Back before, in the beginning, the ‘New World’—they didn’t
have even a culture, only the CONGREGATIONAL Church and its earnest
prescriptions for civil society. In time, these people acquired neighbors. They
were eventually able to move freely in a whole network of Connecticut towns,
seeking jobs, spouses, trade, education.
**
Yellow spartina, in the little Lieutenant River. By the
road, one half of a metal scissors. “LAX” bumper sticker on a white Chevy
Tahoe.
A brook in a backyard. The people in these homes can live
with nature in harmony no more than with a good white wine: they must lay it up
in order to quaff it at their leisure, cycling through it expensively as they
go about life’s business.
KAFKA’S ECSTASY: The ecstasy of the desk. Exhilaration of
continuing at your desk-work.
The road follows the riverbank north. The gassy smell of
leaves rotting, trees in shallow swampwater. Griswold Preserve in Old Lyme. IN
THE FOREST IN JANUARY. It’s unusually sunny. I walk through whole hillside
developments around Jericho Drive. There are excavators parked in cleared plots
of mud.
Wood fence in front of a beautiful private lake.
“Do you enjoy
annoying all the neighbors or just us” –A handwritten sign affixed
with masking tape to the fence, facing the road.
It’s going to rain overnight tonight. So: ?
So quiet in the highland hills. Obvious suddenly: Why am I
so ANGRY? At everyone who has judged me, on the general criteria, without
reservation, without questioning the criteria; as a transparent failure. A
misguided half-person. –Without even considering, What is the origin or
societal function of the judgment. Remember
to think of EVERYONE, the very best.
[Did people really judge me, or was I just depressed and
imbalanced enough to believe this.]
The colonists would be very afraid of the hilly terrain away
from the shore and riverbank. People didn’t move up here to these forest homes
until the late twentieth century. Thinking of the real thing, kids like my old
friend B, one’s scorn and pity and shame. Everyone who wants to
get up an argument, between our different respective choices. Makes my own work
so much harder—(the belief in an undivided world of intentions!) the enemy—the
opponent—the demarcation—the blood-drinking ego.
Just past the East Lyme border, a shuttered roadside bar for
sale by owner. [Sketch: lichenous brownstone milepost, 10 MILES to New London]
A glorious day for all the multicolored spandex bikeriders
to be out. Two men, one woman resting at an intersection, one man says, “You
know, I don’t mind that we did this instead of mountain biking today.”
(Indian grocery: ‘Please don’t go behind there, that’s
Indian groceries’. Warning me off.)
Orange sweater guy at credit union reaching out car window
to use the drive-through ATM, puffing on the curved stem of a pipe.
3:15pm: I FIND THE PLASTIC ALLIGATOR, “Taber”. The highway sweeps above 95. I remember
losing a toy in the Sound, and my mother telling me it would be swept out to
China. Because I stop to pick up the tiny plastic alligator, I notice the
six-person cemetery next to the highway here.
A single length of cold rebar rings the overgrown grounds. I
step through the pricker bushes and clear away the grass and dirt from one of
the horizontal tablets. I read the weathered inscription: In memory of Samuel
Taber, who died January 6th, 1813, in his 39th year.
(That was yesterday!) [See sketch] In Memory of Mr. Samuel Taber Junr, who died
Septr 6th, 1798.
One would wish to know why there is no Nobel Prize for
needlepoint. [This sounds like a quotation but I don’t remember from whom or
why I was moved to record it.]
Stout young guy with red-outline tattoo of the Raymond
Pettibon Black Flag logo on his right tricep. He tells me there’s no bathroom
at this gas station, but I can pee out back. In the gas station: much heated
debate over Tony Romo’s critical fumble.
Lacrosse is big in this region. The sign for youth lacrosse
in East Lyme: the decayed netting of a stick, affixed to a post at an
intersection. It looks like a Joseph Beuys sculpture.
“CONGAHAVATH CHESED” Jewish Cemetery. I spot graves from
1926. I place a rock on the memorial of an Army private; there’s already a
bucket of rocks and an American flag there. Some of the headstones give the
Jewish date:
“LUBCHANSKY: Sep 2 1950/ Elul 20, 5710”
Route 1 at night: neon signs. (But by day it’s picturesque.)
