by Skye Davis
I.
When I call Joel, he tells me my name brings back memories of a comic-book
character he admired as a child, Captain Midnight. He also tells me that he had
hoped to have his chores completed before sunrise, but that they rarely are
anymore. He needs to chop more wood, but it’s harder now; in the last ten
years, he’s lost forty pounds of muscle. “So, that’s the state of my life—looks
like we are on the way down,” he says in a soft, amused tone. Then he launches
into long-winded directions to his home. The identifying features I am to watch
for when I get close—brush and boulders. Joel’s driveway is overgrown and easy
to miss from the main
road.
The air is warm for October on Cape Cod. When I pull up, Joel jogs toward me,
until I get closer; then he stiffens, coming to a stop, as a child might. I
reach out my hand and he shakes it, his eyes round.
Joel is wearing a navy-blue sweater with a small hole at his right shoulder and
pale blue jeans. In his eighties, he has a full and stiff grey beard that stops
halfway down his neck. It seems alive, with unidentifiable crumbs sprinkled
throughout. His nails are long, thick, yellow in places, and packed with dirt.
His glasses, however, are spotless—clean enough for me to see my reflection on
the surface of his eye. He’s small in stature, and barefoot. Swelling gums
obscure his few remaining teeth, but what’s left of his smile is enough.
After many years in the army, and more years as a sea captain, Joel eventually
washed up on his family property in Brewster, Massachusetts, where he had lived
as a child. Around the same time, he decided to stop working for a living.
“I’ve never been in line with this society,” he explains. He would only take a
job if it met the following requirements: if it was so interesting that his
curiosity made him take it; if it was just too damned much fun to resist, even if
the money was bad; or if the pay was so much money that he couldn’t say no—“But
it had to be that much,” he emphasizes. At one point, he had a
paper route, just for the fun of it; he also coded computers for a while,
unpaid, simply because he enjoyed it—but neither job stuck.
Instead of working, he sleeps in four-hour shifts, just as he did at sea; up
before the sun to do his morning chores, he will go back to bed at ten AM.
Resembling an elderly version of Tom Hanks’ character in the movie Cast
Away, Joel is happily marooned. He sees every part of the day.
We are standing in Joel’s driveway, or
what used to be his driveway. Now the impeding bushes make it too narrow for a
car to drive through, but it’s a perfect path for a bike—Joel’s only means of transportation. At the
end of the grass passageway is his yard. Objects peek out behind overgrown
strands of grass like predators: rusty wheelbarrows, boats, lanterns, brown
plant buckets, pails of dirty water, broken bicycles and bicycle wheels, a torn
plastic sled, a damaged beach chair, multiple metal trash cans, heaps and
scraps and stacks of wood, an axe, a ladder, tools, carts and various kinds of
netting. Blue tarps are strategically strung above old bikes and naked bushes. Solar
panels are scattered around the yard like bodies.
In the middle of everything stands a cabin. It’s tiny; what his neighbors might
consider a tool shed. A skinny, dark pipe rises out of the roof, releasing
pillowed smoke into the white and blue sky. “This is home,” he says,
affectionately.
The land, tucked in a corner of the town, has been in Joel’s family for almost
three hundred years. The first house, built in 1735, Joel can describe down to
the rafters. He turns his back to the shed, facing a field of tangled bushes,
and sketches his childhood home in the empty air with his finger.
The roof boards were laid vertically over the beams. In the middle of the
1800s, two little rooms were added. The kitchen had a walk-in pantry, and
eventually a screened porch was added to the northwest corner—the porch where he
would sleep during the summer months when he was a child. At the time, there
were no trees in Brewster except for the pine forest that grew behind their
home, which was a rookery for the black crowned night heron. A beautiful
bird with blue wings, this heron makes a barking squawk when disturbed; when he
was a child, the nights were filled with harsh screams and blood-curdling
hollers.
When Joel returned home, he kept everything as it had been when he was young.
