Lance Mannion

Where we no longer are

The haze
  has us
     in a slow, pink
       and gray

confusion; everything
  we know---
     the horizon,
       for example,

and the distant
  ridge of land---
     has vanished,
       the boat

glides without a sound
  over a sea of curled
     and luminous glass,
       there are clouds

in the sky wherever
  that is, and clouds
    in the water,
      and maybe

we have entered heaven
  already, the happy boat
     sliding
        like a bee

down the throat of a huge
  damp flower.
     Some birds,
        like streamers of white silk,

approach us crying.
  Ah, yes,
     how easy,
        how familiar

it seems now,
  that long,
     lovely thrusting up and down
        of wings.

              ---At Sea by Mary Oliver

Shark Day

More than 100 boats compete in shark tourney

OAK BLUFFS — The spectators came by ferry, bike and car. They tied as many as five boats together on a single mooring and loaded eight people on a small dinghy. Children sat impatiently on their parents' shoulders.

All gathered to see who would come in with the biggest catch in the 23rd annual Monster Shark Tournament.

The winning fish, it turned out, was a 361-pound porbeagle shark hauled in on the Marshfield-based fishing boat Karen Jean II. The shark measured more than 7 feet long.

But that was just one of more than a dozen sharks that came in yesterday. The tournament, billed as a two-day contest, was in effect a one-day event because of turbulent seas Friday that kept most boats in port. Only one boat brought in a shark Friday, and that mako did not even meet the minimum weight requirement of 200 pounds.

About 130 boats went shark fishing yesterday. That number was down from years past because the recession has made the nearly $1,500 entry fee tough to swallow, said Steve James, who directs the tournament.

Those boats that landed sharks came into the harbor beginning at 3:30 p.m. The fearsome fish were hoisted up and weighed as the fishermen stood around taking pictures with their catch. The sharks were then measured and finally cut up, first by marine biologists conducting shark research and then by event staff, who preserved the heads and tails and edible portions.

The winner's prize will depend on many factors, James said, but they will go home with at least several thousand dollars in fishing gear and possibly a larger amount in cash prizes and a boat.

Read all of Paul Needham's story in the Cape Cod Times.

From the Adventures of Lance Mannion: Lance Mannion, the Big Kahuna

Lance Mannion grinned at the cold, angry sea.  He strode confidently into the surf.  Then he saw it.  The biggest, meanest, hugest wave ever.  Still grinning, he turned on his heel and strode confidently back up the beach.

       ----A True Story written by Oliver Mannion.

Be sure to try the she-crab stew

Our favorite lobster shack.  You'll have to find it yourself.  We don't want it to go all trendy.  Scallops were delicious.  Last night, as in our last night of vacation.  Heading home tomorrow.

Watching over his Cape Cod girls

One morning, bunch of years ago, in 2002, 2003, can't remember for sure, the blonde and I rode our bikes out to Morris Island, the large hump of sand at the southern end of town where the Monomoy Wildlife Reserve begins with a jump over the channel to North Monomoy Island.  We leaned our bikes up against a then brand new bath house and wandered over to a cleared space in the sea grass that seemed marked out for a garden.  And there in the dirt was a stone decorated with sea shells and inscribed to the memory of someone named Peter.  Besides giving the man's name, the stone said, "A place for him to watch over his Cape Cod girls."

We puzzled over this, wondering who he was and how old he was when he'd died and when he'd died and who those Cape Cod girls were and in what way were they his.  We speculated about the significance of the spot which seemed to offer no overlook of anything much.  The ocean is practically out of sight behind a hedgerow, Monomoy Island, North and South, are hidden from view by woods.  Of course we understood that it was his spirit that was meant to be doing the watching, presumably from a higher vantage point.  But it still seemed to us that the spot itself must have meant something and that spot didn't seem all that special.  If those Cape Cod girls of his were friends or family, it seemed unlikely that this bleak patch of sandy ground, which, besides not being very scenic, was rather exposed to the wind and weather, was a spot where they would have come to play or picnic.  The phrase "his Cape Cod girls" threw us a bit too.  Did he have other girls in other vacation spots?  Or were these girls his Cape Cod girls because it was on the Cape that they were all happiest together?

Yesterday, when I was out there again, back for the first time since, I discovered that the stone is no longer his only monument.  There's a double-backed bench now with his name carved into it.  The bench is angled so that it faces a bird feeder where some chickadees were perching and having a snack.

The spot marked for a garden is a garden now and daisies bend and wave over the stone almost hiding it.

And it occurred to me that his "girls" might have been flowers or they might have been birds or they might have been both and that he might have used to come out here to watch over them where they lived.

