Untying the Moon Read online

  Just now her taste buds are set to flower, and when they wheel into the shingle strip parking lot of the lobster pound the guy at the window recognizes Miss Ruby and then Bailey and turns out to be a kid she’d sailed with in another life. She orders two rolls and asks him to time the second one for five minutes after the first. When the first one is ready she leans her willowy body against the convertible to study the bay and makes ridiculous attempts at savoring each bite. Who am I kidding, she says aloud to the big blue sea and walks over for the second course. There’s been too much self control these last months—never her strong suit anyway.

  It’s tricky business, the lobster roll, a cunning balance of simplicity and timing. The easiest way to ruin one is to complicate the matter. There’s no such thing as jazzing up a lobster roll. No such thing as a “company” lobster roll. Nothing more than mayonnaise—the right mayonnaise—and a dash of salt and whiff of pepper should be ever-so-gently tossed with the nuggets of sweet meat from a pounder.

  Then there is the important consideration of the bun, a square bottomed hot dog bun that when properly buttered and toasted becomes as crucial to the overall flavor as is the unearthly delicacy of perfectly steamed lobster meat that someone else picked out. The butter must be rich and creamy and it must be applied to the interior of the bun before toasting, lovingly so as not to smush said bun—toasted such that the butter golds and each bite has one moment of subtle crunch between the lobster and the warm puff of bread that vanishes as the bite continues, offering the palate an exquisite union of noble flavors. Celestial.

  She pulls over again at Searsport, and as night wears on stops at Cherry-field Crossroads too. At Roque Bluffs State Park she showers, opens a bottle of wine, picks the meat from a now soggy roll she ordered just in case, snugs down in the back of Miss Ruby beneath her Morning Star quilt from childhood and stares long into the true sky, the one Manhattan will never know again, listening to Lyra and Cygnus and Aquilla and Delphinus, the star cluster her mother gave her on her seventh birthday. She dreams off into the sea . . . drifts . . . wakes with the urge to keep moving, so she and Blue Ruby swing off US 1 and swoop into Jonesport where Tall Barney’s will open at 5 am with the daily influx of seafaring locals, the clatter of cups, the smell of fresh coffee and warm sugar.

  The talk of lobstermen. Those in Jonesport, the Allens and the Beals, have a dialect that remains decidedly locked into ancient ancestry. They assemble themselves over strong brew and jaw about seals and Canadians, useless regulations and poor markets. They speak of tides and rigging and lines, just as sea reapers have gathered in thousands of ports for thousands of generations while the big earth slowly tilts oceans out and in to the beckoning moon.

  And though the talk is hushed, spoken mostly in the clipped and partial sentences of the indigenous that is encoded to the outsider, there is also laughter, hearty laughter. It is this long ago language that brings her to Tall Barneys, to the outstretched table where lobstermen come and go in freeform clusters through the day, but the rhubarb pie is also a draw—the best she’s ever encountered.

  As she passes the marina at the edge of town the naughty Norton fellas, Barna and John, are boarding Chief with the fifteen passengers they haul twenty-seven nautical miles every day out to tiny Machias Seal Island to clamber onto the rocky outcrop where thousands of puffins and auks and terns screech and scrabble and dive bomb interlopers en masse. Barna has been making the run since 1939 and his boy John has now marked decades himself. Boundary dispute with Canada has yet to be settled, so they share—one boatload per country per day.

  Bailey took a 10 mg valium when she made the trek years ago, aware she’d get wiggy once they got to Machias and everyone was cooped up in the miniscule clapboard blinds scattered around the rocky island. As one of the few who have set foot on Machias, she proudly keeps her souvenir patch in her bag of treasures, knowing she’ll not be making that journey again. It was an amazing adventure, but to be hemmed in that tightly, locked in a box where elbows had to be tucked in order to turn, was the stuff of nightmares. “Don’t Fence Me In,” Willie Nelson trills, and she sings right along with him.

  During her first conversation with Barna Norton she’d called to sign on for the trip to Machias and ask how long the drive would take to Jonesport from the Wooden Boat School in Brooklin. After a long silence he asked, “You mean by land? I have no idea.” Nautical miles are the miles he knows and Bailey was smitten from the start. Now she stops for burly hugs from both boys, happy to see Barna looking spritely, but she doesn’t tarry.

