Bending Reality - Cape Cod

Captain Penniman built a house in Eastham in 1868. The lower jaws of a sperm whale formed his entry gate. They were proud symbols of the man. “isn’t it nice?” k asked. What an imperial fucker I thought, the other parts of the poor sperm whale were processed for lamp oil and lubricant. “Leave it to the white man to exterminate all the majestic beasts of the sea, then arrange their jaws as gates for their multicolored houses.. cut down all the trees to stay warm. What douchebags!” K was exasperated by my response. I continued from my soap box, “Pamet Indians lived here thousands of years, ate raw clams, wore minimal clothing around their private parts, could run 100 miles a day back to back. Planted fish under their plants for fertilizer. In this area, for thousands of years nauset Pamet Indians lived beside the marshes in cape cod. They used community grinding rocks… fine grained metamorphic rock to grind and polish tools to make stone axes, and bone fishhooks. They took from nature only what they needed.” 

My errant denunciations dissipated in the beauty of the place. The day before we walked the nearby elevated walkway of the fort hill red maple swamp trail in the rain. With corona, we have time to stand in the rain over the swamp water in off-season vacation lands and muse how the peat is so dark, the water looks like mirrors and the light rain makes gentle puddles causing ripples in the water to quiver.

We had come to this landing at the end of Hemenway road to kayak through the marsh at low tide years before. It took time to recognize the place. Going to cape cod in the offseason is like entering the same familiar place but in a different reality. In the summer the low marsh cord grass is green and stands up straight. In early spring, it’s matted yellow and flattened. A totally different experience. No bugs. We would never get this experience were it not for corona. 6,000 people live in chatham year round, 35,000 people come during the summer. Hardly anyone goes to the cape outside summer. With corona, off-season is even deader. When we kayaked this marsh, the seals at time were circling our boats capturing fish trapped in the shallow waters of low tide. Here at low tide, on a sunny brisk spring morning, we walked on the dry yellow grass. There were no seals to be seen. It felt like walking on a giant expanse of horse hair… or as K says, the back of a hairy beast. “don’t you feel like it will arise?” “yeah. It will rise.” I respond sarcastically. I’m not a big fan of fantasy fiction like her. It’s just some flattened yellow cord grass at low tide. Squish squish. We got to a point where we couldn’t walk any further without getting wet, so we returned to the elevated walkways of the red maple swamp trail. This time, the sky was cloudless. The mirror-like surfaces of water reflected the trees growing in the marsh. 

I missed the concentric dance of rain puddles. But then I got a weird idea, to re-create a doctor strange reality bending image. First I spit onto the surface and took selfies of the rippled reflections. I posed with conviction…. my hand casting spells before me like dr. strange opening a portal. The spit floated on the surface and detracted from the effect though. I then threw little sticks onto the water and took pictures. Pretty soon, the once pristine mirror surface of the swamp was filled with floating bogies of spits and sticks on the surface. Like any great architect, with idea in mind, I sought to refine the expression of conception. I went to the end of the trail to gather some stones to create the better reality bending scenes.

K came by and asked what I was doing seeing all the sticks and spit float upstream to her vantage point. I tried to explain the mess I made, and she thought I was crazy. I gave her a pebble to throw. Tentatively she dropped a pebble and made a limp wristed hand wave gesture. I told her she wasn’t convincing anyone she was bending reality or opening dimensions. Actually, when she looked at her reflection, she was trying to fix her hair to look good for a picture. At which time I yelled at the top of my lungs jokingly “you’re so vain!” at which point a birdwatcher (the only other person to fucking come to the trail that morning) came around the corner and told me to shush. I was scaring her birds away.

Several dozen pictures later and satisfied with our reality bending selfies, we headed up another trail. Under the brush, through the woods, over the stream on wooden crates, over rocks, and forks in the road led to someone’s back yard. On our way out, K was taking a picture of a pond in all seriousness, I tickle zapped her hard in the ribs when she least expected it and ran for my life back to the safety of the car. It was a scene from American gladiator. I don’t run, and she runs all the time. But the adrenaline gave me an extra boost of energy to hop over logs, traverse rickety crates over streams, and choosing forks and run to the car and lock myself in to avoid retribution. At that point I wondered what the birdwatcher was thinking when she saw k pounding the car window and cursing me out.