Duxbury Bay

[Bolonsky Adam]

Clarks Island in Duxbury Bay might be better known had Truman Capote not been Capote but, rather, Tom Cruise or Hanks. Capote wrote In Cold Blood on Clarks in the 1960's. The book made him rich and his name far more widely known than that of the island where he wrote it. Had either of the Toms spent time here chances are the place would be nowhere as unassuming.

You know Capote's book. Or perhaps you don't. A gruesome murder spree in the back notches of the farm belt -- Kansas or Idaho or someplace. The prairie, cold and bleak. Two guys with guns. They slaughter if I remember it right an entire family. Later the book gets made into a movie but by then Capote has been credited with creating a new literary genre: fictionalized truth. Soon others get on the bandwagon and write books similar. But by then Capote, no kayaker, has become an unpredictable drunk who combs through some notebooks at the end of his life to write one more book, a tell-all about the high life in New York. Jackie O. Warhol. He moved in those circles. He was that sort. But man could he write.

He had also by then fallen drunk off his chair when Cavett interviewed him on TV. Then Mailer: The Executioner's Song, about Gary what's-his-name on death row, and later those books on Marilyn and Of a Fire on the Moon, about the space program. East coast intellectuals other than Theroux (our best kayaking writer, I think) produced books that examined the worst of who we are not by reporting but by placing into their novels characters of the American conscience: people so well known, so much formed by us, that they are more we than themselves.

And it all started here on Clarks. And now the book is old hat and Clarks has become a footnote: This is where Capote wrote his first bestseller.

As for seakayakers and crime books. Just ask Yvonne Rosmarin, whom I kayak with when I can pry her out of the house before noon. She sort-of paddles and very much reads Anne Rule crime stories. By the drawer-full. You know the books' story lines: their narratives float up out of the headlines every few months. Guy's wife or guy's wife and kids go missing. Press conference. Guy weeps. "Would whoever has Dossy please bring her home!" Something about the guy seems wrong though. He doesn't seem so much stoic as emotionless and we begin to suspect what every cop already supposes: guy offed his wife with a garrote or a .44, rolled her into a rug then dumped her in the county landfill, or else duct-taped her up into in a trash barrel he's got in a rented stall at U-Stor-It.

When you're bored in Duxbury Bay because there are no fish worth looking for, you think about this sort of stuff: the connections between the water you're on, the books you've read, the people you know and the writers you admire. Meanwhile maybe you also consider:

- that crime stores are the best reads on a kayak camping trip. As with sitcoms, even if the names and faces change, the story arcs essentially repeat themselves. And as any kid with his teddy bear knows, the familiar is a sopoforic. Ever try to get a good night's sleep in a motel? It's not your house. Strange sounds. Weird odors. Crime books are familiar. Read one in your tent and your sleeping troubles are gone. Chapter One: “Joanie Michelson was the kind of mother and woman everyone in her quiet suburban neighborhood admired. She was loving and outgoing and beautiful and her life with her husband, Herbert, seemed perfect. But little did her neighbors know that beneath the happy exterior of domestic bliss there lurked a monster. Herbert… ” -

-- a page-and-a-half of this and you are snoring. The usual fracas of trying to fall sleep on a rocky cobble on the Maine Island Trail? Gone. The husband, in debt or with a mistress or addicted to cocaine, or all three or both, offed his wife. Four years later you're watching summer rerun TV, and there he is, getting interviewed by a fancy-haircut reporter in a bespoke suit:

Reporter: “Did you do it? Did you kill her?”

Guilty Herbert: “No! I loved her! I love her still!”

You watch Herbert give the reporter a long, baleful look and you like everyone else knows he is full of it. Reading the book about the guy, you drift off to sleep in your tent, wake only to walk the high-tide line to be sure the tide hasn't made off with your boat. These aren't the days of Capote, so the book you have in your tent is disposable. But were it Capote, and the book In Cold Blood, there would be no sleep. The novel would juggle you so effectively into restiveness it would hold you there, like a Graff generator, until you'd think the electric current had entered the tent, made the metal zipper of your sleeping bag vibrate and hum, your skin crawl and your spine tingle.