He didn’t have electricity or running water. He had a well and a pump outside,
“and it was just fine.” He heated his home with a wood stove, used kerosene
lamps, sometimes gathered road-kill for food, cooking it over a harsh fire, and
at one point had an outhouse built on the property in order to maintain the
local housing code—something he has since given up worrying about. Then, in
2008, the house burned down.
Joel’s family had left
prior to his arrival, his parents opting for a warmer climate, his older
sister—“a different one.” She lives in Indiana and now considers herself a
Midwesterner, a sentiment Joel doesn’t seem to understand. “I’ve never
considered myself this or that, but this is home,” he concludes, his eyes
raised to where the house used to stand, his toes snuggling the same dirt they
had as a child.
II.
Joel stares at the ground, once scorched, before us. The
earth is beginning to find new life; grey, knotted plants lift out of the dirt
like weak flames.
He first left the Cape to attend a small
liberal arts school in Worcester, Ohio—Scottish, Presbyterian. By the end of
his junior year, he didn’t have enough credits for a timely graduation. He was
a biology major, “which in those days was a very soft science,” he says. “There
was no math, there was no nothing, there were a bunch of taxonomists running
around pinning species and genetic names on unknown plants.” In order to
graduate, he had to complete an independent study. He had read about a site in
Arizona, the Aravaipa Canyon, and decided to head out there.
Arizona was incredibly dry. As he drove across the state, he noticed two ruts
traveling across the desert toward a horizon of mountains. “I couldn’t go by it
without going up there,” Joel says. He points to the top of the trees at
the edge of his yard, and they morph into a series of peaks and valleys. The
piles of fall leaves and abandoned projects melt into sand-colored dirt; green,
sharp, desert foliage appears around us. Then, without warning, Joel finds
himself in the middle of a flash flood. “All the sudden … a wave this high is
barreling down the canyon!” I can see the water rise to his knees. But the
flood then ends as quickly as it began. I’m not sure how he escapes. Joel’s
stories seem to last only as long as his memories do, but his details are so
vivid that it’s as if everything he describes he can
touch.
While working on his independent
project in Aravaipa, Joel stayed with Cowboy Fred. He spent his days in the
canyon, recording the species that lived there, and returned to the farm by
dusk, where he discussed shared memories of Cape Cod with Fred’s newlywed, a
feisty lady with red hair who “wore two guns whenever she went to town.” There
was a grapefruit tree by the walk-in freezer, covering the ground with large
balls of produce. I see one in Joel’s hand as he grips the air; it’s the size
of a volleyball. I watch his nails dig into the thick skin, ripping at the damp
bottom of its rind. He can peel each segment away like tape, “The sweetest
thing.” Two girls, Fred’s nieces, sit somewhere behind him, a bench by a barn.
They ignore the scattered fruit, instead sipping on iced tea all
summer.
“At any rate,” Joel says, placing his hands in his pockets. With
this phrase and a toothless smile, Joel humbly dismisses the world he’s drawn
around us. Desert sand sinks back into soil and the world begins to
re-materialize—tarps sprawl blue in the sun, bent bikes reappear, smoke balls
above the trees. “You’re getting cold, I can tell,” he says, shrugging a
shoulder toward his home. We head inside.
III.
As we walk toward the entrance of his cabin, Joel’s feet curve, delicately
wrapping themselves around the strings of thorns pressed into the soil. His
feet seem unbothered, reacting to the sharp spikes the same way they do to cold
stone. “Don’t be shocked,” Joel warns, as we enter.
The cabin is larger on the inside than it appears from the outside, but
crowded. It smells like fire. I stand in the entrance; there’s no room to move
any further. The stench of the burning wood is overwhelming; with every breathe
I inhale a thin layer of smoke. Timber beams stretch above us; gear hangs out
of a ceiling loft. Dirty mirrors and brown paper in chipped gold frames line
the walls, with a few small windows in between. Books and cassette tapes, to
entertain him when he isn’t doing his chores, are stacked high everywhere
possible. A broken clock with birds instead of numbers hangs on a tilt across
from me. Drying clothes droop along a line stretched from wall to wall.
