Seaside Sojourns (Part 2) While New Hampshire is home to perhaps 15 miles of shoreline, there are several beautiful beaches located along its scenic coast. There are, for example, Seabrook, Hampton, North Hampton, Jenness, Rye, and Wallis Sands Beaches. For reasons never explained to us, Dad always took us to Foss Beach, a rocky cove where scarcely anyone went. The entire area was littered with oddly shaped stones, rounded and smoothed from the waves’ impacting the area over the centuries. There was literally a wall of such stones slopping down to the side of the road where we had parked. Scattered amongst these stones were shards of driftwood, sundried, blackened seaweed, and broken soda bottles. The beach itself, though only barely visible at low tide, was composed primarily of hardened clay. Adding still more atmosphere to our family’s seaside retreat were large spiders, crabs, sand fleas, and green flies which would bite us, removing small chunks of flesh as they did so. It may have been Alice who coined the term “Fossil’s Beach”, though Dad failed to appreciate my sister’s play on words. After he had stubbed out his cigar in our car’s ash tray, Dad got out of the vehicle and stretched before putting his head into the driver’s side window and explaining to us, “I’ll look the situation over and get the lay of the land. If the tide has gone out far enough, the rest of you can come on down.” So after he had scaled the rampart like pile of stones and surveyed the beach below, he waved us on to join him. After we had stumbled along among the stones and debris to reach the site that Dad had picked, Ma put down an antique army blanket supposedly used by her Uncle Ernie in France during the First World War. Resting next to her on that blanket were a cooler containing our food as well as a large, green jug filled with homemade lemonade chocked full of actual slices of lemon and ice cubes. I wasn’t able to get around very well because the rocky surface was so irregular. It hurt to walk. It hurt to sit, and it hurt to lie down. Going in the water wasn’t an option either, though Alice placed me in a small, tidal pool that must have been little more than 12 degrees Farenheit and caused my ankles to ache right down to the bone. Ma and Dad entered the water very briefly, walked in to about waist level, and came out pronto because of the frigid temps. Even worse, lining the shore were piles of rotting, brown kelp festooned with flies as they sat there in the sun, stinking to high heaven. Lacking knowledge of such things, I was frightened and would go nowhere near them. “But it’s just seaweed, Jimmy!” Dad explained, in an attempt to put my fears to rest. I didn’t care what he said it was. To me it looked like sea serpents, and I wanted to go home until my brother convinced me otherwise by building a huge, walled castle in the sand. This was the only redeeming feature of the day. Tom had taken some large stones, incorporated them into the castle’s walls where they took on the appearance of guard towers at each corner. Then he topped each of the towers with a green, seedless grape. “Light houses,” he explained. When it was time to leave, I failed to grasp that I could not bring the sand castle with me, upset that when the tide came in, the castle would be destroyed by the waves and no longer extant. I needed a diversion from this personal loss and found one in short order. It was as we were getting back into the family car and I had not yet been put into my car seat. Dad picked his cigar butt from the ash tray and pulled out that glowing plug once more from beneath the dash board. Curious, and wanting to see how that thing worked, I scampered across the transmission hump and was about to put a finger into the socket from where Dad’s lighter had come. Suddenly Ma began to shout. “GET HIM! GET HIM!” And before I had an inkling about what was going on, my father grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and slammed me into my car seat. That’s the way it always was. Ma screaming for Dad to do something, and Dad coming through in the nick of time. We left for home shortly after this. If a few hours at the shore were upsetting to me, spending a weekend there would prove to be more challenging by far, as I discovered the following summer when my Aunt Alice and Uncle Ray invited us to stay with them for a weekend at the cottage they had rented at Wells Beach, Maine for the month of August. Their cottage was named “Water Lily”, an old, gray New Englander situated on Atlantic Avenue overlooking the rugged Maine Coast. The scale of everything at Wells Beach was vastly larger than any of the beaches I had seen. There was a concrete sea wall directly in front of the seaside of the cottage, against which the surf would crash at high tide. At low tide, if there was fog, the ocean was hidden from view but the sound of the powerful breakers was always present. The sand seemed to go on and on without end, making it appear to my two year