Casting On A Sea Of Memories

Because this was a visit and a return, I might have had the nerve, right at the beginning, to call it Sakonnet Point Revisited and take my lumps on the Victorianism and sentimentality counts, though half a page of murder and sex at the end would bail that out. But one always knew from Lit I on that if you are to cultivate a universal irony, as Edmund Wilson told Scott Fitzgerald to do, you must never visit anything in your works, much less revisit—ever.

But when you go back to a place where you spent many hours of childhood, you find that some of it has become important, if not actually numinous, and that Lit I might just have to eat hot lead for the moment, because there is no way of suppressing that importance. Also, there is the fact of its being no secret anyway. A Midwestern childhood is going to show, for instance, even after you have retired from the ad agency and are a simple crab fisherman by the sea, grave with Winslow Homer marineland wisdom. Sooner or later someone looks into your eyes and sees a flash of corn and automobiles, possibly even the chemical plant at Wyandotte, Michigan. You can't hide it.

Still, there was one thing certainly to be avoided: to wit, when you go back to the summer place everything seems so small.

You protest: "But when I got there, everything did seem small...."

Don't say it! The smallness of that which is revisited is one of the touchstones of an egregious underground literature in which the heart is constantly wrung by the artifacts of childhood.

Students of Lit I: concentrate on all that dreck on the beach that didn't used to be there, won't you? Get the usual garbage, but lay in there for the real nonbiodegradables, too. This is 1971; be sure the aluminum cans and the polystyrene crud shows up on the page. The great thing, ironists, is the stuff is really there! So, questions of falsification and literary decorum are both answered satisfactorily.

I had neared Sakonnet Point thinking, "This place is loaded with pitfalls," and I had visualized a perfect beach of distant memory now glittering with mercury, oiled ducks, aluminum and maybe one defunct but glowing nuclear submarine. And I met my expectations at my first meal in the area: The Down East Clam Special. The cook's budget had evidently been diverted into the tourist effluvium inspired by the American Revolution that I saw in the lobby. The clams that were in my chowder and fritters and fried clams were mere shadows of their former selves, in some instances calling into question whether they had ever been clams at all.

On my plate was Lit I, in parable form, come to haunt me. I knew at that moment that I had my imaginative sights. As a result, I actually returned to Sakonnet Point half thinking to see the whalers of the Pequod striding up from their dories to welcome me. And, truly, when I saw the old houses on the rocky peninsula, they fitted the spangled Atlantic around them at exactly the equipoise that seems one of the harmonics of childhood.

I had my bass rod in the car and drove straight to Warren's Point. There was a nice shore-break surf and plenty of boiling white water that I could reach with a plug. Nevertheless, I didn't rush it. I needed a little breakthrough to make the pursuit plausible. When you are fishing on foot, you have none of the reassurances that the big accouterments of the sport offer. No one riding a fighting chair on a hundred-thousand-dollar John Rybovich sport-fisherman thinks about not getting one in quite the same terms as the man on foot.

Before I began, I could see on the horizon the spectator boats from the last day of the America's Cup heading home. The Goodyear blimp seemed as stately in the pale sky as the striped bass I had visualized as my evening's reward.