Materials are spread on the flat, low surface to my right—somewhere underneath
them, I imagine, is a bed.
“It’s just a bloody mess,” Joel says, climbing to the center of the room, his
bare feet dodging items. There’s something odd about the fact that he addresses
the chaos, that he cares at all. He settles in the only empty space, which is
about the size of a big square kitchen tile, in the center of the cabin
directly in front of the wood stove. Something is there for him to sit on.
In the left corner, behind the stove, a stack of wood climbs toward the ceiling
like a ladder. As Joel stands, crooked, he grabs the first of a series of lines
that hang above him. They are tied to the ceiling beam and fall toward his
reach, secured by a bowline, a sailor’s knot. The rope holds him in place as he
leans over an unidentifiable pile next to the wood stack. “You can tell
I’m an old seaman, I just grab a piece of riggin’.”
He secures himself, looping his hand in the line, and extends his other hand
toward the kindling, grabbing a wedge somewhere in the middle and tugging at
its edge until it comes loose. He makes his way back to the stove. He does this
twice more; his movements slow, precise, balanced—as if he is somewhere in the
Atlantic and the waves are steep on his bow. He stacks the three pieces of wood
beside his seat.
He sits, turning a black handle on the face of the stove. The glass window
blazes red and yellow; the hinge squeaks as he opens it. He stuffs a block of
wood inside.
After his childhood home burned down, Joel declined all offers from neighbors
to rebuild. The house, in its original form, was what made it home. Any new
building would be just that. Instead, he built a teepee out of local bamboo and
recycled plastic in the middle of his charred land. He had a wood stove with a
pipe that went right through the top of the teepee. He remembers those days
with a smile; if it was cold he knew how to dress. “It was incredibly good,” he
tells me, lining the stove with another log.
He lived there for almost four years, until one afternoon during the winter of
2011. He had just left the tent to collect more wood for the cold night ahead,
“and suddenly WOOSH.” An explosion. The teepee erupted in flames. “The damned
thing burned down,” he says, grunting. The stove’s hinge squeaks as he reaches
for the last of his three pieces of wood. Outside the teepee, there had been a
Coleman gas stove that he had used for cooking. It sat over a large pit and,
due to a faulty switch unknown to Joel, propane fuel had been leaking and
seeping into the soil below his home for days.
An article written by Doug Fraser in the Cape Cod Times explains
the event was reported as a teepee fire. On the basis of that description, the
firefighters could guess where they were going. Joel was known throughout town.
Despite his many housing violations—improper venting or use of space heater or
water heater; lack of electricity or gas; inadequate electrical outlets or
lighting in common areas; failure to restore electricity, gas, or water, lack
of a safe water supply, working toilet, or sewage disposal system; inadequate
locks for entry doors; accumulation of garbage or filth that may provide food
or shelter for rodents, insects, or other pests, or that may contribute to
accidents or disease; and no smoke detector or carbon monoxide alarm—the town
officials looked the other way.
According to his neighbor and friend,
Kate, town officials have chosen to ignore Joel's disregard for codes and
regulations, allowing him to live in the manner that he has preferred. In fact,
when his teepee burned down, some of the town officials helped build the new
cabin for him. He’s often referred to as “the man who lives in the woods,”
or “the man with the beard,” or “the man on his bike.” Yet with the description
also comes respect: respect for Joel and for the old Cape Cod. This peninsula was
his before it was ever theirs.
IV.
Kate
first met Joel twenty-three years ago, when she and her husband moved into a
house down the road from his. Originally from Maryland, Kate was hesitant to
move to Cape Cod, but her affection for her new home grew. When they moved to
the house on Lower Road, Kate was pregnant with her third child. “One
afternoon, I looked out my back door and observed a man with long hair and a
beard walking around my backyard. I wasn't sure what to make of him, so I sent
my husband out to see what he wanted. Rob went out back and began chatting with
Joel, who explained that he was checking the water levels in the creek behind
the house. After a while, Rob came back into the house and announced that,
while he was certainly a character, he did not appear to be someone that was a
threat.”