old eyes as if it were an alien landscape. The beach was lined for miles with cottages of similar vintage, all probably constructed around the turn of the 20th Century, during a time when beach going had first come into vogue. At the extreme northern end of the beach, the Webhannet river took its source, forming a lagoon, on the other side of which was Drake’s Island, where herds of harbor seals would beach themselves to rest and breed. Not yet in existence were the jetty, boat channel, and marina. At the south end of the beach were an assortment of fast food joints, hodge-podge of gift and curio shops, small post office, a large arcade, dance hall, parking lot, and movie theater. Within Water Lily was more activity than I had ever seen in a family setting. First there were my cousins: Louise, 14 years old and Raymond, 12. Their twin brothers, Gerry and Billy, were both 9. The youngest was Joe, 3 years old, and the one closest in age to me. Gerry and Billy and Raymond had invited friends of theirs to stay with them, so needless to say there was a very large contingent of rambunctious pre-teen boys tearing up the place. Because of this I wisely chose to keep a low profile to observe without getting in the way. Mealtimes here were different from what I was used to. Uncle Ray was seated at the head of the table, presiding over the dining adventure as though holding court, and freely dispensing his opinion on a variety of topics. With the possible exception of my father, no one else appeared to have been listening to what he had to say. Ma and Aunt Alice were discussing recipes. Cousins Raymond, Billy, and Gerry were talking with their friends as Joe and I poked around at the food sitting there before us. This proved to have been problematic for me. While I had been taken off baby food for over a year, Joe was not so fortunate, having some sort of developmental problem with his jaws, necessitating that he continue with the Gerber fare. As a token form of empathy, my mother thought it would be a good idea if he and I ate the same. So in order to facilitate this I was spoon fed strained peas, pork paste, and squash, the mere thought of which continues to nauseate me to the present day. It was very early the next morning when I was awakened, unsure of where I was. It’s a toss-up as to whether it was the crashing surf or Dad’s snoring which had jolted me out of my early morning slumber. I eventually realized that I was lying in a baby crib. Then, ever so slowly, I became cognizant of my exact whereabouts, recalling how my family had driven to Maine the day before to spend the weekend at Wells. I directed my gaze toward the bedroom window and saw nothing outside but gray haze. Then I was nearly overcome by that rotting stench of “salt air” as a fog horn resonated in the distance, and I wanted to go home. I knew better than to wake my parents, which would have brought swift retribution from my mother via a hair brush across my backside. So instead I lay there in silence hoping for release from this makeshift prison. Later that day, in the mid afternoon, Cousin Joe and I sat outside the cottage atop the seawall watching the tide come in. The fog had yet to lift, so while the surf was out of view, we could hear it coming closer and closer to our seaside perch. Aunt Alice and Uncle Ray were inside the cottage with my parents. Alice and Cousin Louise lay on a beach blanket several yards away waiting for the sun to break through, hoping to get a tan. Billy, Gerry, Raymond and friends had been alternately tossing a ball around and diving into the surf. Cousin Raymond ran up to me and Joe asking us why we hadn’t gone in the water. “It’s too cold,” Joe told him, mirroring my own sentiments. But Raymond just laughed and used a small shovel and pail to start digging a hole nearby in the sand. After he had finished, there was a massive crater five feet by five feet, surrounded by a wall of compact sand which he then filled with sea water. “This’ll be better,” Raymond explained. “Here y’go, guys! Now you’ve got a home made swimming pool.” Joe and I climbed into this improvised pool, discovering that the water was nowhere near as cold as we had feared. We sat there for the rest of the afternoon watching as the tide came in and eventually swamped our pool. This might have been the best time at the beach so far. Less memorable was Alice’s attempt to replicate a new kind of Italian cuisine she and Louise had discovered at a Worcester, MA eatery. She told us it was called pizza, and in an effort to improvise a home made version, she took English muffins, topped them with Campbell’s Tomato Soup, Velveeta Cheese, sliced hot dogs, and cooked them in the oven. The resulting ersatz concoction was so hideous that I didn’t try pizza again for several years, and even then only when I had access to the real McCoy. (TO BE CONTINUED)
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 19:30:10 +0000
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