Walking the Berkshires

Stuffies: Quahogs for the Masses

Down in our corner of Buzzards Bay, I am known as the king of baked stuffed quahogs.  For some reason, I have the mojo needed to find them in their hundreds when there are scores of hungry relatives, and the stamina to convert these hard shelled clams into their finest culinary incarnation.  This week, with more than 40 relatives at Windrock, I figured we needed about 350 medium sized clams to make 120 stuffies.  My brother-in-law Peter and I made our target in under an hour.

I scrubbed each clam and steamed the whole lot in two vast kettles with a bottle of beer and a goodly amount of Wye River (Original Red) Seasoning, the Eastern Shore's answer to Old Bay.  Each opened clam produced a midden of shells and a mound of meats, with the clam juice reserved for those who like it straight, those who like it with tomato juice and vodka, and the cook, who needed some for the next phase of the process.

Here we hit a snag, as someone in recent days seems to have melted the Cuisinart in a position that no longer allows the blade to engage.  An ancient KitchenAid with meat grinder attachment could not overcome the tenacious clams, so they had to be hand cut and minced, a process where I had the indispensable assistance of cousins Margaret and Leila.  Cynthia, meanwhile, scrubbed out over 100 half shells to contain the stuffing.

I sauteed some garlic and onions in a roasting pan with olive oil, and added more Wye River.  The clams were enough for several meat loaves had we felt so inclined, and I stirred in some unseasoned breadcrumbs until the mixture reached the desired consistency . I'd estimate that the ration was 6 parts clam to 1 part stuffing: a generous proportion making these premium stuffed clams the way Ben and Jerry's make premium ice cream.

I filled the shells on three baking trays, sprinkled on some vermouth and dusted them with paprika.  Then into the ovens they went for 15 minutes until there was a nice crust on top and they were ready to transfer to serving trays and distribute to the assembled throng.

Even finicky eaters devour my stuffed quahogs.  An inter-generational soccer game came to a screeching halt when the platters arrived on the field.  Having enjoyed a more intimate dinner with clams from the same waters just the week before, I was in my prime with this batch.  Favorite nephew status is now assured, at least until dinner, when my cousin John and wife Megan are serving us hundreds of chicken enchiladas.  Ah, summer.  Ah, stuffies.  For the next few hours, all is right with the world.

A Sea-Change Into Something Rich and Strange

Something happens to me when I get near the ocean.  My whole body starts to tingle, responding to the smell of the sea, the flow of the tide.  I listen for the sound of the waves at the shore, the creak of the cradle that rocks me to sleep.  I overlook the bay, or the surf, or the great Atlantic swells, wanting to be close to that rhythmic, restless water. 

I feel this way about mountains, too, and deserts, but these are generally static affairs, and my experience is one of being in motion within those landscapes. A great summer storm roiling over the crest of the hills or the shimmer of heat haze may animate these places, but for me the ocean itself is a living thing.  I do not presume to know its moods, or ascribe intentionality to its actions, but I do see its power, and feel its pulse.

I have never been a blue water sailor.  One summer, though, at just this time of year, I did sail from Cape Cod to Rockland, and had the dog watch during the Perseid meteor shower far out in the Gulf of Maine.  That was a night where only the winking lights of distant watercraft vied with the display in the vault of the sky.  I remember trails of green fire, and imagining longboats from Greenland making such a journey a thousand years before.

I'm not at all sure there is a mask around anymore that will fit me, as my diving gear is long gone, but if so I may go out to the breakwater and dip beneath the surface to explore the old rocks and crevasses to see what they conceal.  The pouting white lips and crooked teeth of Tautaug,  or a sleek gray eel, or the mottled claws of lobsters are all possibilities.  I love being under the water, in the very element that so captivates and intrigues.