A
few years later, Kate and Rob ended up buying the property that abuts Joel’s
property, and it was then that she received a glimpse into how he lived. She
admits that “There were a lot of people who cautioned us to be careful of the
hermit that lived next door,” but Kate found that she admired Joel’s
independence: “I thought it was kind of cool that he was living off the grid.”
The relationship grew after Kate found a book about a young boy and his pet
raccoon in her mailbox. “Attached to the cover of the book was a note from Joel
saying ‘with your permission, I would like to share this book with Maggie,’ our
oldest daughter. I was very impressed that he would ask me before just giving
the book to her.” After that, Kate would often stop at the end of the driveway
and chat with Joel when she saw him.
One
time, when Kate and her son were checking their mailbox, Joel was just
returning from running some errands on his bike and there was a dead squirrel
hanging off the edge of his basket. “As Joel and I chatted cordially, my ten-year-old
son just kept staring at the dead squirrel hanging off the back of Joel's bike.
Joel noticed this, gave me a wink, and then turned to Alex and said
‘That's my dinner. Go get your own!’ Needless to say, my son
Alex was horrified at the idea of going anywhere near the dead squirrel.”
According
to Kate, there are a lot of people around town who are a part of Joel's
life. He had a friend, Randy, who worked in Boston a few days a week. Joel
would take care of Randy’s dog on those days, providing Joel with a chance to
eat properly. His other neighbors, Gail and John, are close to Joel. Gail
frequently brings him food, and he spends every Christmas Eve with them.
“Despite the fact that he drives me crazy sometimes, Joel has come to mean a
great deal to myself and my family,” Kate tells me. “He is a very warm and
caring person. He likes to act aloof, like he doesn't care, but that is not
really his nature. He always asks about the kids. When he sees me, he's very
concerned if I look tired or overextended.”
After
the second fire, Joel was turning eighty and once again without shelter. Kate
had seen the smoke coming from Joel's property while driving home and had
offered to let him come to live with them for a few months. Instead, another
one of Joel’s friends, a professional house builder, made a deal with a local
lumberyard: any lumber they couldn’t sell, he would take for free. He gathered
half a dozen people and it took them six days to build Joel’s current
cabin.
V.
Joel
hurries me out of the cabin now, explaining that his friends always gets
nauseated after staying too long. I offer to drive him to the next town over;
there’s a particular local sailboat—a custom Catboat—that he’s always admired
from a distance, and I happen to know the boat builder. He grabs a pair of
sneakers near the doorway. “As you can see, I don’t wear shoes very much, but
just for the owner’s peace of mind,” he says.
Outside,
his face crinkles at the sunlight. We climb down the two steps at the
entranceway of his home, one at a time and together. After making our way to
the bottom, he pauses to say something he’s been holding back: “It seems that I
have cancer.” His eyes squint in the sun as he massages his gut, looking to
name the illness. “What’s your… begins with an R … one of those.” He hooks a
finger in the heel of each shoe, carrying them down his driveway.
We
don’t make it very far down the grass path before Joel stops again by a pile of
solar panels resting at various angles on a metal cart. Some are large, the
size of a window, while others are hardly bigger than a deck of cards. He
adjusts them carefully, facing them towards the sun. We will be gone when it is
at its strongest. “It’s a wonder I’m not blind,” he says, staring into a large
black square. He uses them to light his home and heat his water.
After
Joel completed his independent study in the Aravaipa Canyon, his college let
him go on to his senior year—“I guess mostly just to get me out of there."
Joel lets out a belly laugh, without the belly. Shortly after graduation, he
was drafted.
He
was sent to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, to learn how to be a weatherman. Between
training sessions, the army gave each of them ten days off. They handed
everybody a train ticket, “Even the married guys.” Joel exchanged his ticket
for cash and decided to hitchhike to Worcester, Ohio, to visit a friend from
school.