###

So I'm wandering the bay thinking about Capote and the women I know who are fascinated by crime books. There are at least four. I'm in my North Bay. The North Bay is a fast but in many ways awful boat. I see terns diving at a submerged sandbar and paddle towards them. The shallows must be filled with sandeels or silversides pushed to the surface by stripers or blues. The birds are frantic, as if slashing from the air at sacks of donuts that have fallen off a DPW truck working the shore detail. Let's see if fish might transform the day from daydreaming about books into one wasted landing schoolies….

Duxbury Bay's kayak fish spots are: Gurnet Point; the Bug Light rock dump; Saquish Beach Rip and Captains Flat's shallows; the canals of Browns Bank off Plymouth Beach, and all the guzzles between the sand bars out on the oyster grounds. But on this muggy afternoon none are producing, and now, holy crap, the sky is changing color horribly and in a hurry. I'm beginning to consider, in my deep pool of boredom (there isn't really, I think, a reason to kayak Duxbury Bay other than to exploit it for food), that I've tread water for about an hour on a single notion: how it would probably be best to head home. Looks anyhow like a thunderstorm is pulling up anchor inland and is taking a bearing on this port. I pull up the lures and stow them.

So. Grinding southwestward, from High Pines towards the westward turn at the southernmost tip of Clarks Island. I see the flickerings. The sky becomes almost entirely greased over, and now here comes a cold dry gust of air slicing in from the shore, like that blast of cold air they hit you with in summer at the front door of Home Depot. There's a large rumble - big heavy thunder -- and now another flicker flashes over what looks like Middleboro or Lakeville. Oh Christ. The squall is sailing out here on a beam reach, heavy clouds stretched full. A jagged split cracks out from the black curtain that has hovered over Kingston and swollen into the weird shape of an anvil. Clarks has outbuildings on its northern end, I know, a barn to the south, an aluminum ramp bolted onto a plastic candock with slips for four. If I land at the dock and secure my kayak before the storm opens up like a lit butane torch, I can take cover inside the outbuilding.

Like all the few remaining primitive shore islands of Massachusetts - Marblehead's Tinkers and Browns, Falmouth's Cuttyhunk, Nantucket's Tuckernuck, the Elizabethan archipelago, the Isles of Shoals, and so on - Clarks persists primitive and undeveloped only because old-family or trustee owners can afford to keep it so, and because it lies offshore of a wealthy lace-curtain town whose residents are interested in the view. The north end of Clarks is preserved open space but its mid-island owner, and a caretaker, live there in summer to keep the weeds down and work the docks and houses and grounds. On an estate this large I'll be able to slink into the barn unnoticed.

I land at the dock, hoist the kayak up-ramp slung over my shoulder --

CRAAA-AAA-AAK! --

-- BOOM!!

The barn! The door! I drop the boat and RUN. The barn door's fastened shut with an un-nutted bolt pushed through the hasp like a needle.

Two bolts of lightning rip shoreward. One whacks the bluff at Gurnet Point, the other the snackshack near Marshfield. Now the whole horizon turns purple and smoky. Rain. The bay then turns white (I'm watching this from the barn's flagstones) and every molecule of water rolling in the bay begins to roll over on itself. The rain is falling so hard, so huge, drooped sagging curtains of it, that finally it has to bounce up off the water's surface. The bay looks as if the rain is both falling from the sky and getting sprayed up out of the ocean.

I pry open the barn door. In there it's not only dark but warm: an enclosed windowless space in which is garaged a hulking green John Deere tractor, rakes, baling wire, weed whackers and spare solar panels and dozens of mechanics and tree pruners tools. By now the storm has completely blown open. The rain smashes down on the roof. I sit on the tractor seat. I watch the storm.

That island. What a place to write a book. What a place to forge within yourself a craft unique and new. In short what a place for someone young and full of promise to roll the dice of his future, bring with him a writer's simple tools. It's almost enough to make you think the isolation worth it.

But, poor Capote. Even if the man who ruined him was the man himself, his end was, like any true tragedy, tragic primarily because his ruination might have been staved off by the very ruiner. Capote could have avoided that end, not by staying out of fate's way and by avoiding such as this and other storms, but simply by making slower, or quicker, choices that had nothing to with taking cover. -30-