April 16, 2009

Brilliant spring skies– in coming here I retreated a month to the time of first buds and uprising bulbs. Headed east as soon as I had coffee, and when I got to the sea, the low sun was a blaze of golden fire upon it, so it could not be looked at directly. I followed the coast to Rye Beach. Swans floated in the marshes across 1-A from the beach. What did the sea look like? It looked like fire. I headed, as I knew I would, to Ogunquit, where I went in olden days for sex. I looked in the windows of the Front Porch, a piano bar which was a little fey for my taste–too much white wood and too many hyphenated martinis– but where a line, however awkward, never failed. One never had to wait long and one never was turned down. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. The best was to find someone with a room or a condo right in town, so one could keep on drinking and then roll into bed in exactly the right state of mind. I found four B&Bs where I had been an unregistered guest. Others I must have forgotten. The beach was flat and brown-gold and way too cold, but I stood there, remembering, with a smile on my face. Sought out and found the pole made holy by the snowy owl so many winters ago. Near Kennebunkport I drove off to the Rachel Carson nature preserve and took the nature trail there. A raggedy woods is fringed by broad marshlands, dotted with round ponds and further islands of trees, and bordered at last by the roaring Atlantic. At one point, at the corner of the woods where it sloped down to the salt marsh, with the sea’s murmur and the rattle of a kingfisher in my ears, I thought, “I have never been happier in my life.” As I lingered there, a man from Israel walked by, and we talked a long time. He was born near Ogunquit, but lives now near Nazareth, which he says is the breadbasket of Israel, green fields stretching in all directions. In Ogunquit they invited me to the Patriot Day festivities tomorrow, and I will probably go.

In the forest, after my Israeli left, a stood very still for a time, so that it forgot I was there. A pair of red squirrels tumbled across the forest floor, chattering and rattling the dry leaves. One squirrel had practically landed on my shoe before he noticed I was there. His take of shock, his backward leap onto a tree, the torrent of staccato squirrel abuse and quivering of tail as he turned panic into courageous offense was so comical I laughed out loud in the listening woods.