This year there are many blue crabs in the warm waters of Buzzards Bay.  I saw one in the shallows when I was rooting for quahogs with my toes, and evidence of others up and down the beach.  Maybe this coming week when I am at the shore I will go crabbing in the Weweantic River (avoiding the Agawam with its swans and algae and treatment plant).  Maybe I will gather fiddler crabs and fish with my children and nephews and their second cousins with bamboo poles at high tide.  Or maybe I will sit, contented on shore, and watch these children splash and play, and let the weary weight of my complicated life drain away with the falling tide.  Sand between the toes and salt on the skin is just the balm I need.

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

- Shakespeare (The Tempest)

Dog Days

(Photo credit: T.Leodari):  The cicadas outside my window are planing down the season.  Shavings of summer days curl on the wood shop floor.  Insects whine like a saw through heartwood, with a drone that lingers at the edge of consciousness but grows persistent as August advances. 

The first sugar maple leaves are starting to turn at the tips of ailing trees, a visual jolt in all this heavy green.  The fields now sport goldenrod and asters and the fireflies have ceased their dance. The summer cannot last more than a few weeks now, declines even as it ripens, and each remaining day of bright sun and blue water is precious to a weary heart.

What we have done and left undone becomes all too apparent as the summer wanes.  The garden got away from me in thick and heavy air too oppressive to bother to weed and mow.  There are many green tomatoes but few green leaves on the vines, and it will be a race to see whether the harvest reaches its potential before the plants themselves wither.  The lettuce has bolted, the crabgrass overwhelmed the flower beds.  There were other priorities, but still my inner gardener disapproves of my stewardship.

On the other hand, I have managed to accomplish a number of core summer activities that are even more sustaining than the fruit of my garden.  I took my children to Monhegan Island.  I had steamers and lobster in Maine, and baked stuffed quahogs harvested right off the beach at Windrock.  I made a cherry pie, and had steamed crabs in Delaware.  I picked raspberries.  I saw whales.  I attended a Revolutionary War Reenactment and joined the 1st New Jersey Continentals.  I made mussels marinara and ate fried clams.  I went for a sail on Buzzard's Bay.  I saw the future and it smiled.

This weekend I will drive to Windrock once more with my children and join 40 relatives for a week by the sea.  I will catch and cook 300 quahogs.  I will make pesto with my garden basil.  I will make peach pies and roast sweet corn.  Maybe we will find a box turtle, and make drip castles, and fly kites.  Maybe I will get a chance to sit and read.  Maybe, maybe, I will rest at ease.

Summer is no less vital when its days are numbered.  What is vital for me is to be present, and aware, and not to mourn the endings.  Turning points are like tides, flooding in at the river mouth, standing waves against the flow.  Something must give, if not now, then soon, and when it does something else can take its place.  As a dear friend reminded me, sometimes when you embrace a change it hugs you back. As with life, then, so with me.

Here and Not Here

The problem with the Berkshires is they lack an ocean.  We had one once, long ago.  There was a shallow inland sea on the other side of the mountains, which we can thank for our marble valleys today.  Before that, before the ancestors of the Berkshires pressed upward to Himalayan stature as bits of what might otherwise have become part of Africa twisted and folded and transformed the very bones of the Earth in a relentless upwelling, the place where I sit today was once the edge of a Continent. Sometimes I feel the lack of that long receded sea, and the press of tides from 500 million years ago.

Although a fire sign, I am drawn to water.  Not just to the shore, but beneath the waves in the womb of the sea.  I am a child of salt water even more than fresh, more Triton than Naiad.  I am happiest with waves in hearing, with the taste of brine on my skin. 

I love the undulating spine of our mountains, but they do not curl in on themselves like Atlantic rollers as they shoal.  I love the way that the wind ripples the grass in an unmowed field, but there are no whitecaps at the crest except for the darting swallows.  When the air here is thick and waits for summer rain, the wind is always fresh off the bay.

Still, the fireflies in the meadow are are just as magical to me as glowing phosphorescence on dark nights by the shore.  The song of the ovenbird plays at the strings of my heart like the mewing of gulls.  The red efts in our moist woods and the savory wild mushrooms are the treasures we find here, instead of combing the beach and digging for clams. 