The
same day, a blizzard came in from Kentucky. He hitched a ride in a truck
heading north, but the storm followed them, becoming progressively worse. Joel
decided to stay with the driver to Detroit. When they arrived, Joel went to the
YMCA and purchased a room for one dollar and twenty-five cents. Marooned, he
decided to buy a car. The next day, in the midst of the squall, Joel found a
used car lot, where he bought a 1941 Chrysler Windsor sedan. It was a wreck,
but the salesman charged Joel $100; “He knew he had me by the short
hairs.” He made his rounds at the truck stops, looking for a large tractor-trailer
he could draft behind and eventually found a driver heading south to Toledo,
Ohio.
The
wind was coming from the west. Joel gestures at the gusts against the frail
window of his sedan. “Within minutes there was a drift this high right across
the road,” he says, flattening a palm as high as his hip.
Joel
followed the truck’s running lights. They stopped for coffee and a piece of
pie. When they got back on the road, the wind direction had shifted, and it was
dark. The heavy tractor-trailer held steady, but Joel kept spinning out, losing
more control with each mile gained. “I couldn’t keep up with him any longer.”
Joel points ahead, and we watch the truck disappear over a hill, into the
dark.
Shortly
afterwards, the sedan stalled. It was about midnight, and the sides of the road
were walls of snow. “Jesus if somebody comes wheelin’ over that hill and
there I am and he’s on ice and can’t stop…” he drifts off, reliving his panic.
Joel
began walking. Eventually he found a house with “one little light on.” A
man came to the door, “A son of a gun, not even in a night shirt,” Joel
recalls, smiling. He owned a gas station nearby. The man wrapped his shoulders
in a heavy leather coat and followed Joel to his car. They pushed the sedan a
mile to the gas station, where he thawed water out of the fuel system. As Joel
describes the man under his car, everything becomes small, the “little fuel
line” and the “little heat lamp”—as if he’s playing with a set of vinyl dolls
from his past.
He
made it to Worcester by six AM. After a nice day spent with an old friend, he
took off and headed back to New Jersey.
VI.
As we continue toward the car, Joel notices me look down at his toes. His nails
are uncomfortably long and the dirt within them seems decades old. “My feet are
the very best part of me,” he explains, stopping again, “Even the physicians at
the hospital don’t know what I’m talking about. I say, ‘Look, you people with
shoes don’t even know how to walk; you walk with your heels first.’” He
demonstrates. “Watch a bear when he runs, he runs first off pigeon-toed—at
least his front paws; they’re like this,” Joel spreads his toes. He explains
the mechanics of the foot, how the first part that touches the ground should be
the outside edge. “If there’s something like a stone or a thorn down there, its
amazing how your foot, without you thinking about it, will automatically shift
its weight so it doesn’t poke a nail up through the bottom.” He holds his shoes
up in disgust. “You just use up a lot of energy flailing these things back and
forth—when you’re barefoot, you’re light on your feet.” As we begin walking
again, my boots feel
heavy.
When I reach for my seatbelt, Joel takes the hint, reaching for his own. He
struggles to match the latch with the plate. I help him. He explains that he
has lost all feelings in the tips of his fingers, that he has no tactical or
olfactory senses left—if he picks something up, he has to look down to see
whether or not he’s holding it. “I can’t do anything delicate,” he
explains.
I ask him about last winter. With record snowfall and freezing temperatures,
I’m curious as to how he fared. It was described in the Cape Cod Times in
March of 2015 as the worst Cape Cod winter ever. Joel, a man whose only
means of transportation is on two wheels and who doesn’t believe in wearing
shoes, responds carelessly, “I didn’t think it was that bad.” His secret: he
doesn’t shovel snow; he just walks on top of it. Eventually, it packs down like
soil. Also, he doesn’t have a commute. As we drive, he points to a road
sign that reads “Route 124.”
He comments, “That used to be just 24. Why go and make it complicated?”
VII.
After eight weeks in New Jersey, Joel was sent to Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Fort
Huachuca lies right on the Mexican border. “Well, the weather in the summertime
is just blue sky and sunshine, day after day—you didn’t need a weatherman at
all.” Beautiful clouds would form over the mountain every afternoon, “little
puffy cumulus clouds.” They would rise, traveling almost six miles into thin
air. When night fell, he watched lightning drill into the tops of mountains,
the bolts of yellow lining the horizon.
