The House on Rock Harbor Road -- February 8 and 9, 1963 - Final Entries

The last two entries in my father's House on Rock Harbor Road journal trace a cold but not unusual winter on the Cape. My father is back in his nature/environment mindset with poetic musings on the cold and snowy winter. He ends talking for the first time about a novel he was writing and how humor pieces aren't very funny at the moment because of the recent "Cuban situation." Also, a critique of Thurber.

So this is it. What next? Where to go? I started the blog, honestly, because at the time (and no doubt, still) a writer going public with his/her work needed an online platform. I started Unreliable Narrator long before Beyond the Margins happened. When BTM started up, I moved my writing about writing, reading, and publishing there. Back here I experimented with movie reviews for a year. Since then it's been mostly intermittent entries from my father's work. I will keep UN going in some capacity. There is more Wendell writing, but I'm not sure my blog is the place for it. Maybe so. Or possibly my Dad's writing is meant to stay where it is--scribbled on legal pads, typed on stacks of white paper, scrawled on yellowed and delicate parchment, and as clipped and saved articles from long gone magazines and newspapers. We'll see.

 

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- January 11, 1962

In this entry, my father is feeling, well, a little sad. Maybe a little removed from the goings on in the world. Maybe it's just mid-winter blues. The piece ends with Wendell (and Muriel?) on the hunt for furniture. This, it seems, is an unfinished entry. We'll never know why there is a sadness to the stranger's house.
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Today is a day of cold, the nation seems locked in a gigantic mass of cold polar air. Snow strands motorists in Tennessee. Chicago reports thermometers reading 15 below zero.

Far to the south in Peru, 3000 souls are buried under a gigantic slide of ice and earth. The Bridge of San Luis Rey is brought up to date by 400 years and multiplied several hundred fold. And of these lives little will ever be recorded except to note their passing.

Here on the Cape it is cold too, but in the teens and twenties and warmer in the sun in a protected spot. I walked on the beach of the bay. It was a silent world. The wind blew enough to make me turn away and hood my parka and yet there was no sound of waves for a billion tiny particles of ice formed a covering on the water some hundreds of yards out from shore to muffle waves and sound of waves. Only from far out over the white tide line did there came the faint hiss and rush of the small white caps that drove against the grated edge of the flow.

Occasionally the lisp of sparrow came from the tangle of beach plum and scrub on the high bank beyond the strands then all was silence except for the soft pad of my shoes in the sand and the crunch they made when I stepped upon a frozen patch of ground.

You found the turnoff into the sand drive by an anchor out at the main road. Following up the drive you came to the house set in a clearing in the pines. It was a frame house, wood-shingled, weathered now after a century so close to the sea and when you stepped out of your car to stand warm in the sun you were surprised to discover that the house had a view clear to the ocean down over the scrub and the moors and the dunes.

The yard had the quality of being now unattended and yet it bore the marks of sharing a life with the house –a spreading back (yard) with its rope ladder for kids to climb, a bird bath set on a high pole where a chickadee came to drink, a toy truck broken and tossed aside, rose bushes in need of cutting back, and around the yard a low stone wall to enclose the lawn.

We knock at the door and ask, “Are you the fellow advertising furniture for sale?”

“Yes, getting rid of what I can,” the man replies, as he sweeps ashes from the floor near the fireplace, the sound of the broom strokes loud in the half empty room. The great open fireplace held smoldering logs, the walls of the room were plaster, the beams in the ceiling natural. There was about the room a simple charm—yet now a sadness…

The House on Rock Harbor Road -- January 3 & 5, 1962 -- Cape Cod Sketchbook

Combining here two short journal entries that show my father continuing to explore the idea of a written sketchbook, cataloging in word statistics and descriptions of nature and the environment.

Also, for your enjoyment, I found a couple pictures of Drummer Cove Cottages, one featuring my three sisters.  ->

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January 3, 1962. Sketchbook
The wind blew in hard for two days out of the west across the bay. And on the third day while still it blew, I went to the beach at Skaket for seaweed and grass to bank the house against the cold. On the beach half covered with sand and drift I came upon an oar. Its blade was split, a third of its power gone, it lay mute along the heaps of black weeds.

I brought the oar home to look at it more closely. Six foot tall, it stands, thin and lean, tapered straight to the blade, and nicked and scared, a piece of heavy leather where she fit the lock. Probably all the way from Scotia, a neighbor said. See, it’s long, like as not for a dory.