Then I noticed that the bench was also carved with the dates of his birth and his death.

He'd died young at thirty-six.

On September 11, 2001.

I looked him up on the web when I got home.

His girls were his two daughters and his wife, and this, the Cape itself if not this particular spot, must have been what we'd thought, the place where they were all happiest together.

Rush Limbaugh tries to horn in on my vacation

The volunteer manning the desk at the Visitor Center at Monomoy Wildlife Refuge yesterday was a short, wiry, bright-eyed, and still square-jawed old man I'd guess was in his late sixties, early seventies---New Englanders are tricky about age.  He could have been eighty.---in a powder blue sweatshirt with the National Park Service logo.  His full head of hair was white and silver and cut close above his ears.  He was quick and cheerful and friendly with a roguish grin that established him as the type who's built a personal religion around the word spry.

The Visitor Center can be lonely place on a nice day.  On a cold, blustery day, the air full of a mist working up the courage to become rain, it's probably the center of even fewer visits and the old man was keeping himself company by listening to talk radio.

I wasn't a few steps in the door before I recognized the voice.

"Is that Rush?"

The old man grinned his roguish grin.  "You've got good ears.  I close it up in the drawer when I see someone coming in."

My ears were good enough to pick up Rush saying the word "race."

"I'm sorry," I said, "I can't deal with that blowhard ruining my vacation.  I'll come back later."

The old man laughed, good-naturedly.

Blue as the home state of Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank is, there are still Republicans about.  They become thicker on the ground the farther outside of Boston you go, and some of them are as rabidly Right Wing and loony as any yahoo you'd meet in the front row at a Sarah Palin rally in the Real American parts of Virginia.

But who knows what the old man's politics were?  He could have been a ditto-head.  Could have been a flinty New England Liberal proud that he cast his first vote for President for John Kennedy, listening to Rush for the fun of it. Some people take Limbaugh at his word that he's just an "entertainer."   Pop Mannion used to get a kick out of him before he realized the fat clown wasn't kidding.  And there are some people who listen because they believe it's good to know what tune the devil is playing.

And there are some people, self-skeptical, self-ironical, self-questioning, who not only think it's important to have their most cherished beliefs challenged but who enjoy it, who cheer it on, who even join in.  It's a relief for them.  A release.  As it would be for a parson to step up to the pulpit one Sunday, look hard at his congregation, and with a roguish grin announce, "It's all a load of hooey!"

Sometimes the highest-minded ideals and the most ennobling of faiths can feel like chains around the heart.

"I'll turn it off," the old man said, and he did.

After that the conversation was all about sea turtles, beach erosion, and when the tide would turn and the path along the beach and out into the woods would dry out.

The band warms up

Ready for their big number, Eidelweiss.  Tonight.  Five of eight.

Before the band concert

Every Friday night during the summer there's a band concert on the Village Green.  Took this about two hours ago.  The concert's well underway now.  We can hear it from here.  They're doing the Bunny Hop right now. 

The Village at sunset

Thought the sky was pretty in this one.  Tonight.  Hour and a half ago or so.  Friday, July 24, 2009.

Coffee and a cranberry muffin

Chatham Cookware.  Today.  Now.  Eight-thirty, Thursday morning, July 23, 2009.

Carl and Ellie were here

Greetings from our little version of Paradise Falls.  If you've seen Up, you get the reference.  If you haven't seen Up, you should.

On the way home from the ballpark

Anglers lost, 7-2.  I left at the top of the sixth, with Harwich up 6-zip, driven out of there by the mosquitos.

Heading up Main Street, I realized that I was following those four high school guys in their I (heart) T-shirts.  At first I assumed they'd been at the game too, but it quickly dawned on me that they hadn't been in front of me for the first block up from the ballpark.  They'd appeared up ahead in a moment when I was looking somewhere else, as if they'd just stepped out of one of the shops along here or...as if they'd just crossed over from the other side of the street.  When I considered that possibility I became convinced that I had in fact seen them out of the corner of my eye doing just that.  Well, not them.  Those four brand new white T-shirts which, now that the sun had set, shone like four human-shaped containers of moonlight.  And, I was sure, they'd been coming the other direction.

They hadn't been at the game, I decided.  For the last hour or so they'd been back here in town.  And I wouldn't have thought anything about that except that there was another group of high school students, boys and girls, sitting on the curb up ahead and when the four approached them one of the girls cried out, "I love your T-Shirts...again!"

And there was something about her "again" that implied more this was more than the second time she'd admired their shirts tonight, more than the second time she'd done so in the last little while, in fact.

