I couldn’t have been more than ten when Grandpa first took me down to the shore along the winding path that went from their house, through the tall black grasses that waved in the wind and the moonlight, which started twinkling on the sands and carried out across the gentle crash of the waves to where my eyes couldn’t see, out into the inky blackness beyond.
“Did I ever tell you about the legend of the old cove,” he pointed, “down there?”
“No.”
“Well,” he rocked back on his heels. “It’s time that I did. I first heard this story when I was about your age. Heard it from an uncle, long ago.” He paused, trying to savor the moment when he had my attention. “It seems a pirate ship, they might have been English, or maybe French, with a hold full of ‘booty’ sailed up here, you see.”
He pointed again to a far distant point where the island met the sea. I couldn’t see but nodded as if I could.
“The inlet there is where he found a place to sail up his ship and hide. But he wanted to keep the treasure more hidden, so he and his crew carried chests of it down to that cave off the cove where the water fills in at high tide. And any man who is unlucky enough to find himself there drowns.”
Grandpa paused to make sure that he still had my attention. “And there made his men swear a blood oath by passing a pricking knife that they would die to protect the treasure of Captain Knob Knee.”
“Knob Knee?” I asked.
“It’s an old story son, some names might have been changed. But” he resumed his grandiose tone “All men vowed then and there by the blood shed that if they should die in the protection of Knob Knee or the treasure that they would continue to protect it in the afterlife.”
He paused. “And then what?” I asked.
“Well then,” he drew out. “Old Captain Knob Knee lashed three of his crew to the chest that was hidden down deep in the cove’s cave, as the tide started to rise and a wind blew from the west, that they may be the protector till he shall return or until eternity ends.”
“The men cursed at him, and they swore that any man, beast or spirit who dares to enter the cave shall they themselves be cursed until the sun ceases to rise and set.” He finished with a flourish and basked in his theatrical glow.
I thought for a moment. “Grandpa, do you believe in that?”
“Oh,” he said softly, “I don’t know. It seems kind of fantastic to me. But I also like to think that there’s still a little bit of mystery in the world. Something we don’t know that science can’t explain.”
“Did you ever try going down to the cave?”
“Yes, but I misread the tide tables, and the tide was coming in – I might have joined Knob Knee’s men if I hadn’t had your grandma, standing on the high ground, yelling for me to come back up.”
“I think I believe it.” I said.
~
The rest of that summer slipped away like the clouds that blew across the sky on the sea breezes, the clouds that my sister and me would lay in the sun-drenched grasses and watch change shape.
“Look, it’s a horse.”
“No, it’s a cat, can’t you see the whiskers.”
“Now it looks more like a flower.”
And on it went. Nights came and went; the tide rose and then fell as if it had never come in at all. The summer had passed and so were the long days on the shore, the sandcastles had been, at last, taken by the omnipresent ocean, and my green and white beach towel was folded up for good and placed in the back of the linen closet at grandma and grandpa’s house.
The smell of grandma’s citronella candle had faded and was replaced by the smell of newly sharpened pencils, the first rubbing of a pink rubber eraser, the smell of the lunchtime cafeteria. The sound of the shore waves crashing was substituted by the squeak of new shoes against the freshly polished floors. The joy of finding a starfish, or even a sand dollar, became the joy of getting a good grade. Running in from the thunderstorm was replaced by running away from bullies.
We’d left the island when Dad came to pick us up in his black Buick and take us back to Lowell for the fall, winter and spring. None of us wanted to leave the splendor of the thick forest of spicy sassafras and sugar maples, the woods carpeted with ferns and loamy moss that looked otherworldly lush after the rain. Or the long stretch of shore that was the sole kingdom of my sister and I, all the way from the old William’s place to the inlet that preceded the Mystery Cove that Grandpa had told me about.
I knew mom didn’t want to leave either. She loved the island and hated the dirt and gloom of Lowell, though she professed a happiness to see Dad and return to her own life – I can still see the crestfallen way she looked back and the old white house, boarded with overgrown lilac bushes and towering rhododendrons, both now long out of bloom. I knew that she wanted to stay and stay and stay forever.
But we did go back next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. But, by then we spent only a few weeks there, not the whole long and endless summer, and it was different. We didn’t make the long battles of warring clans on the waving dunes; we tanned and swam and ate grandma’s lunches without asking for more. We slept late, stayed up even later, watched TV in the sunroom with the volume up so high that we couldn’t even hear the unceasing sound of the waves crashing on the shore. We took showers after the beach and, and the end of July, were more than ready to return to Lowell with our wants and friends and petty teenage worlds.
