Dear friends,
A few days ago, walking the hot breakwater that pacifies Rockland’s harbor waters, my two boys and I came upon a fishing vessel encircling a school of pogies. (My computer tries to autocorrect this to ponies, which I rather like.) It’s an odd sight this fishing. The main boat works a broad circle unfurling an enormous purse-shaped net rimmed with small buoys, while a smaller follow boat works another circle driving the fish inward. These are menhaden, small silvery fish caught for lobster bait. Once the net is set, it’s hauled inward, a slow process which smacks of laundry.
On this day, as the purse closed in on the fish, they thrashed about on the dark surface, and we dangled our legs off the big granite blocks watching two seals poach escapees around the rim of the buoys. There was no wind, we’d come for the wind, and the heat soaked us pretty bad, so before long the boys were making for shore and talk of Blue Gatorade.
It was close to shore, near the big golf club resort, where we saw the dead seal. It was the size of my older son, its eyes gouged by gulls. Flies encircled it. My younger son saw it first; it wasn’t a yard from where I was inspecting a bit of granite that had caught my eye. We took it all in for a minute or two, and walked quietly back to my truck in the heat.
As a filmmaker, or perhaps just as a human (I cannot always tell what shapes what), many images call up others. The dead seal called up the Verrazano Narrows in Brooklyn, where 12 years ago I’d come upon an enormous 7-foot sturgeon who had washed ashore after a ship strike. I filmed his strange white corpse for a long while, before ringing an old college friend who worked at the aquarium, who called the officials who deal with such things—strange ancient fish slain by a busy world.
The pale sturgeon appeared in a film called Bluespace, arguably my most incomprehensible film, not much of a distinction but an honest reflection of the things I was thinking about during my waning days in New York City: terraforming, sea level rise, Mars. A live seal (and, for that matter, some pogie fishermen) appeared five years later in a film called The Long Coast, which arguably tangles with the same questions at the root of Bluespace, except from the coast of Maine: what is our fate, along the water’s edge?
A few days before our encounter with the dead seal on the breakwater, I’d been filming with a former Coast Guard officer who was speaking about the fog. One night in the 1970s, he’d responded to a distress call from the Rockland breakwater. A speedboat had struck it at 40 knots in the blinding fog, one passenger flung onto the granite blocks where years later my boys and I would watch the pogie fishing, another passenger unconscious or speaking gibberish from shock, I cannot remember, and the pilot rendered faceless after striking the steering wheel. Or not precisely faceless, no, what did he say, he said the pilot’s face was somehow turned inside out.
I’d been thinking about this faceless man during the walk I took with my boys on the breakwater. Tourists go there, but also locals fishing for mackerel or just getting a spot of exercise. My parents always said it was a mile out on the granite to the lighthouse, but I never believed it. I still don’t know how far it is, and prefer not to know. You have to watch where you’re going, or you can lose an ankle down between the blocks. And you can’t get lost in thinking about Coast Guard rescues from the 1970s, or you miss the chance to see your youngest son pause by a enormous gull, bemused by the comings and goings, staying close by, hoping for a Cheeto.
I’d feel better saying that I don’t like the story of the faceless man, but it’s not true. The story enriched my experience on the breakwater. I would never wish facelessness upon a boater, but I must acknowledge that part of what I seek in filmmaking is a sort of layering of my world. By collecting images and visions and stories from the past, the present gains facets. Things get complicated. Landscapes unpeel. I don’t particularly want to think about boating accidents when I’m trying to find a breeze with my boys on a hot day, but the world is this. There’s no looking away, because there is no away; everywhere you turn, there are unfurlings.
Look south, towards town, and a bait boat hauls in pogies in the company of gleeful seals. Look east, towards the lighthouse, and a boat fifty years ago slams into the granite going 40 knots in pea soup. Look west, and a dead seal waits for high tide to wash it loose. Look north, and a sailboat arcs slightly out of view, as if you need any more reminders that the Earth is round, and that everywhere you go brings you right back home again.