That’s how people spoke of it in Maryland, “the water.” As in, “I like the scenery out West, but I’d miss the water.” Yeah.
We had a house just 1.5 miles from the Chesapeake Bay, but getting to it somehow became a monumental aggravation: I had to rig the sail, my trailer was too funky, the weather was too humid, I really ought to mow the grass, whatever. I wasn’t alone in this, either. People smarter than me figured how to buy houses that were on the water, so you only had to choose your flip-flops, and to hell with working on the weekend. This made crappy real estate so expensive, the only happy campers were the brokers.
Our postman told me once, all serious and mournful, “Guys like you and me will never have a place on the water,” as the saying goes… What HERESY! I wanted to bust him in the head and vowed right then and there I had to get away: not from the agua, but the mindset. Quite the caste system they had going on the Eastern Shore, “manor houses” and the lot. I used to walk around with steam coming out of my ears because nobody minded.*
When any man could be a king: Possum Cove, upper Chester River
What is it about “the water”? When I was growing up, I’d run to any pond or stream in search of tadpoles, water bugs, and fishes. There was something magical about the hunt, you know? The symbolism of such places, the fecundity and all, still kills me when it hits. But now that I’m old, a pond won’t really do, nor would a lake. It needs to be a tidal river or a coastline, water that connects to all the rest. What that represents to me is freedom and mobility (youth?): I never took my wooden boat or sailing kayak out beyond the mouth of any river in those parts, but in the back of my mind was the thought that yes, I could, perhaps. The thing was possible. You could go all the way down the Bay and sail out into the ocean, and from there around the world.
Fortunately, New Mexico is in some ways much like the sea. It’s truly vast, for one thing. There’s palpable relief just cruising down a road with no one else around, at least for a little while—no one to crowd you or tell you what to do: freedom! And then you start to get a little scared… Kind of like sailing, actually, except the open water is more desolate, and you can’t stop to take a piss, or throw up. (There’s an art to being out of sight of land that this boy never learned.) You’ve surely heard about people being lost at sea and never found again? That happens here, too. People vanish into caves and lava tubes, or drive out in the boonies and get buried in the snow. Worse than that, they move to Taos and name their children after trees!
Disappearing is a cottage industry in these parts. Maybe I don’t miss the water so much, after all.
* That part of rural MD 30 years ago was also the only place I’ve ever had a black man stand aside for me because of race. (It wouldn’t happen now!) And see this story about the Freedom Riders back in ’62. A lot of people have forgotten this or never knew it in the first place.
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“I wanted to bust him in the head and vowed right then and there I had to get away: not from the agua, but the mindset. Quite the caste system they had going on the Eastern Shore, “manor houses” and the lot.”
tell me about it!
i’m in a similar state nowadays…
even though i’m in the house & neighborhood i grew up in, the whole soulless gentrified Stepford-zombie affluent suburbia thing is finally getting to me, and i will most likely be selling the house in the next few years and (finally) moving to The City… as HST put it: “…straight into frantic oblivion: safety, obscurity, just another freak in the Freak Kingdom.”
i’ve done Palo Alto, Santa Cruz & Berkeley over the years, and they each have both their charms and downsides, but it’s getting about damn time for me to do the Frisco thing for real!
(native San Franciscans have this whole snobbery thing about *never* referring to The City as “Frisco”, but that’s just lingering pretension by the “higher classes” to try and distance it from the “seedier” reputation of the Barbary Coast pirate & gold rush glory days, and to hell with them for trying!)
Thanks! Although the point here really is about remembering the WATER (things that make me want to hurt myself)… Running from the mindset that things are carved in stone and never change, accepting things as they are, even if that puts one in a hole, did me some injury, as opposed to confronting fear of failure in my own damn self.
Ironically though, in hindsight, the shadow of the place does aid in healing. I am stronger now for having lost myself at sea.
Just about all human actions have their paradoxical aspects – even the protesting of racial inequalities in the ’60′s.
In 1965 Martin Luther King came to Chicago and led a series of protests into the unintegrated white working class neighborhoods of the city. The confrontations with the local people there were quite ugly. The marchers had to be virtually surrounded and escorted down these streets by a cordon of police. Hurled insults and spittle were the least of it. King himself was struck and injured by a thrown rock in one such march. The marchers were made up of white students (I was one of them) and black activists. In effect we were freedom riders.
The reason I mention this is that I came to doubt my own presence in this event, not because I doubted the validity of the cause, but because I became suspicious of my own sense of moral self-righteousness. I was a college kid, still on a holiday from life. The people in these communities had put all their work and savings into these tidy little houses in these tidy little neighborhoods. They were of the same class as I came from. Their little houses were very much like the little house I had grown up in. Whereas most of the student protesters were products of affluent suburbs and private schools far from the reach of urban decay or any possibility of having to deal with either the working class or the actual poor. Contempt for the working class, going slumming, a moralistic take on their unadmitted snobbery – these attitudes were disconcertingly mixed in with purer ones.
Actions have consequences, regardless of motivations. What subsequently happened in many of these neighborhoods had its ironic if not tragic aspects: Black people did begin to move in, property values fell, whites fled, losing their life savings – and the great urban slum simply extended its reach.
I draw no moral from this tale. Segregation was wrong, whether in the institutionalized form of the South or the de facto form in the North. If a price had to be paid for getting rid of it, I suppose poor whites were necessary for the purpose. However, this collateral damage is seldom taken account of by those who remember only the nobility of the cause.
Living a decent life begins at the personal level. You don’t get let off the hook because you have the right views on the big issues or go for a Sunday march or two.
Well, I wasn’t pushing one thing or the other here, just offering a little cultural background on the place I used to live. I think the de facto economic caste system and the Old South racial attitudes (only recently evolved) do go hand in hand, however.
And thanks for the review at Amazon! (Check it out, folks.)