Dancing Around the Four Sides

The green salt smell of the sea and the tidal marshes flooded in as soon as I rolled down the windows on Route 133. On impulse and antidote to my surfeit of doctors' appointments this week, spatch drove me out to Gloucester this afternoon. The clouds were stacked over the water like cyanotypes. We looped the dunes of the Boston Sand and Gravel Company and clattered through the industrial green trusses of the Tobin which currently seem to have been mummy-swaddled in tarps and chopsticks and filled out our summer's alphabet of states during slow traffic on Route 1. The Causeway discovered it had run out of fried smelts right after it had rung me up for an order and offered me fried cod cheeks instead, sweet solid dollops of whitefish which I ate across the picnic table from Rob and his steak-sized baked haddock at Stage Fort Park where local teenagers were sunbathing to music atop Tablet Rock. From the Avalonian granite of Half Moon Beach, we watched a duffel-green trawler chug in past the automated blinks of Eastern Point and Ten Pound Lights, one tower as red-and-white as a buoy, the other black-and-white as the common eiders bobbing across the glaze-blue bands of the waves. We saw cormorants in flight and fishing. We saw gulls balanced like balsa wood on the summering air. I tore my hand on some barnacles and the wind snarled my hair from all directions. When the light started to drain off toward sunset, we left by Route 127 just to see what its coastal views looked like when not obliterated by thunder-sheet rain and meandered somewhat after Manchester-by-the-Sea such that I remember admiring the whale-blue mural of a wave Hokusai-bubbling across the side of the Swampscott Department of Public Works and hoping that Prides Crossing is besieged in June. The neat white crescent of the moon came out in the ink-washed after-sunset and presently we collected ice cream from a slammed CB Scoops. I am not yet done with doctors for the week and this was an even more restoring break than walking by the Charles or North Point Park. My CD of Quinquis' eor (2025) arrived in the mail.