The next summer we only went for two weeks, then the summer after that only for a long weekend.
~
I had decided to pay a visit to the island for a whole week once I’d turned 23. I’d newly left college with a freshly minted degree. The ostensible goal of my visit was to introduce Matt to my grandparents and have them get to know each other. They were both getting on in years and this could be the last summer for this. The real reason was because I hadn’t found a job yet and was looking for an excuse to spend a week without having to look at LinkedIn.
There was also the hope that I would be able to get my grandmother’s strawberry tart recipe – she had made them at least monthly throughout all my childhood visits but refused to give up the recipe until I made the trip myself to come and see them both.
Matt was glad of it too – he hated Lowell, as did I, and longed to see the ocean, to feel the roar and wind that swept along the long, lonely beaches and the sand in our toes.
When we first got together, we took a short trip to the beach and spent three days lying under the sand and stars, sleeping and fucking in my car, drinking water out of warm bottles that we had no way of keeping cool, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that we made with plastic knives. Matt called it our week of living feral, which I’d laugh and join in on, but I’d felt that it was a degree of heaven ever since.
And so we went to the island, me and my gay lover, and were received with warmth by my liberal grandparents. My grandfather had been a lawyer who worked with Harvey Milk and my grandma a librarian who’d wanted to march in Selma but hadn’t been able to afford a bus ticket or come up with a good enough reason to persuade her parents to send her the money.
For days we lived the life that I’d spent long dead summers ago in childhood. We paddled in the ocean and made sandcastles that were as impermanent as our seized youth. We ate my grandmother’s cooking, and she gleefully dished out second helpings of dessert without being asked. We awoke early each morning, practically shivering with anticipation for playing in the thick woods, stopping just short of making a fort in them, before going down to the shore to feel the vastness of the ocean and hunt for sun-bleached shells up and down from old William’s place (old William had been long dead at this point) to the inlet, even venturing beyond to the wide shores of what I called the mystery cove. We dug clams just to throw them back, chase at seagulls, hunt for rocks, try to find sand dollars and starfish after the high tide had passed.
We made out while the tide rolled in, debated my grandfather on the merits of US foreign policy – he staunchly for Isreal, remembering the time when it was liberal to do so, and I supported Palestine – left our dirty clothes on the floor, sand working its way into the carpet, played board games with my grandmother, read romance novels on the beach, drank coffee that that was thick with sugar and cream and wore shorts with cute prints on them – Matt’s had palm trees, mine had pineapples.
A blending of adulthood and childhood, dwelling in a week of suspended animation, kids who had grown up but wanted to go back. This came to fruition the last night that we were there. After we’d finished off the last of my grandma’s potato and cheese casserole, followed by ice cream and a splash of old John that my grandfather poured for me with a wink, we slipped down to the beach for a last moonlight walk. The sky was clear, and the waxing moon was low and large and incandescent, reflecting on the breaking waves.
The air was spicy, and the breeze gently moved through the pines that loomed tall and dark behind us, stirring up ghosts of long ago, whose spirits rose up on nights like this, wild nights. Not to molest or haunt, but to be an unseen witness to two in love with each other and the world.
Matt and I sat on the shore for a long time, not saying a word, not cuddling, not even holding hands, but just waiting for something that wouldn’t come and that we couldn’t have named even if we’d wanted to. There wouldn’t be going back to college in a few weeks and no longer any summers that stretched into eternity. Matt would be starting as an assistant engineer in a few weeks, and I’d be temping, waiting tables or working as an administrative assistant while I tried to put my journalism degree to use. If I was lucky, I would use it to write click-bait about the newest spring looks for tweens or the twenty must-have kitchen essentials.
I wanted to tell Matt the pirate story about Captain Knob Knee, to bring it to life for him, make him feel the gusto and mysterious lore that dwelled on the island, to make him feel the way I’d felt when grandpa had told it to me, to see the waters rushing on the men lashed to a chest overflowing with gold they’d sworn a fool’s promise to protect. I wanted to tell him, but was afraid the story would fall flat without the rhetorical flourishes of my grandfather and sound like a simple fairy tale.
Or I feared that he’d hear it, grab my arm and we’d wade across the inlet and make it to the distant cove, only to find no cave, or a small one, or a craggy shore with a stern wall of barnacled rocks. I wanted for it to be real, for us to stumble on an old treasure map, brave danger and face certain death to be left with nothing but a tall tale that nobody believed – except maybe grandpa – or to be left with enough gold to stay here in this enchanted place and time forever, to never leave, never age or grow old and to never forget the first time that we together made the leap across the sands to an adventure that had started so many years ago.