Lammas: Waters and Roads, Part III
A UFC match between the Old Man Sea Captain and the Mountain Forest Man inside me
It occurred to me, coming down Cannon Mountain, just before I completed my quest to find the holy Pemigewasset, that I had gone from being a beach-and-city person to a mountain-and-forest-and-fresh-water person.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about this — I had thought about this many times already and I am still not sure, really. I also wasn’t sure what this had to do with being a kinder, chiller hobbit-elf in life, but I also wasn’t sure that these were unconnected thoughts. All my life, straight up through my twenties, despite having grown up in a small town an hour or more from city and shore, I would crave — deep in my soul — visits to Boston and the ocean. In wintertime, I would go nuts not, it seemed, just from low light SAD-type stuff, but from my exile from these places that called to me so. A mere glimpse of either, if only for a few minutes, was often enough to lift my spirits. It was always like this — baked into my personal yearly rhythms and cycles.
It’s not like that anymore and hasn’t been for a while. I don’t even really know why. I still get to Boston every month or two, but if I don’t, it doesn’t bother me anymore. And the ocean, previously the stronger of the two needs, no longer demands my presence. We get there once or twice a year, but it’s been so difficult with children and the drive, coupled with the fact that we haven’t done a family vacation there — well, on the North Shore and on the water, anyway — since 2013, that I feel almost completely disconnected with the great sea.
Is this okay? Is this a symptom of some malady, an indication, perhaps, of the corruption or otherwise dulling of my very spirit? Or have I just adapted, over time, gone native, as it were, changing from island beach creature to a forest mountain man?
Some combination of both?
Where do I belong? What ought I to be?
Do these questions even have answers at all? And why am I spending the second half of my favorite season of the year bogged down by these tremendous conundrums of identity?
When I was a child, I had this odd vision of myself as an old man sea captain — a consistent, major vision that came with me over years and years and still isn’t really gone. It’s me with white hair and a formidable white beard, tough, dark, weathered skin with cracks in the corners of my eyes, smoking a pipe or something while gazing with intensity at the blinking lights at the end of the rock jetty after a day at sea.
It’s all nonsense, of course. There’s nothing about me that’s cut out for the manual labor of life on a boat, particularly that of a sea fisherman. Nor had I ever really spent much time on a boat in the ocean at any point in my life. I don’t even really like catching fish myself. It’s all imaginary and completely nonsensical, and yet it persists, even now, to this day. Even me as a Mountain Forest Man still sees himself as the old man sea captain.
I haven’t figured this out yet, and this was particularly clear on the day of Lammas itself.
This Lammas (not insignificantly also Jerry Garcia’s birthday), we had decided not to go to the ocean, accepting that it would simply be too much traveling for three kids and two adults who had already spent a lot of vacation time in the car. By around one in the afternoon, I became deeply, viscerally dissatisfied with that decision.
No, we must have adventure. For Lammas. For Jerry. For the sea captain? OK maybe not the sea captain, but surely for the other two.
With the already-past-its-prime sun at our backs, we busted out, headed for Long Sands at York beach in Maine, the great mighty northern unknown. We blared a whole JGB set — maybe something from the 70s I think — and nobody had any serious issues. Clearly, we had been acting according to destiny.
Upon arriving at York, the children were delighted. This beach was far beyond their wildest expectations. As it was low tide, the beach was large and the water distant; once in the water, the depth increased only slowly while the waves were large enough for a great deal of fun.
Yes, I knew — immediately upon touching the water and especially once immersed — I am not just a fresh water man, that there is something very special about this salt water that wraps our planet and our lives like a Great Embrace. There’s something about that horizon that you know goes across a big swath of globe, something about that eternal ebb and flow — not seasonally, not even tide to tide, but moment to moment. Wave, break, crash, rush, pause, roll back. Just like the good doctor said about the sixties.
I spent a fair amount of time with my son Dom just past the point where the waves would break, just floating on our backs. Up and down, side to side, down, then up again, and again, and again, feeling that salt lift our bodies and our spirits with some kind of dual buoyancy. I felt that sea captain then and saw visions of future paths. I wondered if perhaps my time as a mountain forest creature is intended to be finite, that it represents my stage of life of family and society — as the Taoists might say — and that when it’s over I’ll abandon my woods and even my sacred mountain, and come to the sea to rest.
Seems like something a good hobbit would do, no? And it’s certainly what the elves do.
That day, Lammas, no questions were answered, but it was like a finger reached out from the sky and pointed in a direction: you must go forth and live. Adventure.
The greatest adventure is what lies ahead. And there were more waters and roads in our immediate future.