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My mother Joy was a fearless body
surfer and taught me to be one too. There wasn’t a wave we would hesitate to
swim out to in any weather short of hurricane force winds at any point along
the two miles of beach at Biddeford Pool. Stretching out in the clear hollow of
a towering breaker and seeing your shadow appear for a split second on the
sandy bottom just before everything crashes down in a pandemonium of sound and
foam is such a rush. We’d fight through the icy undertows looking for the next
great ride until our feet could no longer feel the sand and our lips were blue
as crabs. But Joy wasn’t just about daring and speed. She had a contemplative
side and was an inveterate explorer of tidal pools with a life-long collection
of blue and green sea glass that will never be surpassed in terms of color and
opaque purity. No raw edges in her collection. Nothing see-through. Every piece
different. Each one perfect.
Her grandfather was an Episcopal
Minister who built the church that now stands on the golf course in what was
just a sleepy fishing village before President Taft decided to make Biddeford
Pool the location of his summer White House. This turned the place into a kind
of secluded resort for extremely wealthy people from Ohio…and us. When my mom
and her brother and sisters were small and August rolled around they’d all pile
into the car in Westport at the crack of dawn for the trip up the old Post Road
to Biddeford. Driving to Maine was a grueling ordeal back then. There were
traffic lights and an endless succession of small town Main Streets to get
through so that by the time they got past the city of Biddeford and were
pointed out the Shore Road, the sun would be getting ready to set and they’d be
ready to kill one another. But once they made the hairpin turn at Fortune’s
Rocks and managed to get the windows rolled down, that first wonderful whiff of
sea air would fill the car and wash away all the road grit and any lingering
thoughts of fratricide. Off they’d trundle down the Stretch Road with the Pool
on their left and the ocean dunes on their right. At the end of the isthmus,
just up the hill and around the corner from Crowley’s lobster pound and
Goldswaithe’s general store, they’d pile out of the car stamping the numbness
from their legs on the painted wooden porch where their grandparents would
welcome them to the Rectory, a modest clapboard house wedged between grand
summer homes out on Bay View Avenue.
In those days the big three-story
hotel maintained a boardwalk that carved a mile-long loop around the point,
which was where the Reverend took his morning constitutionals with
grandchildren in tow. The first side of the loop took them through canyons of
scruffy pines and bayberry bushes offering bright blue glimpses of the little
islands dotting the bay of Maine. When the pathway spilled them into an open
field, the ocean was spread before them on all three sides, walking now
straight towards the spot Mom used to call “The End of the World”. On good days
the pounding surf on the ocean side of the point sent up rainbow mists that
hazed upon their hair and onto the shoulders of their sweaters. As they began
their return to the Rectory, the sun would be just high enough to ripple the
air above the slats of the boardwalk. Tracing through the tall grass, breezes
from the sea bowed the shafts of Goldenrod and sent Queen Anne’s Lace
genuflecting to their feet.
When I was a kid some things began
to change, but Maine was still Maine. The hotel was converted into a Catholic
retreat (locals dubbed it “The Nunnery”) and the boardwalk around the point was
left to rot except for a few splintery sections that remained half buried in
the clumps of sea grass along the inside arch of Little Beach. Gardeners
working for the people living in the enormous mansions that were eventually
built out on the point started dumping grass clippings and kitchen scraps onto
mulch piles that were strategically placed where the boardwalk used to be on
the far edges of the long sweeping lawns. It was a deliberate attempt to
discourage recalcitrant point walkers like us, but that didn’t put an end to
our ritual. We just skirted around the steaming piles of debris determined to
keep the public right-of-way open until years later when my kids were small and
the mulch piles had finally grown too big and the bayberry and the scratchy
beach plum bushes around them had become completely impenetrable, forcing us,
at last, onto the beach for our morning strolls.