The guys walked by without acknowledging her or responding to the laughter of her friends or to one of the guys with her shouting out, "Hey, are you all gay?"

They continued up the street, side by side---shoulder to shoulder, actually, which is how I'd first seen them---and people coming this direction had to step out of their way because they didn't ever break step.  This was a march.  A slow, amiable, modest one, but still a march.

They were half a block or so ahead of me most of the way through town but I caught up with them out in front of the gift shop near where we're staying.  There's an intersection and a crosswalk there and the guys stopped to talk over their next move.

"Which way, gents?" said one.

"Back that way again, I guess," said another.

And they stepped out into the crosswalk, marched over to the other side of the street, and started back down the other way.

I thought of chasing after them to ask what exactly they were doing, but I knew there was pie at home and Uncle Merlin and the blonde were waiting for me and when it comes to pie neither one of them is the most patient of guardians.

But I'd still like to know.

What do you think they were up to?  A stunt?  A lost bet?  An initiation?  A protest?  A promotion?  A political statement?  Or did they just want to say what their T-Shirts were saying, that they (heart) their gay friends and relations?

At the ballpark, still

I wasn't the only one watching the pitcher and the tall girl who thought what I thought was going on was going on.

When the pitcher broke off his conversation with the girl and her friends and started up the path behind the bleachers towards the club house he was intercepted by a local cop who greeted him with a beaming grin and, as he fell in behind him, several congratulatory pats on the back.  I couldn't hear what they were saying but the cop kept looking back over their shoulders in the direction of the tall girl.

The cop was a short guy, shorter than the girl, for sure, and maybe shorter than both of her friends.  He was young, in his late twenties, I think, but built like a much older man, wide in the hips, with sloping shoulders and no waist to speak of.  He wore his pants high and his belt and holster rode up around his kidneys.  He walked duck-footed.  His head appeared to be shaved but it was hard to tell for sure under his old-style police cap which was too big and from which he'd removed the wiring so that it flopped over his ears.  Next to the tall, strapping, good-looking younger ballplayer, he cut a comical but somewhat sad little figure.  Here, I couldn't help thinking, was a guy for whom a uniform, a badge, and a gun did the opposite of what he'd probably hoped they would do when he'd joined the force.

He and the pitcher finished a short conversation and the cop let the player go with another hearty pat on the back, and I probably don't have to mention that the cop had to reach up to catch the pitcher on the shoulders.  The pitcher walked off to find that other player he'd come strolling back with in a few minutes, leaving the cop standing there alone, his thumbs tucked into his belt, trying to look nonchalant, as he kept glancing over towards where the tall gall was trying not to look like she was waiting for the pitcher's return.  The beaming grin was gone from the cop's face and I thought he looked more than a little wistful.

At the ballpark, continued

"These seats taken?"

"Nope," I said without looking up to see who was asking.  Harwich had men on second and third.   I took my foot off the bleacher bench in front of me.  A mountain slid in and blocked my view.

I'm exaggerating.

It was only a house.

Big guy.  Tall guy.  Wide guy.  When he asked about seats, plural, he meant it.  He took up three spaces on the bench.  And I couldn't see around him or over him.  His head covered third base and the pitcher, angled as he was, his shoulders took out home plate and first base.

Nothing for me to do but move.  I walked around the clubhouse to the stands on the third base line where, because it's where the home town crowd mostly sits, I couldn't find a seat.  So I found a place to stand where I could look through a gap in the bleachers and see most of the field.  Except that I didn't.  Look through the gap.  I was distracted.

Behind the bleachers is a favorite gathering spot for the pretty young women who are planning to still be there when the game's over and the fans go home and there's pretty much nobody left but them and the ball players packing up their equipment.

Few years ago---Jeez, was it almost ten already?  IMDB says so---movie came out set on the Cape, Summer Catch, about a player in the Cape Cod League (Freddie Prinze) who falls in love with a local girl (Jessica Biel).  The premise was that Prinze's character was a hardscrabble working class kid and Biel's was a WASP Princess---get it?  Prinze's character was playing out of his league both professionally and romantically.  The reality is often the opposite.  Cape Cod, for all it's summertime wealth and visits from celebrities and Presidents, still has a large working class population.  Chatham is a fishing village.  The Cape League is for college ballplayers.  They play here against the best of the best in hopes of attracting big league scouts but because they don't get paid they don't lose their amateur status.  Mike Lowell played for the Chatham A's.  Evan Longoria and Jason Bay did too.  Most of them take part-time jobs to pay their expenses but they're on scholarships at their schools.

