When I visit a new coastal community, I always scan the local paper to see if it covers the waterfront. Even if there are no arrivals and departures, the coverage of the waterfront gives me a good feeling for the community. Is it a “working waterfront,” a tarted-up playground for the wealthy, or an ignored part of town hidden behind a highway? You learn a lot about a place by how it “faces.” If the fisherman, boat repair yards, filet houses, and chandlers are all relegated to a back cove somewhere off the highway, I’d prefer to be elsewhere. So, I always look for places where everything comes together in a living whole – not fractions divided by walls and highways.
Last Sunday, I was on the coast, and while waiting for my wife to exit a shop, I had a conversation with someone who turned out to be a retired lobsterman. Over five minutes, we traveled fifty years back to a time when traps were wooden, and we were younger men—Fishfinders and Loran-C was high-tech then. We laughed while watching someone unfamiliar with boats struggle into a floatation vest.
The community was a fantastic melange of art galleries, jewelry shops, restaurants, and a working waterfront. Down at the end of the pier, a refrigerator truck was loading a fresh catch, and a “Cap’n” was welcoming aboard a group of tourists for a harbor cruise.
Traveling to some odd corner was unnecessary to experience the parts. It was all there, like a theatre in the round. There was always something new to view. It was a circus with the tourists and a daily round for the locals living by the sea. Get to the coffee shop early enough, and it was all local. The talk was about the weather, the catch, how the season was going, and what the Board of Selectmen were up to ( the damned fools!). I imagine that some of the fractions existed in a state of tension with one another. It seemed inevitable. But the whole was much more than a simple sum of the parts.
I’ve relished this sort of place, from Maine to the Carolina Capes, on the Chesapeake and the Great Lakes. They are all different but all sort of like home. Their success is that they have yet to close off the water, make it only a playground for the wealthy, shut it off, or encapsulate it. It’s all there. And it’s alive.
Discover more from Louis N. Carreras, Woodcarver
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Happy ending! When things become playgrounds for the rich, they kind of die.
I read you post this morning about travel and home. Something is cooking in my head about what you said. I may have to dig into it, and rreread your post. But your post has set something loose in my mind, right after I finished my post…you are a trouble maker, Martha – you make people think!!!
Oh Lou, I’m so sorry. I never mean to do that!
No Martha, I think it’s a positive thing. It’s just has to cook until I know what it is. It’s great to be challenged!
Oh Lou. It’s something I’ve thought about a LOT. I don’t remember the movie but some restless kid got the word from an older person, “When you find what you’re looking for you’ll stay home.” Something like that.
Home and a search for it occupied lots of my wandering in the 1960’s and seventies. I even found one or two that I return to in my semi-fictionalized posts on coastal Maine. It’s parts complaint, and homage,. I love the opportunity to work out the issues. I think that’s part of what’s going on. some places you call home are just too toxic to be home, but you keep on trying to go back.
does any of that make sense?
Yep. My REAL home (family etc.) was a very fucked up place. But over the course of my life, I learned I carry that around with me and paradoxically being treated badly feels “comfortable.” It’s an ever-present danger. But HOME as far as Zürich is concerned is a mysterious and true thing with historical roots that I had NO idea about. The whole thing (life?) is almost like the X-Files words at the start of the show, “The Truth is Out There” in both senses of “out there.” But Milton was right; “he mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n. What matter where, if I be still the same…” Travel is — I think — a short-cut (we believe) to transformation and that’s not wrong, but it’s also (IMO) not that simple.
Maybe we spend our whole lives not so much looking for home the geographical sense as trying to identify it in some metaphysical way. And I have NO idea what I mean.
Your comment -“Maybe we spend our whole lives not so much looking for home the geographical sense as trying to identify it in some metaphysical way.” makes a lot of sense to me. sometimes I think some of us are like hermit crabs we find the shells or whatever, and carry them around with ourselves.
Yep. Exactly. I think of myself as a kind of snail. The books I’ve written and my paintings are my trail… In my mind I’m just a kind of traveler. I’ve written my reports and painted my impressions.
Relationships are wonderful but transient because of death. The most significant relationship I have had and have is with the planet, but even here I’m the transient one though it, itself, is highly mutable as Mt. Blanca reminds me from time to time. “Hey I was a gigantic volcano and before that was a different mountain range completely! So chill out, little human.” Some people would probably find my perspective kind of melancholy but I think it’s very cool. I think (if this makes any sense) this is why little kids love me and follow me as if I were the Pied Piper. They haven’t been here long enough to feel or be anything but, ‘Wow! That’s so cool! What is it?” 🙂