Somehow cast adrift, the oar rode the currents south by west through fog and squalls, brine swelled, a strong tough hardwood, bleached white as bone but carrying yet the remnants of yellow paint or varnish while deep within the blade still showed a tint of red where she’d dipped the sea uncounted times. Whose hands gripped this oar? I’ll never know.

January 5, 1962 CCSB (Cape Cod Sketchbook)
A mist rises from the tidal meadow for several forces there are met. Some days ago it snowed, and banks of white are left across the ocher marsh and now it rains a steady coming down of drops too fine to see, a warm rain for January after days of cold.

Add to this a tide not quite at flood but high enough to line the marsh with lakes and flows, a vast wet place, mottled brown and white and gun-metal gray hazed now with mist.

Ducks course the channels of marsh and gulls appear and pass gracefully, silently, in the air above until at last beyond the road and the dark outlines of shrubs there is only mist and with it the strong salt smell of the sea.

Snatching Wood, Part 2

I needed wood, so one Tuesday morning I finally broke down and called some guy who advertised in the paper. I ordered a half cord. He said he’d be over first thing Wednesday morning. He finally showed up Wednesday night after dinner. He had to back down the incline at the side of the house adjacent to the railroad tie stairs my dad built. He upended the bed of his truck and the wood roared out to form short, poorly executed teepee.

I wrote him a check. The cost was about half of what I had left in my savings. Because he was a nice family guy who seemed really busy with his new wood business, I didn’t notice when he explained the wood was freshly cut and ready for burning. Because it was dark I didn’t notice the green of the wood. A lot of it was also encrusted with snow, so it was damp. After he drove off I brought in a few armfuls of wood and dropped them in the greenhouse.

I started to lay a fire in the woodstove, trying to build the biggest and hottest fire I could to heat up the house. I started properly with lots of newspaper and kindling, and then I placed a couple of smaller logs, and one larger one on top. I lit the paper and waited for heat. The paper burned, and the kindling, but the logs wouldn’t catch. They were both too damp and too green. I had bought wood that wouldn’t burn.

I spent the next afternoon stacking the wood in a long flat-topped pyramid, running it along the side of the yard. I brought in the smaller logs that would fit in the stove, and took to chopping the larger logs that wouldn’t fit. I had been splitting logs for a few years. I enjoyed it and I would rather do it than watch my father, although he was fine at it. It was just hard to watch. (To this day I can’t watch someone using a knife or other sharp instrument). It was hard work and I worked up a good sweat. Maybe I could just split logs to keep warm.

I was sure that there was no way I would convince the guy who sold me the wood to come on back with his truck and take away this green cord and leave me a seasoned one. I was the sucker. I had laid out good money, and I had to learn from this mistake.

A few days later my friend Jeff from school came to visit. It was my birthday and he didn’t want me to be alone. I told him, Come on down, I’ve got wood now. On his first night I tried to get a roaring fire going. I got a few logs to burn, but I wouldn’t call it a good fire and for the nights that he stayed it was freezing in the house. He slept in a sleeping bag on the floor by the stove. He didn’t mind.

After Jeff went home I continued work on the screenplay. On sunny days the house was always warm and I sat at the dining room table that I had moved to the middle of the living room, right in front of the stereo speakers. I listened to music all day while I wrote. I made coffee in the morning and drank Pepsi all afternoon. By mid-afternoon I was ready to get out of the house, so I’d take Muffy for a walk or drive her to the beach. With this schedule I finished a first draft of the screenplay by the end of March.

By the time the weather broke, the wood was actually in decent shape. It was still pretty green, but not fresh, so I found more and more logs that would keep a decent fire going. When my parents returned, it was mid-April and the snow was long thawed and the winds were warming. They thanked me for buying wood and apologized that they hadn’t left more wood for me.

I stuck around the house for a few more months finishing up the screenplay. On July 7th 1990 I struck out for Los Angeles in my ’79 Honda Prelude that I had bought from my brother-in-law for $700.00. A couple weeks later I hit southern California at the tail end of a heat wave. I remember driving across the Mojave Desert in plus hundred degree weather, windows down, hot wind whipping through the car, the frigid cold of a Cape Cod winter long past.

By October when my parents built their first fire of the season, the wood was perfect and lasted the rest of the winter.