What I'm saying is that if these kids aren't princes, they are princes-in-waiting, and if they're smart as well as talented and they make the most of their opportunities, even if they don't make it as professional ballplayers, their status as college heroes and the connections that come from that will carry them far in life.  For the most part, then, in any romantic encounters between players and fans, it's not usually going to be the case of Simple in his seven league boots winning the hand of the Princess, but a case of a beggar maid pining for the king for whom she's done an anonymous kindness.

Which is what I always think about whenever I see something like what I saw going on behind the bleachers Monday night.

One of the Chatham pitchers circulating through the stands helping to sell 50-50 raffle tickets and give out programs (and autographs) had stopped back here to chat with some fans---three college-aged women, one of whom was clearly smitten.  Her friends were just star struck and they were talkative and giggly.  But she was quiet and still and her eyes were huge.  She was the prettiest of the three too.  Not Jessica Biel movie starlet gorgeous.  Normal human being beautiful.  Her legs were long and her cutoffs were not.  She was tall, but the pitcher was over six-foot and she had to look up with those wide open eyes into his.  She had his attention, but he was cool enough not to show too much.  He also knew enough not to hang around too long.  he left them each with a program and then excused himself to go continue his rounds.  The tall girl stared after him and her friends tried not to laugh too hard.

Several minutes later the pitcher came back this way.  There was another player with him.  They walked right past the tall girl and her friends who I don't think saw them.  The pitcher and his friends were talking quietly but the pitcher gave his chin a quick jerk in the tall girl's direction and the other player lifted his head, held it still a second, then nodded.

I don't know if the pitcher was looking for his friend's approval or encouragement or to be warned off in case another friend was interested in the tall girl or in case she had a reputation as a nut or a clinger or a heartbreaker or someone who's heart it would be too easy to break.  I don't know that I was seeing the story I've just told.  I don't know that all I was seeing was a ballplayer being gracious with some fans and then talking over the finer points of the game with another player.

I do know, that if I was seeing this story, I'm rooting for the tall girl to find out that, one way or another, whatever way she wants it, this prince turns out to be a prince of a guy.

At the ballpark

Chatham Anglers have a first baseman who likes to talk.  Chats it up with all and sundry whole game long.  Has conversations with the umpires, the other team's first base coach, every opposing player makes it down to first, even the ones who are only there in passing, on their way to second or on their way back to the dugout.  Outgoing, you would say.  And I wonder if that's a general trait for first basemen, along with being tall and quick and left-handed and able to hit with some power---chattiness.  After all, of all the players on the field, first basemen get the most company.  There can be crowds at third base sometimes, but runners don't spend a lot of time there usually, and at any rate when there's a runner on third, the game is at an intense moment and the runner and the third basemen need to focus.

But a runner can spend a good ten or fifteen minutes hanging around at first.  Three long at bats that end in strike-outs or lazy flies and the runner and the first basemen will have lots of time to really get acquainted.  Get the umpire and the first base coach involved, call down to the second basemen from time to time, and you've got a party out there.

So I wonder if it's common for first basemen to be gregarious types, natural born hosts, as it were.

At any rate, Chatham's first basemen seems a friendly guy.

He's something else too.  Tricky.

Other night, Falmouth had a man on, fancied himself a base-stealer, probably because he was.  He had the Ricky Henderson thing going on.  A batting glove flapping from each back pocket, taking long leads in a low, low crouch with his legs spread wide.  Give him a chance and he's going, all the way to third, he sees his way clear.   So there he is, big lead and a big lean towards second, and the Chatham first baseman's playing well off the bag behind him, deep in the hole towards second, not bothering to hold the runner on, because Chatham's up by a few and there's two outs, who cares if he runs?

Pitcher, apparently.

Apparently.

The first baseman breaks for the bag.  You can hear the ball whipping over, smack into the first baseman's mitt.  The runner's caught flat footed.  He snaps his head around, frantically looking for the first baseman, loses his balance a bit as part of him takes off for second and another part tries to make it back to first, and a third just stands there saying, What the fuck!, which is the part of him that knows all of him is out by a mile, whichever way he goes.

Then it dawns on him.  The pitcher isn't looking at him.  The pitcher's looking in at the catcher.  The pitcher's still holding the ball on his hip.  The runner turns and glares at the first baseman, who's grinning from ear to ear, lazily punching his empty glove.

I'll bet he's been perfecting that trick and the sound effects since his first year of little league.

On the way to the ballpark

Not another bouncer anecdote.  Last night, on the way to the ballgame, several blocks past that bar where the bouncers lead interesting lives, met up with four young men coming this way, high school guys, juniors, I'd guess, on their way to their senior year.  All of a type.  Tall, athletic, square-jawed, square-shouldered, blonde or blondish, handsome, cocky but boyishly good-natured.  As if they'd all come from auditioning for the same part in a movie about a high school quarterback or The Heath Ledger Story: The Patriot Years.