In life, longing and loving, here and not here, are braided like strands of rope and are stronger together.  There is time for each in its season, and to hold the absent places of the heart in our mind's eye.  I feel the wind from the sea when I walk in these inland woods.  I smell the sweet earth of home when my feet press the wet sand.  They are all part of the fabric, a unified whole, and so my restless heart finds comfort.

The Self Inflicted Wound

A dear friend wrote to me recently about the anguish she felt over the oil that continues to inundate the heart of the sea.  She is a brilliant poet, and one who looks squarely at the horrors of the body and soul, but she also is a person of action and feels helpless in the face of this heartsickness.  She is a writer, as am I, so this is what I wrote in reply.

"Sometimes it takes a self inflicted wound to halt the bleeding.  I think of those "relief wells" inching their way through the seabed, and it almost feels like using a lancet to release bad humors in those days when western medicine and modern science knew little of each other.  Black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood.  The body out of balance. 

We are shockingly primitive in our modern response to what our greedy delving has released.  It is like Tolkein's Balrog of Moria that awoke when the dwarves went too deep after their mithril.  It took Gandalf's death and rebirth to quench its flame.  It will require something like that of us as well.

Tolkien the lover of Trees also understood the sadness of the elves who outlived all else that they loved, who knew the ancient oaks from acorns and saw whole forests heedlessly destroyed to satisfy the consumptive now.  The Scouring of the Shire is for me the most important part of the Lord of the Rings.

The more we look unflinchingly at the horror of this house of grimy cards, the more we insist never again, the better chance we have that some positive lessons can be learned.  As for the wounded sea, the irreplaceable losses and the long term scars, sometimes the best we can do is bear witness, to tell their stories, to feel and to weep and to give tongue to grief.  The real healing happens over spans of time beyond human years, although it is amazing what resilience is possible from decade to decade. 

Consider the dramatic change in status of so many birds, including Brown pelicans, threatened with extinction by DDT and now recovering in its absence.  The harp seals that now haul out on the beach at Windrock when before the Marine Mammal Protection Act they were heedlessly slaughtered.  The quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink which when you were growing up was fouled and disregarded. 

We cannot sit by and say in a thousand years the earth will cleanse itself of the outrages we inflict on it.  There is a small comfort in knowing that geologic time is measured in millions while we encompass decades, but we only learn through telling and bearing witness, and a poet with your heart and depth of love for the ocean is the right person at the right time to give expression and meaning to this self inflicted wound."

Going and Coming

My children start summer vacation tomorrow.  In my youth, this usually meant 2 months at Windrock,often with Mom and with various assorted cousins and aunts, but with only a few weekends when we were joined by our working fathers.  There was a week of full family vacation in Maine at Monhegan in there as well, and then a mournful and grudging removal back home a few days before the school year began.  It helped that by late August, the air at the shore required sweaters, but for me there is something melancholy that lingers as summer wanes, and unlike my children I do not have the excitement of a new term in September to carry me forward.

This summer I will take half a year's worth of vacation days for that week in Maine and a week at Windrock.  I was able to save up and carry forward an additional week, which is needed because my dance card has gotten quite full now that I have embarked on finding a life outside of work and parenting.  I am off to Monmouth, NJ for the Revolutionary War reenactment this Saturday, and will spend it as an enthusiastic fan and potential recruit of the 1st New Jersey (Col. Ogden's) Regiment, Continental Line.  I will overnight in Philadelphia rather than in camp, for I have personal reasons to be spending time in that city beyond delight in old friends and the usual genealogical and historical factors.  Yes indeed.

Next week, my wife and I will find a quiet moment and sit with our children and share the news of our plans for divorce.  We do not have all the answers worked out to all of our own questions, but we are very clear that it is the right time for Emily and Elias to hear that they will always have both parents, that we love them deeply and that they are safe and secure.  When Viv finds sufficient employment to allow us to divide our assets into two homes, what has long since happened in the heart will be possible in the physical space we occupy.  As it is, nothing material will change in the weeks and even months after our conversation with our children, which may ease their acceptance, or may delay their response to it.