In Waterford, I can still pick up a New York City tabloid newspaper, but I can
also eat at a Tim Horton’s, which is right down the street from a Starbucks.
NEW LONDON: Established 1646. A car parked behind a
multi-family home is bumping reggaeton; migrants part of the economy here. A
pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses walking their bicycles up the hill of Beckwith
Street. Here in New England, liquor stores are called “packies”, and I pass a
business actually called “The Packy”. I make my way down the hill, toward the
lights of downtown New London.
5:53pm, 39 degrees.
The US Customs House/Maritime Museum: There’s an inscribed
cement placque out front about the first US trial where a slave got his legal
freedom. During the proceedings: “’Do you want to be slave or free?’ The slave
replied, ‘Free!’”—Note: Enslaved by my own cynical depression, I interpret this
dialogue as Beckettian tragedy.
Little whales everywhere here, like picaninnies in the Deep
South. A bar with $1 PBR. The home of CT’s first newspaper press: a gorgeous
space being refurbished to house a bar. I-95 over the Thames River. A shredded
diaper on the shoulder. Nothing to do about it now: I’ve committed myself to
walking across this dangerous bridge. (I-95 melds briefly here into Route 1.)
Groton obelisk?
A state cop on the Groton line on the bridge flashes his
lights behind me. A very thorough frisking (my crotch), he gives me a ride
across the river. He drives surreally fast. We whip off the exit. I brace
myself for carnage and death.
“Do you think your laptop could take a bullet?” I ask.
“Ha. It’s a tough book,” he replies. The thing looks like it
could burn you a DVD out of recycled plastic bottles. “Don’t walk across
bridges no more,” the state trooper says. He must have discovered my incident
with the state trooper in Old Saybrook!
The night still holding clear.
10pm. MYSTIC 5 MILES (regular road sign).
Shopping cart on the rocks at Trout Hole Brook.
Highways wend past ancient, incidental cemetery plots.
Scattered soft rain begins, lightly tapping the fallen leaves.
11pm: Mystic Historic Downtown. Settled 1645. (The year
before New London) The huge white Baptist church lit up. Glow from within the
high arched columns. The name of the town is supposedly derived from a Mohegan phrase--“great
tidal river”.
AVALONIA: A beautiful
paradise of spartina reaching way out along the road. Nature preserve.
1649: First settlement of Stonington. (Again, Seye-Brook was
1635.) Lichenous green trees in a watery area: a river or brook. It’s raining.
I have to stay at a motel. I can’t sleep under this rain, even in the shelter
of a tree with the moisture running all over my coat. The rain is in my
eyelashes and I’m chilled to the bone. (I stay the night and watch ESPN in my
cold bed. Blow out the hairdryer trying to get my socks and shirt dry. There’s
a story on about the footballer who played right through with the bleeding broken
leg, and that gives me courage. Stupid courage, perhaps.)
PAWCATUCK. The next day. I get a bite to eat and coffee at
Tim Horton’s, down the road from the motel. “Mechanic Street Historic District
has been placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the US
Department of the Interior.” There’s a sign up in the window of the
chiropractor’s office: “We accept Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Insurance”. Route
1 goes through a pretty, vintage old downtown here. There’s a new sunset. A
sign on the other end of a road bridge across the high, flush river, within the
same downtown:
“WELCOME TO WESTBURY”, incorporated 1669. Half of this
downtown lies in Westbury, Rhode Island. “Pawcatuck River: Mentioned as the
western Boundary of Rhode Island in the Charter of 1663”. Big old red brick
buildings wall off the north bank of the river. I look in on some newspaper
employees, they’re leaning over their desks and trying to wrap up an edition of
the WESTERLY SUN. (The office is a historical site.)
4:53pm. 48 degrees. “Victorian Strolling Park” behind the
grand romanesque terra-cotta library. (There’s a phone number for a room to
rent, I write it down.)
