BACK TO THE SEASIDE

Hewitt Cove Pier. Photo Credit: Brian MacLean

Peter and I have moved back to the seaside. I should probably be more specific and say that I have moved back to the seaside. Peter has customarily lived inland to a greater or less extent. Unless you are bound to a sea from an early age or come from seaside genetic stock, you may shrug at my enthusiasm over seaside living. In fact, recent effects of sea level rise may make some shy of the shore. 

My father's fathers, extending back generations to the West Cork shores of Ireland, were seaside people. I recall meeting a cousin of my paternal grandfather when I was a small boy. He was an ancient Merchant Marine officer, who proudly displayed a hand that lacked a couple of fingers, lost on a sea voyage. I stared at him in wonder because he looked just like Popeye the Sailor in the cartoons. 

My grandparents chose to settle in a mess of an apartment on the first floor of a mid-19th century house in Beachmont, a community on a hill overlooking the Atlantic just north of Boston. The house was situated on a high ridge which afforded unobstructed views of the Atlantic. The house had a deep, secret cellar, used by The Underground Railroad before Emancipation. Escaping slaves were rushed to the shore below in the dark of night to be rowed to awaiting ships off the coast. From there, they began their journey to Canada. My grandfather loved that story.

I recall waking to the smell of an incoming tide and the cry of gulls in that apartment. That was one of the few great joys of my early childhood. When I became old enough to carry a pail, heavy with clams, my father would take me out onto the flats at low tide just below that house. He taught me how to dig for quahaugs, massive clams with tougher meat than cherrystones. The clams were very plentiful back then, in the 1950s. And few people bothered to harvest those beds. 

My mother, whose lineage was from landlocked Belarus, didn't come out clamming, but she loved to bake tray after tray of clamshells, stuffed with our harvest, diced and mixed with heavily buttered bread crumbs. Eating those meals at a big table with my parents and grandparents was another great joy of my childhood. 

I went to a Jesuit high school on the shores of Boston Harbor. I didn't mind the one-way commute of 90 minutes twice a day on bus and subway lines. The morning commute felt like an escape from the grimy city where we lived back to the seaside. And I was always slow to leave after classes to go back home. 

Coming out as a gay man in 1970 necessitated adopting an urban lifestyle. The seaside came second to the pursuit an identity and a community, where making connections with other homosexual men was less fraught with insecurity and danger. It was an era of beloved gay ghettos, husks of previously grander urban neighborhoods, where apartments were relatively cheap and meeting places for homosexual men were easy to find. 

My yearning for seaside living returned once I established myself in the gay community. Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, was a summer gay ghetto, a migratory place, where urban gay men flocked in the thousands. In the 1970s, rooms in gay guest houses were cheap. Bars were raucous. Street life was visibly uncloseted. And drag queens walked around in broad daylight to advertise their shows in clubs. 

The 1970s in coastal America was The Gay Renaissance. Followed by The Gay Plague of the 1980s and 1990s. 

I chose to move fulltime to Provincetown in 1987. I commuted 120 miles each way and worked 32 hours in two overnights at a Boston hospital to make enough money to live by the sea. It was worth it. That 18 months in Provincetown healed my soul from the depression of the early AIDS epidemic. Winter was my favorite time. I spent it with the nesting seals at Race Point. I waved to passing whale pods off the beach at Herring Cove. I went out to the dunes at midnight to lie on my back and wonder at The Universe, magnificent without the interference of streetlights.

I left Provincetown, despite all this joy, to work with AIDS patients in Manhattan. It was the joy and peace of Provincetown that fueled that impulse. It needed to be shared with those who were dying in the valleys of that gray city. And that was what I tried to do as a hospice nurse. 

Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, I have returned to the seaside to live several times. Economic necessity has pulled me away to inland towns along the way. Most recently, Peter and I lived about eight miles from the seaside before our move. 

But now I am here with Peter, with whom I can share my love of the sea air and silent moments on a bench out on a pier in our new neighborhood. Recently, after a long silence, Peter turned to me and said, "It is amazing how good just sitting here makes me feel." I inhaled a deep breath of sea air and nodded. That moment was also one of the great joys of my life.