  In Lubec, one of the bitter-end clusters at Canada’s edge, she hires the captain her friends in Jonesport approved for safe passage into the vortex. Old Sow, created in part by 70 billion cubic feet of the Atlantic pounding into Passamaquoddy Bay where an underwater mountain is flanked by two great slashes in the ocean floor, each several hundred feet deep. A deadly shape-shifter, edging this way and that, depending.

  Old Sow is the star attraction in a hinterland where travelers happen along on occasion to view this oddity of nature from the irrelevant vantage point of land. They perceive only a bit of churning water, so they move on to collect a commemorative tee shirt, a sticker that reads “I Survived Old Sow.” Rarely do they venture into the water itself. Yet calamitous persons and vessels have been drawn in perpetuity to the monstrous abyss never again to be looked upon in this world. Less hapless souls have been spewed out once more by the onerous deep, ever to remain dry-landed.

  There are daredevil captains who will ferry those desirous to the scalloped edges of the surge before turning back to safety. Bailey herself had once ridden the insistent roiling of Old Sow with a foolhardy captain, whooped at the electric sea pumping through her as he fought to control the rudder while Old Sow tossed them like matchsticks in an eighty foot trough. As a child she never understood why no one else was thrilled in an undertow.

  This temperamental place rivets her—tingling skin, drumming heartbeat—the possibility to spiral down a sea wall of rushing water and be spirited to another world, antediluvian. She’s always fantasized about the lost kingdom of Atlantis. Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom” beguiled her, as had Odysseus’ high adventure with Scylla and Charybdis. To happen across Old Sow like she did years before was auspicious, and since then she’s made pilgrimages from time to time to this source of boundless energy. A seeker. Of what she isn’t certain.

  The offshoots of Old Sow, the “piglets,” mesmerize her equally. While Old Sow boils and thrashes, roils and churns, the smaller whirlpools form glass sided funnels that clearly bespeak the strength of each downward spiral. And, unlike Old Sow, they allow themselves to be closely seen. The whirlpools turn up again and again in her paintings. Since she first witnessed them, Bailey has believed the chaos of Big Sow, coupled with the order of each smaller whirlpool, forms an oracle—if she could only learn to read it.

  She comes to witness and marvel, to toss questions into the eddies and watch them get sucked under, thinking maybe the answers will spring forth and she can catch them. Unlikely, since the questions themselves are thorny and blurred. Who she is. What she is. Where she is. Why.

  At least, standing on the bow of the boat, in a long red slicker against the drenching splashes and spray, the coils of Manhattan unwrap, the suction marks of an outworn lover begin to fade. She’s been given no answers to cagey questions, but what she can do—what she’s done before—is clear a path to search for them anew. Right? Wrong? Runaway? Who can say? She spreads her arms wide and, utterly tethered to the almighty moon, for a fleeting moment the powers of all oceans rise through her.

  On the return through Jonesport she chooses a dozen two pounders—fine fresh lobster—and arranges them in Miss Ruby’s custom refrigerated bait well in the trunk. At Tall Barney’s she collects the still warm pie, noshes on a lobster roll, clam fritters, and a blueberry popover, then eases across the street to gas up and call ahead.

  “Hey Boss,” she says when Ben answers. Friend Ben, Bossman, Brother Ben, Pal. There since the day she was born. Always there, no matter her vagabond ways.

  “Hey Boo,” he says in return. The salutations they’ve used since their Carolina childhood when he forever tried to tell her what to do and why. In high school he quit bossing, but she knows what he’d say anyhow.

  “Room in the inn?”

  “Oh, lord.” The voice that sounds like smooth deep water.

  “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Bailey the Blitz has once again pulled her renowned disappearing act.”

  “Give me the gories when you get here. Where are you now?”

  “Top of Maine. Thought I’d bring you some lobster but maybe I’ll take them to the home folks and bring you a mess of fish back.”

  “We’ve got fish in Philadelphia.”

