Labor Day Saturday 1997

So we still had all these clams just crying out for walruses and carpenters. So we started calling friends to come gobble them up. You’d be surprised how many people get queasy thinking about fresh clams. Not Jim, however. I don’t know anyone who appreciates good food as much as Jim. Meals at his house are long leisurely affairs where you sink down into the process, fill your head with aromas, and by the time the food hits the table you are floating in gustatory nirvana.

It was late morning when we called. Jim was up for clams and...

“Going sailing?” he asked. Sounded like a deal to us.

You may remember that it had been foggy and raining most of Friday, and the weather was still unsettled. Wind swinging through easterly quadrants, blossoming piles of cumulus rearing up out of the west. I went out to do my daily draw while we waited for Jim, just up the road at Fenimore’s farmstand, and had to cover my works a couple times when it spat on me lightly. It would look like clearing, then another batch of blueblack buffaloes would rumble over the horizon.

As usual folks stopped to look over my shoulder, gossip, make deals. A painter friend from Yarmouth who’d just been to a local wedding, proposed we go hunting for faces along the waterfront (he’s a portraitist). He was raving about the golden light along the bay shore, under all this lower. A local storeowner stopped, and laughed when I pulled a color xerox of her store out of my bag and presented it to her. Passing friends waved and beeped. The woman minding the stand came to check my progress, and was amused that I was featuring the pickup around back. By the time all was said and done I’d been at it a couple hours when I packed up.

Jim was already at our house, chewing on the ed bone with Peggy. School starts with a vengeance on Tuesday for both of them. They were undressed for hot weather, which it was, and when I suggested we might like jackets, Jim demurred.

“I won’t get cold,” he prophesied. We put cold juice into the thermos instead of the usual hot tea.

I suggested we might get wet, but nobody seemed to care, or even believe it. We’ve hardly been out in the little sharpie at all this summer, it seems, and these teachers wanted to soak up every last dreg of summer. Jim in particular has been all wrapped up in settling into his new house and barn, and we haven’t taken our annual excursion on the wind.

Not that we weren’t warned. Getting into the skiff under Jimmy’s ramp, Jim and I nearly upset, and Jimmy laughed aloud. He’s seen me perform before on an upside down day, and lets me keep my boat there as his cost of admission. Balancing a large man in a tender skiff IS good sport. Then getting all the dogs and kit aboard sharpie was another act. Bagel is so old and lame now that he regularly balks in mid scene and CC jumps back and forth in confusion. This time we have to clamber over rafted boats, and I vaguely wonder why everyone isn’t out on a holiday weekend. But eventually we all get settled, and wallow downriver.

After we get the load balanced to suit the dogs, we throttle up and slice a wake toward the bay. The cardinal flowers and Joe Pie weed punctuate the shoreline with purple and red touches, and there’s an occasional splotch of color in the trees. We’ve definitely turned the corner to fall.

Lughnasa, the first of August, marks the height of summer in these latitudes, and I always felt that the Maine Festival, which happens on that weekend, was the highwater mark of the hots hereabout. The old Celtic festival was the time to begin eating the new crops. Dig new potatoes, pull garlic, harvest blueberries (bilberries on the other side of the pond). Our beans come ripe, and the crickets appear, start their song. It always has a touch of the dirge for me. The last fiddling of summer.

We didn’t get any beans this year. David the market boatist says a mite gottem. He nuked his with something “organic”. And the crickets were late. I’d begun to wonder if they were going to be like the bees, few and far between, this year. But they showed in force by mid-August, and even the bees seemed to be staging a comeback, after the decimation in last year’s hives. The kingfishers were a bit late, too, but they’ve been flashing their blues at us since mid month, and now the marsh hawks are loping along the tidal meadows, sure sign of fall. Look, there’s one.

The wind is fitful in the river, and I can’t figure where it’s out of. It reverses itself under the powerlines, and we don’t get a decent slant of wind and tide until we reach the mouth of the Cathance. We jump a mature eagle who sails off downwind. We seem to have a good breeze coming off the bay, though, and Jim takes the helm while I make sail.