Joel and his peers spent their weekends off in Tucson, partying at the home of
Agnes De Mille, the choreographer of the movie Oklahoma; a thespian friend got them the invite.
The musical was being filmed in Arizona for the clouds, Joel explains; Oklahoma
had empty skies: “No mountains there to make orographic winds.”
De Mille lived in a beautiful brick adobe building in Tucson: “You could hardly
tell if you were inside or outside.” There was an irregularly shaped swimming
pool with underwater lights that lit up the Sahara Desert. They spent summer
nights floating in cool water, looking up at stars through the unpolluted
western air. The word “unpolluted” melts out of Joel’s mouth with
longing.
We continue along the route that connects Brewster to Orleans. Thick yellow
lines center dense pavement. Houses emerge along the edge of the road.
“See, there used to be land everywhere,” Joel says. Growing up, he had never
known Cape Codders to be wealthy. They were farmers or fisherman, and they all
lived on large pieces of land inherited from their ancestors. They would have a
metal pail to milk their cow, a field full of asparagus or turnips or potatoes,
and a wood lot near a locust tree where they chopped their way to a warmer
winter. And they shared. “Your neighbor’s cows knew you as well as they knew
anybody—and that’s the way the Cape worked.” As he speaks, the houses we pass
seem to dent the forest like cavities.
“Then the tourists started and people started coming here,” Joel
recalls. “They
really liked certain parts about the Cape, and there were certain things that
bugged the hell outta them.” Things like having to drive down a dirt road
through the woods to get to their house, or the trip to the local general
store: “You could get a can of house paint, a tablecloth, or a loaf of
bread—but you could only get what they had.” The newcomers demanded
supermarkets, pavement on the roads, streetlights at intersections; taxes were
raised and, before he knew it, “the land was lost.”
Joel used to have fifteen acres; now he has two. He used to have goats and
chickens, eggs, milk, and cheese. The goats would walk along the stone wall
that edged his property and play king of the mountain, two of them trying to
knock the third off. They had incredible balance and would roam the land,
feeding on anything that grew green. He had an apple orchard, where his
chickens would range freely, rooting in the apple trees. His dog at the time,
“a St. Bernard divided by two,” would look after them, protecting them from the
fox, hawk, and coyote.
As his land diminished and neighbors moved in, his goats still knew no
boundaries. The neighbors kept finding them on their lawn or in their driveway,
but Joel thought little of it, “People built their houses on my animals’ home.”
Eventually, he was taken to court for animal trespassing, where the judge told
him he had to fence in his goats—“And I says, ‘You want me to fence in the deer
as well? I suggest, your Honor, that if those people don’t like me or my goats,
that they fence us out.’”
He was fined two hundred dollars. The judge complained that he couldn’t fine
him two thousand dollars, due to the law being 250 years old. On the other
hand, the two hundred dollars that Joel ended up paying, he had earned in the
1960’s. In the 1970s, due to inflation, the money he had saved had suddenly
become worthless, “I says, Judge—it’s just like you were fining
me $2000.”
Suddenly, his goats disappeared. He believes the town confiscated them. He lost
his dog to heartworm, something he had never heard of, and his chickens were
picked off slowly. Defeated by the memory of it, Joel sighs.
When we arrive at the boat yard, Joel is like an artist in a museum. He runs the pad of his
index finger along the edges of a boat, his long nails shadowing the woodwork.
He climbs ladders and peeks inside cockpits, cautiously—like a kid hanging over
the edge of a lobster pool. And as he dances his palms over the various hulls,
he relives his days on the ocean.
After his time in the army, Joel attended the University of Washington, where
he tried his hand at oceanography, eventually becoming part of the scientific
staff on a research vessel. He remembers the cobble beaches, the day-lit
nights, and the original whaling boats. He wags a finger at certain thoughts,
as when he tells me it never snows in the Arctic because there’s not enough
water in the air. “It’s a very dry place, it’s a desert,” he says, happy to see
my eyes widen.