And all four of them are wearing brand new and very white t-shirts, two of which say "I (heart) My Two Dads," one of which says, "I (heart) My Lesbian Friends," and the fourth says, "I (heart) My Gay Brothers."

To be continued...

The existential ennui of Herring Gulls

Seven-thirty.  Lighthouse Beach.  Clouds low and flat, thin, like spills of gray oatmeal and curdled cream smeared unevenly but widely across the otherwise blue sky.  Think by now I'd have learned to read the weather down here.  Something about the metallic light---like a fluorescent bulb reflected in very dusty chrome--tells me it's not going to be a beach day unless I hurry back to the house and drag the gang from their beds and down here for a swim right away.

Walked out to the two large, pond-sized tidal pools that lie far back in from the shoreline.  Looking for shorebirds.  Took the inland route which is the most direct and so avoided the cool air at the ocean's edge.  Back here there's not much of a breeze, hardly any that registers on the skin at any rate, although a low, hollow sound going in and out of the old shell-likes tells me it's there.

The muddy flats along the smaller and nearer of the pools are empty of birds but not of their traces.  Footprints of gulls, small waders, crows.  Footprints of non-avian species too.  A dog.  A small, scampering, barefoot, human, and a large, galumphing human wearing brand-new hikers.

Settling down with the binoculars and my coffee on the edge of the larger pool.  Twist my cup into the sand where I'll leave it to go cold before I remember to take another sip.  Air here is fresher but can't hear the breeze.  Drowned out by the sound of the surf out of sight but insistently noisy as it breaks on the beach just beyond the rise of the foredune.

A plover over to my left.  Semipalmated variety.  Three other waders picking through the mud together.  Dowitcher.  Sanderling.  Piping plover.  And across the pool five Herring Gulls, unusually quiet, inactive, listless-looking, depressed-looking birds, as if crushed by the existential boredom of being themselves and they would gladly trade places with any other sort of bird.

Dinner on the porch

Menu: Chicken, corn, potato salad, French bread, Sangiovese, Pepsi.  Tonight.  Seven-thirty.  Sunday, July 19, 2009.  Wish you were here.

"The million dollar view you wouldn't give a nickel for."

New island in Orleans swamps old community

Storms washed out the barrier that connected North Beach cottages to the mainland, creating an island expected to disappear because ocean patterns are not re-depositing sand to heal the barrier beach.

Bob Long pushed the stern of his skiff gently around, jumped off and set the second anchor on the beach to hold it in the current.

To the north, the white manes of breakers were visible, a brisk northeast wind driving them through the new inlet and deep into Pleasant Bay.

After the fury of the April 2007 storm that opened that breach, Second Village cottage owners clung to the words of experts who predicted the break would heal.

At first, it was a tenuous breach in the barrier beach that served as a lifeline to the two dozen North Beach camps divided into two "villages." At low tide, you could walk across the channel that severed the clutch of 11 cottages, known as Second Village, from North Beach.

Long's family even floated their pickup truck over on a barge anticipating that the land connection along the seven-mile barrier beach back to Orleans would be opened again for summer.

Instead, the gulf between their homes and the cottages of First Village yawned wider with each passing day as the channel held, deepened, and the Atlantic Ocean and Pleasant Bay collaborated in scouring out a permanent, impassible inlet. It was now dubbed North Beach Island. Second Village inhabitants watched the shoreline to the north recede, and, one by one, the cottages of First Village were taken by the sea, until there was just one of the original dozen left.

"It's the million dollar view you wouldn't give a nickel for," quipped Bill Hammett, the owner of the last camp left on North Beach.

Read the rest of Doug Fraser's story in the Cape Cod Times.

Several galleries with lots of good photos, starting with this one.

Dreams

All night
the dark buds of dreams
open richly.

In the center
of every petal
is a letter,
and you imagine

if you could only remember
and string them together
they would spell the answer.
It is a long night,

and not an easy one---
you have so many branches,
and there diversions---
birds that come and go,

the black fox that lies down
to sleep beneath you,
the moon staring
with her bone-white eye.

Finally you have spent
all the energy you can
and you drag from the ground
the muddy skirt of your roots

and leap awake
with two or three syllables
like water in your mouth
and a sense

of loss---a memory
not yet of a word,
certainly not yet the answer---
only how it feels

when deep in the tree
all the locks click open,
and the fire surges through the wood,
and the blossoms blossom.

     ---by Mary Oliver