  “Not the same, Boss.”

  “Well come on. I could use a good story.”

  “I’ll be there after while. Just making sure the coast is clear.”

  “Always is, Boo. I’ll fluff your pillows.”

  “Alright then. Watch for Miss Ruby’s wake when we sweep the Seaboard.”

  In adolescence, when their bond gravitated toward the path of the physical, Bailey shut the gate. Not worth taking the chance. Not then. Not now. Loss—that loss, even the possibility of it—is a depth she cannot fathom. Whatever the out-of-sorts something is in her soul, there will be no risk of safe harbor. Safe harbor that will never deny or forsake. That will always be home. If she unlocked the gate he would come running, and if he really wanted he could hurdle the fence—but he won’t.

  And it’s not as if he’s sitting around waiting. He’s been through three “special” ladies in the time it’s taken her to quit kidding herself about this last guy, Kerret. Jesus, even the name sounds fa
ke to her now.

  As she stands there pumping gas she catches a whiff of inevitable empty and debates a ride to the docks. Some sturdy, no frills guy whose boat bunk she could share for the night. Just a little catch and release fun. Sweet temptation, but she’s restless for motion.

  On the southbound highway she turns to tidal thoughts instead. In the Bay of Fundy where she’s just been, not only do the tides go in and out every six hours, but around Eastport the boat you looked at six hours ago is now 26 feet higher or lower. At the mouth of the bay the shift can be fifty feet. Five stories of a building. It is the most profound tidal change on the planet. Change. Yes.

  By midnight she’s backtracked through Maine and dozes in some benign state park across the New Hampshire line. At sunup she grazes a breakfast buffet, loads her bag with fruit and cheerios. Never mind the live ones in Miss Ruby’s trunk, the stinging truth is there will be no lobster rolls this day.

  The next hours blur through Massachusetts, a bit of Connecticut, a corner of New York, then the Pennsylvania mountains. A string of junctions and a stream of cars, but nothing like I-95, and she takes child pride in notching off the states to Miss Ruby as they roll along with Billie Holiday and Patsy Cline, Pink Floyd and the Supremes, unsettled thoughts shifting song to song. The sky shades outside Worcester, Massachusetts, but she smells no rain, and by Hartford the sun bellows once more.

  Somewhere in the thick of Pennsylvania a man walks the roadside, a grizzled burnout shuffling along at the unmistakable pace of contrition, insensible to passing traffic. She slows to offer him a ride but he says he’d just as soon walk, has no interest in talk. I’ve got nothing much to say myself, she tells him, and he gets in.

  He’s wearing two different shoes, one dilapidated loafer and one white laced sneaker, a second loafer strapped to his pack, sole flapping like a puppet as the old man moves. A sneaker is a comfortable thing he says when he sees her looking. You’d be surprised how many end up on the side of the road. Blowouts mostly. She considers this. I’ll be able to wear my good shoes when I stroll into the Waldorf one day he says. She elects not to mention the hotel is a long way in another direction but he sees her eyes in the mirror. The path’s not always where it looks to be, he tells her, and she considers that as well.

  “Can you take some music?”

  “What you got?”

  “Most anything,” she says. “You name it.”

  “Willie Nelson singing Stardust Memory?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Let’s hear it.”

  He folds himself into the back seat and sleeps for a while, wakes with a start and weeps in quietude, then softly sleeps once more. When he wakes again he asks what state they’re in and she says Maryland. That’s good he says, could you let me off here and she says don’t you want to get to a town first. No, he says, I’m ready to walk now, so she stops and when he flat refuses money she insists he take the rest of the pie that’s been warming in the floorboard, that she’s caught him lusting after, telling him she thought it was blueberry when she bought it, that she doesn’t much care for rhubarb. With it she gives him the contents of the coffee thermos in a big styrofoam cup and wishes him well and drives on as he disappears into the wayfaring world she knows so well. You can overthink a thing is what he says when he leans in to shut the door.

