I’ve never been ‘here’ before.
I’ve been by here a hundred, maybe a thousand times.
It’s human nature. If I had been on vacation I certainly would have stopped, looked, maybe even gotten out of my car and explored this historic site. But because I live close by, I just drive on by.
Until today.
I’m making a point of walking all of Plymouth’s parks and conservation lands this year. I started in late December with a few visits to the Eel River Preserve off Long Pond Road, then had a wonderful afternoon tramping through fresh-fallen snow on New Years’ Day on the Gramp’s Loop trail off Mast Road. But then this recently concluded roller coaster of a winter interceded, with snow falling almost every week, ice everywhere, frost heaves and tortured trees. It was all I could do to make it out of my driveway, much less find time for a leisurely stroll through the woods.
I couldn’t wait any longer though.
I needed to get away. I needed to get out. I needed to replenish.
Not that I expected Ellisville Harbor to do all of that – but I thought it would be a step in the right direction.
Right away I am disappointed.
It’s too close to the road, and to Cedarville. On a gray Wednesday afternoon there are five cars in the small lot – most with people sitting in them, eating their lunch. I don’t begrudge them the view or the time off, but I was hoping to be alone. I was hoping to be able to get out of my car, take a few steps down a path, turn a corner, and be completely alone.
Instead there is society to deal with: mostly workers taking a break, but a dog walker and a couple, arm in arm, that I see heading into the woods.
Through the trees bordering the lot I see a rusted old piece of farm equipment: I suppose it has been left as a reminder of the history of the family farm that once thrived here, but on this misty afternoon it simply looks like junk.
I get out, and move to a display where there is history of the site, and a rather vague map.
Stop critiquing, I tell myself. Just shut up and walk.
The path is wide, graveled, easy to follow. Too easy, I think. Shut up and start walking.
To the right of the path the old salt pond is visible through the still bare trees, a hundred yards or so below, and beyond that steel gray water.
My sense is that things should be greener, warmer, brighter by this time of year, but that the repeated blows this past winter rained down on us, have taken a toll.
The forecast was for sun, and temperatures well above 50. Instead it is overcast, misty, and a strong, cold wind cuts right through my jean jacket.
Stop whining, I tell myself. But in the woods and farther below in the pond, geese, grackle, and smaller, unseen birds, seem to squawk in agreement.
I look around for something aesthetically pleasing. I try taking a few pictures with the small digital camera I take everywhere I go – looking down the hill through the trees, toward the water. But the pond and ocean - which the brain easily discerns through the gaps, don’t stand out in the lens of my camera.
I walk on and the path remains too wide, too easy to follow, too public.
To the left there are dry, dead meadows with clusters of crumbling trees. I notice a dog walker has taken that direction. I guess that these so-called meadows must be minefields of uncollected droppings.
In the midst of a clearing a rusted wellhead surfaces like some strange religious totem. Ahead a few tall cypress punctuate overgrown rhododendron bushes. It doesn’t feel natural. It doesn’t feel alive. The trees are not in bud. Almost every limb is dotted with one or two brown stragglers: shriveled leaves that have refused to let go, even after so many limb-bending bouts with ice and snow.
Instead of finding myself deep in dark woods, closer to silence, and alone – as I would have hoped, the path winds back toward an unpaved public street – Gracie’s Road, and passes over the driveway of a shingled, nondescript home used – I think, by State Park employees during the warmer months.
With little additional effort I come to the point where the path angles sharply to the right, abutting a private home, narrows, then descends downhill before ending at a twisted, suspect staircase to the beach.
On the beach at first I sense only the disarray. It’s a lost and found of ocean items.
But as I walk slowly over the sand and stone and wind-scalded seaweed, gazing down at each arrangement of cast away ocean plunder, I find I am pleasantly distracted by the subtle varieties of seaweed, stone, and trash available, and impressed by the casual indifference with which the beach has been decorated.
The rockweed’s pods have as much variety and color as gemstones: in places they are pink, in others gray, black cherry, or blue-green.
A scroll of serpent green kelp is tangled and twisted, half-submerged in the sand like wet knee socks discarded by a skinny dipper.
A thick ribbon of – what I take to be gray polyester insulation, has somehow been looped like a holiday bow in and out of a mound of green weed.
Brown and white and green and amber, even pale pink, coin-sized stones are clustered together at a rise in the sand, licked by the foaming tide, forming an accidental Apian Way that stretches the length of the beach, leading the eye toward the distant stack of the power station at the canal.
A jogger suddenly streaks by behind me – and I jerk back to attention.
I maneuver back up the Escher-like staircase back to the pathway and, this time, meander purposefully into the dead brown meadow. In its midst, at a distance, I notice a cluster of short, wire-limbed trees, their highest branches pleading with the gray sky.
I move into their midst and find that they are all dead: the last bits of clinging bark slipping from their ivory limbs like sleeves that have lost all elastic.
I empathize with these trees.
It has been a long winter. My unused limbs seem to have lost their elastic as well. It would not surprise me if my skin sloughed to the ground, leaving me with just the husk.
At least the calendar tells me its spring.
