30: I have sometimes had the feeling . . .
30: I have sometimes had the feeling . . .
Little Follies, “Do Clams Bite?” Chapters 7, 8, and 9
7
I HAVE SOMETIMES had the feeling, since that time, that the future held nothing that I wanted to face, that I was moving downriver toward some equivalent of having to stuff a hungry clam down the front of my bathing suit, and that I would be better off, on the whole, jumping overboard and letting myself slip beneath the surface, but the thought of the bottom—the slime, the rusty cans—has kept me on board.
8
I WENT UP TO THE BOW and sat there watching the docked boats, the waterside houses, the Flying A station, and the Municipal Dock slip past. It was always a pleasure, however mixed with fear, to see the bay suddenly open before us when we passed the dock, where boys my age sat fishing safely. It was a clear day, and I could see across to the flats.
The flats were a broad expanse of the bay where the water was waist-deep or lower for Grandfather, depending on the spot and the tide. In the flats were numberless small islands, some just dots of land, others large enough to hold a shack. They scarcely rose above the surface of the water. In fact, what height they had was largely an illusion, since it was composed mostly of grasses, not the sand in which the grasses grew. As much as I disliked the flats at the time, I loved the islands, and as much as I feared clamming I loved crabbing with Grandfather along the network of narrow waterways that ran among them. Grandfather slowly, silently rowed Rambunctious’s dinghy while I watched for a scurrying crab along the overhanging edges of the islands, a flash of white in the shadowy water, so quick that I reacted not to the crab itself but to the memory of it, and darted my net at where it had been, much as I’m rowing the waterways of memory now, snatching at flashes in the shadows. I liked the pace of crabbing too: the lazy pace, barely more than drifting, and the whispered conversation, which wandered as we did, in and out and around the islands. If, just then, I had been asked to choose a perfect life for myself, that is what I would have chosen, and Grandfather and I would be there now, whispering, barely moving.
9
OF ALL THE ISLANDS, my favorite was the largest, Small’s Island. On Small’s there was an old hotel, Small’s Hotel. Small’s had, in its day, been quite the spot. It was abandoned now, and it fascinated me. It was exactly where I wanted to live. I knew nothing of its history at the time, and I was embarrassed to ask my grandfather about it because he was likely to see beyond my questions and realize that I wanted the hotel, the whole island, for my own.
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