There is no avoiding this, but it can be done with love and sensitivity, without blame or panic, and that is the task ahead.  It will be painful, but also a relief.  We tend to take vacations and long weekends separately in this family, so going to Maine or Windrock without Mom and to Vermont without Dad is customary and comfortable already.  Last Saturday we went to the theater together and had a wonderful evening of Gilbert and Sullivan, followed by midnight desserts and children enchanted and asleep in my arms.  There are opportunities for grace and togetherness even in the pain of transition to our unmarried lives.  Joint custody means we will still be important factors in our children's' lives and give our better angels the incentive to interact well as good parents.

Although I am still in the same place, the same corner of our living room where I have been sleeping since October, my life and heart are in motion.  I am not pacing the cage.  I am hopeful and have much to hope for.  There is work to be done before all that needs to go and abide and come into my life is fully able to do so, but I do not fear it. No indeed.  I am just in that place on the edge of the season when change is in the air but the leaves are only just starting to turn.  And instead of melancholy, I feel myself turning as well.

A Few Favorite Things

Windrock Morning

I arrived at midnight and awoke to birdsong.  My visit is so brief that I did not even tell family I would be sleeping here, and so I do not know who is in the Little House with the blue pickup truck and the car with Maryland plates,  I suspect it is family because both the driveway gate and the Big House door were unlocked, and hope they are not too surprised by my car outside when they rise.

I am here in this way because I had a late night work meeting in CT and an early morning non-work meeting here with Mass Audubon, which with its conservation partners has conserved a substantial piece of land adjacent to our own and is anticipating several more conservation easements from our neighbors in what we call the Great Neck Conservation Partnership.  As we placed the Conservation Restriction on Windrock in December 2008, we put in the first link of a recreational trail on our land and I am meeting to help Audubon integrate it with the trail and parking area they are planning for the surrounding lands.  Then I have to be back in CT before 4:00 p.m. to get sworn in as an alternate on my Town P&Z and attend a meeting at 7:00.  Long day.

It is another cool, overcast day and everything is Summer green.  I slept on a couch in the living room and so am writing this while looking out the picture windows at the gray waters of the bay and a tug and barge moving through the west entrance of the Cape Cod Canal.  I will walk to the bluff in a little while and gaze out over the view that centers my soul, breathe in that cold, briny air and the scent of wildflowers, and feel the tensions of a busy week and complicated life drain away.  And I look ahead to the next visit, alone or with those I love, and I know they need this place as I do, even if they have not yet had the opportunity to know it in person.  It is a warm embrace, and always has been, and I know I will not shiver in the cool morning air unless with joy.

Paradise

There were Baltimore Orioles feasting on winter moths in the new leaves of the oak trees at Windrock, and weaving their nests on the outermost branches.  The air was clean and bright and the lilacs still in full bloom, while ours in the Litchfield Hills have faded.  There were osprey gliding like kites in the wind.

Children ran in the grass in their shorts, or tottered around on too big high heels and gowns from the dress up box.  Drip castles emerged on a sand bar.  Novel solutions were found to vexing mechanical problems, like using several small threaded lengths of pipe to make one large extender for a pipe wrench to fix the hand pump. We planted trees to screen us from the new construction next door.

I taught my daughter to skip stones.  I watched my son give evidence of a deep love of dogs, where once he had been frightened of them.  We joined my uncle and cousin for a glorious afternoon sail in his new yawl from Mattapoisett to its summer mooring.  We saw lady slippers emerging in the woodlands, and wisteria twining up the side of the house.   Emily swam, and Elias found quahogs in the cool waters of the bay.  I felt my spine uncoil and my back straighten in what is the closest to heaven I know on this Earth.

Rent Our Oceanfront Property in Massachusetts This Summer

This summer, our family homestead overlooking the sparkling waters of Buzzards Bay just off Cape Cod in Wareham, MA has a number of prime rental weeks still available.  You can rent the 2 bedroom "Little House" for $1,800/week, or the grand old  "Big House" for $3K.  Lots of July and August weeks available.  For a great vacation contact info here.