I was around ten and my sister Mary
Paul was seven and my older sister Joanie was fifteen when we all took a break
from the beach one afternoon and drove out as a family to Fortunes Rocks. We
wanted to do some sleuthing around a big abandoned stone mansion that was about
to be bulldozed to make way for the dozens of seaside homes you see there
today. When we got to the long driveway of the old estate there was a chain
with a NO TRESPASSING sign blocking our way. We got out of the car and peered
down the drive. Dad wouldn’t go any further, of course, but he knew there’d be
no talking Mom out of it so after some weak protestations, he simply threw up
his hands and drove himself back to the beach.
That left the four of us free to
jump the chain and creep towards the run-down house. Nobody had mowed all
summer so the sun-warmed grass directly around the place was up to our knees
and tickly. Joy suspected the house was headquarters to a Russian spy ring, and
sure enough, when we stepped onto the porch and pressed our faces up against
the dusty windows something moved from behind the pieces of furniture covered
in bed sheets. Or maybe we heard something, but whatever it was it scared the
beach sand right out of our bathing suits and sent us scampering to the safety
of the rocks out on the point.
The red seaweed made the going
slippery but we managed to get to a place where we were hidden from the sniper
hiding behind the curtain in the attic window. Taking cover among the heaves of
sun-bleached granite we looked out across the long arc in the shoreline and
could just make out the Biddeford Pool beach through the summer haze in the
distance. The row of cottages nestled in the dunes along the Stretch looked
like little pieces of ribbon tied to the tail of a kite trailing towards the
grey, box-shaped Nunnery taking flight over the last thin shimmering line of
white sand. Beyond the Nunnery the tree line sloped to the old Coast Guard
Station tower where the rocks at the end of Fletcher’s Neck pointed like a
ghost blue finger out into the ghost blue sea.
Meanwhile, we had a job to do. The
seagulls stirred into flight by our earlier shrieks were settled back on the
water riding the gentle swells along with the bright confetti of the lobster
buoys, while somewhere just below we knew a Russian sub was silently circling. The
sun was hot on our backs as we formulated a plan. It was my little sister Mary
Paul who found the piece of sea glass that just might do the trick. Early that
morning, when we were walking on the beach we passed a nun. We often saw nuns
taking their morning strolls, but there was something a little different about
this particular one. Maybe her habit was a bit askew, or maybe she winked at
us, but in any event she looked like someone who could be relied upon, and sure
enough when Joanie flashed our signal, the earnest sister with the tortoise
shell glasses was at her post on the roof of the nunnery far across the water.
She signaled back a message with her trusty compact mirror: “Coast Guard
Alerted.”
Mom lived the last of her days
sitting in a chair in a place called Maplewoods. It was nice there and for a
while a remote part of her brain could be summoned upon to belt out Sinatra
tunes at the Snowflake Teas, but the old girl–who cheerfully admitted in a rare
moment of cognitive clarity that she had lost just about all her marbles–was
soon running on nothing but the microdots of distant memories. Her eyes grew
good and dulled by a life well spent. One time, even though she couldn’t have
told me what she ate ten minutes ago for lunch or name any of her grandchildren
in the photos hanging on her wall or even remotely comprehend the fact she now
had four great grandchildren, I caught her looking over at her mason jar of sea
glass sitting on the windowsill and could see something bright and clear flickering
across her eyes. Some faint synapses deep inside her clouded brain were letting
in gentle breezes from summers long since passed. She was walking again through
tidal pools. Suddenly, an icy wave came sluicing between the rocks and splashed
white and foamy around her ankles making them ache for a second before sucking
back out to sea over a chattering bed of small glittery stones. Maybe that was
what I saw and remembered too.
“No,” she said to Mary Paul who had
proudly snatched up the piece of glass left behind by the retreated wave, “the
edges on this one aren’t smooth enough yet. Don’t you see? It will work fine
for our signal but we’ll need to throw it back.”
Let some other little girl come and
find it later, when it’s good and ready…
Jono Walker is a writer and book review blogger
who moonlights as an advertising executive and marketing consultant. He lives
in Pennsylvania with his wife Julia, their big weedy garden, a couple of poorly
behaved dogs and his trusty fly rod. Visit his blog at www.jonosbookreviews.com
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