Delano made us a new main this spring. The old one disintegrated after a dozen years, mostly because I abused it. Not just leaving it up in any wind, but stowing it in the sunlight, by wrapping it round the mast. I’m treating this new sheet with more respect, bagging it below, but it makes setting and dousing sail more tedious, and the whole rig is slatting and banging before I get it hoisted and trimmed. By the time the jib’s up we are most ways to the mouth of the Muddy, and the wind is right in our faces. East northeast. Not a good sign. But the tide is with us, and we can tack the tide and get ourselves aired without motornoise. We settle back for a leisurely jaunt. Resume the parle.

Geez, that wind is unsettled. Puffy. Veering here and there. We are zigzagging up to the middleground where the bay proper opens out, but the wind keeps heading us, whichever we turn. And the clouds are going inky. The colors getting more lurid. Is that thunder, rumbling on the edge of consciousness? Maybe we should go downwind a bit. We wear around and start back up the tide.

But the sun breaks through again, and the wind steadies a bit, so we point up into the Muddy. We can sail along this shore for a change, until we see what the weather is up to.

Slowly. Slower. Slowest. The wind is flunking out. We have just enough headway to stem the tide. So maybe it’ time to turn again, but which way? Tacking out to the marshgrass where it’s shoal, or wearing toward shore, where the backwind off the trees may hook us? I opt for shore. Sure, enough. We run right up onto the slimy shingle.

“NO. Stay,” we stifle the dogs’ eagerness to leap out and get all muddy. Push off with an oar. Paddle back into the wind. First one way, then the other, as the wind does, and then doesn’t. Does again. The black clouds over Centers Point are towing curtains of rain. Closer. Closer.

And the surface of the river comes alive in opt art patterns, Japanese woodblock rhythms. Dancing splashes of rain making concentric ripples like goosebumps, and the pale tossing grasses beyond. We laugh and the dogs huddle miserably. But it’s soon over. And we continue waltzing with the erratic breeze. The thunder is getting louder now. There’s some noise about motoring, but in for a dime, in for a dollar, I say.

We get our moneysworth. The sky opens up and the Japanesey turns opaque. Pounding waters leaping off the river surface. We’re sodden to the skin. And hooting like fools. The dogs think we’re nuts. The wind is drowned, and we drift with the tide in the baptismal air, laughing helplessly.

So there it is. The ritual ablution to close out a sabbatical year. We jumped into the salt at Popham together before we set off for America and Spain. Now we’ve washed off the road dust in a downpour on the last weekend of summer.

A pair of kyakers paddle up to us as we nose back into the Cathance on the rising wind. They stop alongside, ecstatic with our mutual absurdity, and saluting our stubbornness at continuing to sail in the downpour. But that wind is cutting though our wet clothes. Guess we can start the motor now.

“Race you.” I challenge them. And darned if they don’t beat us upriver, 10 horse or no. We have another comic interlude trying to land at the dock. When they clearcut the waterfront here, one of the unanticipated consequences was the creation of a new eddy below the bridge. Just enough to make landing a bit more amusing. But we manage, carrying Bagel ashore rather than argue with him.

Back at the house it’s hot shower time, with tea and Bourbon. Jim borrows a pair of Peggy’s sweats, which come halfway up his shins, but are proper apparel for a clam fest. And about time, too.

We spread newspaper on the table, buckets alongside, and dishes of melted butter, and dig in. It isn’t often there’s ENOUGH clams, you know. But the three of us manage to run out of steam before we get to the bottom of the big pot. We take a break to eat fresh salad from the garden, and the heavens open up again in deluge.

“Guess we made the right decision,” we concur. I find that after eating steamers barehanded it feels nice to dig your fingers into an oil and vinagery salad. And then there IS more room for clams. We lazily pick out the last of the mud puppies, and pour a little dark beer on it, to help it settle.

UMMMMM. and then it’s back to school, and sawdust.