  Deep in the afternoon she brushes past the panhandle of West Virginia into Virginia itself and the lush promise of the Shenandoah Valley opens before her. Though she’s taken a route that only grazes the congestion of the megalopolis northeast, it is nevertheless with gratitude that she turns onto the hundred mile stretch of Skyline Drive, devoid of most motorists, and watches the sun nestle toward the ridges on her right as Miss Ruby curves forth and back along the crown of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  By twilight she and the day are done, and after a belly full of road snacks she’s ready for fresh mountain trout. At Big Meadows she takes a room on the lake and is so pleased to have slipped in before the dining room closes she orders crab stuffed trout almandine, a smoked trout Caesar salad, and a bottle of Montrachet to celebrate the getaway. The easy part. Then there’s the What Now. She can outrun it, though, until the answer comes. Or a better question.

  Fully aware she’s the last patron of the evening, she strikes a deal with Verna that she’ll finish her wine in the taproom if Verna will be kind enough to box two orders of smoked trout with crackers and capers and onions and dill sauce for tomorrow since she’ll likely be gone before the breakfast doors open.

  In the taproom she falls in with a foursome of sag-bellied fishermen, swaps them tale for tale with her own repertoire of angling adventures, but declines the offer to come up for poker and instead sweet talks the bartender into a piece of the chocolate torte she missed at dinner. With that and a split of champagne she climbs the stairs to her room for the hot bath she’s prospected for hours.

  That night in the clean covers there’s sleep for the weary. She rolls and fades again and again, through to the morning knock of housekeeping, blinks her way to the sliding door and is taken aback by what lies beyond—one of those startling blue days that bar the door of despair. A Bossman kind of day. She brews coffee, sits in the slatted porch rocker with both hands around a stout mug and drinks big before the mountain air can brisk it.

  Alright then, she says to the gloss feathered raven on the porch rail, prompting him to hop and flap once as she rises. She fills the coffee jug, warms Miss Ruby, cruises the camp store, and hits the road, a hot blueberry muffin in one hand, scattering bars of bluegrass onto the southbending highway. After Loft Mountain she stops at the next overlook, spreads the quilt in a grassy spot, props on one elbow, and reads aloud the opening pages of Steinbeck’s homage to the open road, her voice spreading the gospel of wanderlust across the studded valley.

  It’s Monday so most of the weekenders are already home sorting laundry, but every now and then a Winnebago pulls in, gawks, and grinds back onto the incline, satisfied that Bailey hasn’t sighted a bear.

  At the end of the chapter she drives another stretch, this time choosing an even more capacious viewpoint before she spreads the quilt, pulls out her sketch pad, opens a bottle of Beaujolais, and feeds herself a cluster of red grapes and slabs of hoop cheese on Ritz crackers. On the hood of Miss Ruby she sets a Hershey bar to soften and returns her attention to the wanderings of Charley and Steinbeck.

  Her eyes heavy after only a few pages into the sun so she closes the book and licks her supple chocolate from its foil wrapper, considering the migratory journeys of warblers that chorus among the hardwoods—how far they’ve come, how far they still have to go. The squawks and trills of all the flittering birds will quiet as summer lengthens, but for now the Appalachians are alive with the parlance of wings.

  She gathers the quilt and drowsily follows the red clay path to a small meadow the sun hasn’t chosen. Mountain laurel blooms in hushed pink along the dense trail and the tall grass is sprinkled with tiny bluets, cow parsnip, wild columbine, and Indian Paintbrush nodding red and yellow. Here she lies and drifts, sweet scented honeysuckle somewhere nearby, an occasional engine rounding the mountain above her. At the edge of sleep she feels a twitch on her arm, tries to ignore it but finally cannot deny its movement, knows it to be a tick before she looks, then finds two more crawling up her jeans, the signal to move on.

  Through the afternoon she weaves the Blue Ridge, reads a chapter here and there at wildflowered turnouts that catch her fancy, and surveys the rolling ranges as one atop a towering lighthouse, sketching the ones that call out to her. With a fiery sunset kindling the westward sky she leans on the windshield of Miss Ruby and toasts the day, a fine day of unclouded vistas, while she relishes the smoked trout, disregarding entirely that the bread has gone dry and that the rest of the world exists somewhere outside the shadow of that particular shoulder of mountain.