A Jaunt to Rockport by the sea

My haunting of friends, relatives, and old familiar scenes continued: since I was in Boston I took a quick trip Northeast to Rockport, Massachusetts, to visit Bill and Sue Waller, cousins on my father’s side whom I hadn’t seen in years.  Bill and his wife Sandy live in the same granite-walled country house near the sea that belonged to my Uncle Marvin and Aunt Pat when I was a tiny new addition to the world, and the winding road to it took my Miata by the abandoned tool factory and past glimpses of blue Atlantic with breaths of salt and seaweed, down to the unchanged corner at Philips St. where I fell through a tunnel of memories.

Sandy and Bill Waller

It was great to see my cousins.  I was sorry to miss my niece Renée and nephew Julian, absurdly elevated in my absence to college at Smith and PhD work in Germany, respectively, but I was able to sleep in Julian’s little slope-roofed bedroom upstairs that was Billy’s before him, and I had more time to catch up with Bill and Sandy.  We had an enthusiastic reunion, hugging, talking and joking in the familiar kitchen and cluttered diningroom.  Bill’s an astronomer now teaching science at the local high school; Sandy an engineer doing facilities work.  They fed me like a king (a lobster dinner the first night, rosemary lamb the second), and I regaled them with tales of Mexico.  We walked the edge of the shore on the huge, glacier-broken rocks, where multi-gabled mansions of weathered shingle face the cold Atlantic and maybe a plain white lobsterboat browses at the pots out there.  Such scenes call to deep within my childhood blood, and it was hard to reconcile them as being even on the same planet with those of Tzepotlan and Jalpan just a few months ago.

Later I strolled by myself around the town of Rockport, a salty New England town so picturesque as to be almost a parody, and hence flooded with visitors on this last of the warm sunny weekends.  Lobster buoys hung in restaurant windows; the many art shacks with their walls of sunsets and dinghy scenes were awful, but the clam chowder at the Leaf & Bean was worth waiting for (a recommendation from Julian passed through Bill), and the classic view of the harbor was one that my parents at least never tired of.  Their bygone sighs of satisfaction called up a smile of my own while I waited for the other tourists to leave the good photo spot.

My Uncle Marvin (my father’s brother) was a fine artist—many cuts above the art shack crowd—who never became well-known and eventually turned to architecture, but not before leaving behind a large body of work in a midcentury impressionistic style.  My cousin Sue, who also turned out an artist, and who lives just down the street from Bill and Sandy in a flat filled with paintings, old photos, and trinkets of the past, is compiling all of Marvin’s pieces into what will be a book of his art; she flipped through the album pages on the couch to show me.  She’s in her 60s, and hampered by an earlier stroke, but not only is she spearheading the book but she has become the family “curator” (Bill’s word); she showed me 1880s photos and told me stories I’d never known about my grandparents and great-grandparents. 

Sue Waller

On Monday morning Bill and Sandy woke early to go to work, and after sleep-drugged goodbyes in the kitchen I got into my Miata and hit the road back to Cornwall.  I had a strange errand that required a long loop: there’s a location just South of Providence, Rhode Island that’s integral to my novel, and which I had only seen on Google Street View.  Since nothing in New England is far from anything else, I drove down to see it in person, get impressions and take photos.  A high chainlnk fence that rather features in my plot turned out to be not there, which might require rewriting. 

It was an uncertain day, with fast-moving clouds pulling tidepools of sun and shadow over the autumnal hills, and I told Google Maps Navigation to get me to Cornwall while “avoiding highways” (a nice Settings option I found).  The result was an anfractuous horizontal trickle through the back roads of Rhode Island and Connecticut, my Miata top going up and down as the waves of black-bottomed cloud came and went.  Each leaf-strewn road framed in old homes and crimson and pumpkin trees was more charming than the last, until I was home.