He tells me a story about Willie Goodwin, a man he met while anchored seven miles off Kotzebue,
Alaska. Willie, a local fisherman, was returning a salmon that had been tagged
by the research team. “We saw this little Inuit guy, and he’s holding a salmon
in his arms like this,” Joel gestures. “So,
a couple of guys help him up on deck.” As they go to place the salmon in the
freezer, Willie tells Joel he has a walk-in. Joel explains that while other
locals dug a hole in the permafrost to store their fish, Willie dug his
into the side of a hill.
Instead of attending the meeting, where they were to be told the results of
their most recent study, Joel and a friend took “little Willie Goodwin” and
went into the galley, where they sat him down at the table, got the coffee pot
out and stayed awake until two AM drinking coffee and listening to his stories.
“Old folklore stories, ya know, like the old woman that lives at the bottom of
the sea and the battle between the sun and moon.”
Years later, when he was back living on the Cape, he received a phone call. It
was his friend’s voice on the other line: “Willie Goodwin lives!” His friend
had found an article in the New York Times about Willie
Goodwin, Jr.—after four years tracking rockets, he was returning home to
Kotzebue. As he tells me this, Joel catches his breath: “That about blew me
away.”
VIII.
After exploring the boatyard, I realize I’m imposing on Joel’s fourth hour
awake. But when I ask him if he’s tired, he responds, “Me? Get tired?!” He has
a similar response when I ask him if he was ever married: “Oh come on, this
society wouldn’t let me have kids. I knew it wouldn’t work, not the way I did
things.”
When he was young, he dreamt of going to sea. He liked the feel of the helm,
what it meant to handle a boat. “It’s great to get good at,” he explains. Joel
became a captain during his last few years on the west coast. He bought a
“split-rigged” Bristol Bay Alaska gillnetter. “She was a lovely old vessel. She
would roll her scuppers when there was hardly a sea runnin’; she would just
wallow, make everybody seasick.” He fished in every salmon run in Alaska; he
would “knock all over” Puget Sound, British Colombia, the San Juan Islands, and
Vancouver. “All I did was sail,” he says proudly. He quickly points out, though,
that a captain must balance his ego as he does his ship and his schedule—four
on, four off. If you aren’t humble and careful, you can become
overconfident, and too self-satisfied.
He returned to the Cape in the 1960s after a friend of his, Jerry Milgram,
called. “He says, ‘How ‘bout comin’ East?’” He was starting a sail loft and
wanted Joel to be a part of it. Joel bought a VW Bus for two hundred dollars
and drove east. The van was in rough shape, “A light breeze from dead ahead
would slow you down to second gear,” he says, laughing. Joel didn’t last long
at the loft, but Jerry became famous the day America had a clean sweep in the
Summer Olympics: “His boats always pulled ahead.”
Throughout the day, I ask Joel why he has chosen to live life the way he
has—why he never took the well-paid job in Provincetown and bought a car, why
he never rebuilt his home and sprung for a shower. He never has a straight
answer, but instead comes up with another memory, another story. But he does
tell me, after a trivial explanation of his sleeping patterns in college, “You
know why I do things the way I do? Because I don’t have any reason at all not
to.”
In 2011, while biking home from the Brewster library, he was hit by a car. He
went over the hood, his shoulder breaking the windshield. “I feel that first
impact and I’ll never forget it,” he says, circling the cap of his knee with
his palm.
When he slid off of the hood onto the road, he landed on his other shoulder, “Of
course I didn’t have a helmet on—never do.” When he regained consciousness
another twenty feet down the road, pain was extreme: “It’s like your skin is a
bag full of red hot coals, and you are full of thorns and barbed wire.” A black
viscous liquid pooled in the corner of his eye. He wasn’t screaming; he
couldn’t breathe. He compares it to the feeling he had as a child when he would
swim to the bottom of the bay, forcing himself to stay underwater until he
found a moonstone—a rock known for its charming play of light.
