “You’re drowning, in case you’ve forgotten. Here are your options:
- Hang on to the fish. It is a legal striper, by the way.
- Drop the rod, get out of the waders, and try to save yourself, or
- Stay here on the rocks chatting with me.”
“Are you an angel or something?”
“Question time is over, Arthur, time to decide!”
“What if …?”
“No, Artie, no ‘what-ifs.’ What if it’s a dogfish, not a striper, what if you get in a car accident on the way home, what if they never find your body. No more what-ifs?
Shea has prepared a late dinner, knowing Artie will be late. But high tide was at 5:45 pm, he’d be done by 7:45, and it was now pushing 9 pm. She’d watched the 6 O’Clock News, and when it showed Cynthia Twiddle-Cunt interviewing Joe Liquordup, damned if the small figure of a fly fisherman couldn’t be seen in the background!
She has lit several candles and placed them on the outdoor picnic table. Why hasn’t he called? She knows enough not to expect punctuality from a man who goes to the sea in search of fish, but there comes a time when it is too dark to fish. Maybe he hooked up with Joe and Cynthia and went out for a drink. Maybe the traffic is bad on the Expressway. She blows out the candles and tries to distract herself with a book. She’s now two hours worried.
When she finally sees headlights from on the front porch it is past ten. Artie, or the police.?A near naked, bedraggled Arthur Gordon staggers into sight. “Omigod,” screams Shea racing towards him. “What happened to you?”
A hypothermic Artie spent almost an hour in the truck with the heater going to get his body temperature back to normal. Yes, he saw the Wampanoags, even Joe. They marched by while he was shivering in the truck. He lost his rod. A giant striper is dragging it around Boston Harbor. Yes, I’m kidding. I’m sure the leader broke. He almost drowned in three feet of water. Do you know about the Trojan Horse? The story comes out in incoherent spurts, complete with jets, ferries, skyscrapers, giant bass with gaping mouths, and a woman now revealed as Sandy Beach.
“Be quiet,” says Shea. “What matters is that you’re here. What matters is that you are safe.”
Elaine, it’s Artie. Yes, I’ve decided. I’ve thought through the independent route, but whenever I think of having to raise millions of dollars, I get sick. Let’s sell to Spielberg and be done with it. We need at least six million dollars-two for the government, one for you, one to blow on Cuzzin’s restaurant, and two to get me through the rest of life. Do your best.