To travel to Block Island, you can take a ferry from here,
or you can fly from Westerly Airport.
I get onto Route 1A (scenic diversion) in the town of Cross
Mills. There’s a little cemetery. 1A is quieter, although not far from the main
highway.
1:38 am, Kingson, RI: “I can’t stop ya.” RI State Trooper
lets me go, gives me a cynical lecture about how I’ll be run down in the dark
by an automobile. I show her my passport. Against the chill night wind, I attempt to project composure and gravamen.
The highway comes out of the woods. Marina. Galilee State Beaches. Still dark.
There’s a lighter blue in the sky ahead. The stars that way are fainter. I’m
hungry.
“Wow. It’s actually only 1am. No wonder I’m not sleepy.” To
1A, scenic route further east toward coast. I see a fox dart across the
highway.
1:36 am. 37 degrees. Some wind.
Around 2am a tall local cop, South Kingston PD?, stops me,
and he wants to know where I live. “You come to Rhode Island to walk around at
night?” I’m pissy and I get a little standoffish with the cop, I chew my gum.
I’m in a bad mood now, and it lasts until I get to the beach. The breakers
rolling in from the bay, tide in from the Atlantic. The state’s archipelagic
web shines from darkness as an array of more or less distant lights on the
horizon. North up the coast, I can see the twinkling span of the
Newport-Verrazano Bridge. Far off on the dark horizon the points of lighthouses
appear and disappear.
Cops: My race (white), as well as certain class cues I’m
aware of deploying (“Yes, officer, this gentleman spoke to me”). The road wends
up a stately hillside, the black bay spreads out below to my right.
At Casey Farm, I rest and take in the view of the
Newport-Verrazano Bridge. I listen to some tunes by Amadou and Miriam on my
iPod (music from Cassie). I am exhausted, cold, in pain. The bridge is
beautiful and far enough to appear radiant in its nearness. A whole swath of
the world, the ocean, the rough coast of Earth here. The music helps me, as I
prop my back against the stone wall demarcating this farmland. Later on I will
listen to some B.I.G., and that will help me push forward when all else has
failed. Cars blip across over the bridge slow and steady.The cars are like
soundless sprites on an LED display screen.
North Kingston: Incorporated 1674. The roadside puddles
haven’t frozen all the way through, but they have a thin layer that looks like
when you tap your finger on the scum of your hot chocolate. The town sits on a
pretty bay. The graceful, weathered concrete bridge, built 1920s by McLaughlin
in New London, CT. [see sketch]
A local paper has
a headline: “What’s In the Lost and Found?”
An editorial, written by a liquor store proprietor, in The North East Independent (I’m reading
it over breakfast at a quiet diner):
“If you want to
see businesses that are totally quaint and unique to Wickford village
added to the already vacant spaces in Wickford, [i.e. if you
want to get rid of these quaint businesses] and if you want to see several
businesses located on Post Road [sic] go down the tubes and if you want to see
the former Mancini’s Hardware remain vacant and so on, then by all means
approve and allow the prepared big box development at Quonset, but don’t ask
the few of us who remain to help you wash the blood off your hands!” (He’s
talking about a Home Depot.)
Last night I passed the Krystal Penguin Inn, outside
Westerly. The name is worth writing down. The inn was to my left. A sign in
Wickford: “JAIME’S CAFÉ-DELI: NEW YORK SYSTEM”. I discover that ‘New York
system’ means a hotdog with ‘the works’.
According to a tourist brochure, the state of Rhode Island
is 37 miles across and 48 miles from
north to south. Not so bad, I can make it.
I reflect on things which have become abstracted somehow into
total hilarity as I have walked. At present these subjects are sublimely comic
to me--paragons of the Platonic ideal of the comic.
--Luc Besson’s Joan of
Arc
--the comic strip Shoe
(they’re songbirds, they have these hard-bitten reportorial lives, they’re
fantastically cynical about songbird politicians, etc) --(Part of walking is,
you can look back and criticize the zany abstractions of your walk-addled mind.
You can have delusions from walking. “Shoe”?? I don’t even see it anymore, at
all.)
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