When he got to the hospital he could feel them probing him all over, but even
with an X-ray, they couldn’t find one broken bone. Then they sent him up to the
sixth floor. “I had a nice room, toilet to myself—had a bathtub with a handheld
shower and about five big fluffy towels,” he recalls. After he showered, four
nurses pounced on him with gauze to cover up the abrasions. “I told them no,
get away, forget it,” Joel continues. “I’ve known all about abrasions ever since I first skinned
my knee as a kid—I know they heal themselves. They take a little bit of time
because they’ve got lots of skin that they have to grow, but they do it all by
themselves.”
The next day was a Sunday. Breakfast came (“Not bad, actually,”) and then
lunch, but no one came to talk to him about his injuries, and by mid-afternoon
Joel was bored silly. Finally, he shuffled over to the nurse’s station to tell
them he was leaving. A nurse explained that there was a physical therapist
coming. “And I tried to keep a straight face,” Joel recalls. “I told her, ‘I got all the therapy at
home that I need.’”
Joel knew it was going to hurt the next day and that he was going to be stiff,
but morning came and he managed. He walked outside, picked up his brush hook,
and started swinging, swearing a blue streak all the while “because I always
get mad at myself when I do something stupid, and somehow I did something
stupid when that car hit me.” Every day, for four days, Joel hacked away at the
woods. By Friday, he was back on his bike: “The pain was gone.” With these
words, he stares at me, a tear forming on his lower lid, blued by his iris,
fighting the urge to fall.
IX.
We settle inside the car on the way
back from the boatyard, driver and passenger. As we steer along Route 124,
heading back to his property, Joel describes to me the different types of
cancerous cells. In the midst of melanoma, he stops—turning his head to look
out the rear window. “That wasn’t a VW bus, was it?” At eighty-one-years-old,
after his cancer diagnosis, Joel would bike fifteen miles to a doctor’s
appointment—two hours to get there and two hours to get home. The only thing he
had to complain about—terrible directions.
He is not yet sure if he will be doing chemotherapy, exclaiming, “Those buggers
don’t tell me anything.” It occurs to him that he would lose his hair: “That’s
a tempting thought! Not a single soul in Brewster will know who I am if I lose
this mop around my face. If I can lose this bush in front of me here, I bet I
can go all around town and just be a fly on the wall.” He pulls at the strings
of his beard with his nails as we turn into his driveway.
We sit in the car for a while. Joel
stares out of the sunroof at the empty trees. He was in the west when they
began building houses around his property. Neighbors would complain about the
birds with blue wings and their blood-curdling screams in the middle of the
night. Finally, someone stomped into the woods with a shotgun, destroying every
nest he could find. The first night Joel returned, he slept on the screened
porch. He could hear the crickets, he could hear the bay, even the faint motor
of a passing engine—but there was something missing.
He lifts his bare
foot onto his knee. The flat of his foot stares at me.
“Your feet must be tough as nails,” I say. He presses the cushion of his
finger along the curve of his foot, treating it like a foreign species,
something alive and unattached to his own body. “My feet are in good shape,
still soft and beautiful,” he says proudly. “They grow thicker and tougher from
the inside out.” He pulls his foot closer to me, urging me to touch it, wiggling
his hip out of place. I finally do. The skin is cold and stiff but smooth.
He continues, “I guess this is the reason why I live the way I live, you find
out all of these things that nobody else knows anything about—because they are
wearing shoes all the time.”
I
stare again at the foot I have touched. The earth is spread like a map on his
skin. Dirt lines the peaks and valleys; crests of white edge his toe mounds;
brown and green grids mark his heel: a topographic representation of everywhere
he’s been.
Skye Davis recently graduated from Sarah Lawrence
College with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and is currently working as a
Culture Editor for an online media company based in Brooklyn, NY. She was
awarded a work-study scholarship to the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, and her
nonfiction has appeared in WoodenBoat
and Life on the Coast magazines. This
piece is part of a series of profiles featuring Cape Cod locals, shedding light
on the economic and environmental changes occurring on the Massachusetts
peninsula.
