O Shenandoah! Dirt Road JournalO Shenandoah! Dirt Road Journal
Hal wriggled into the cool Maine mud, fingering through glistening rocks and shells for a quohog clam. As water-worn rowboats waved and wrestled beneath the pier, a mainland ferry cut her engine, drifting alongside and in to dock. Hal peered intently while hands tied the boat to her mooring, pulling on thick lines, rounding the posts tightly, and a few dozen passengers debarked carrying parcels and suitcases. Grandma wasn't there. Hal sighed and held his breath as a horseshoe crab tiptoed into the surf, then pulled himself up and headed inland, swatting pebbles from his legs and shorts. Scuffing through dirt on the one-lane road, Hal passed the island's only store and noticed its single vehicle, a beaten green ice truck, parked in front. Mrs. James might give him a piece of candy from her wondrously colored jars."Grandma didn't get back yet." Hal looked up in wistful surprise, as Mrs. James said, and he knew she would, "She didn't? I guess you'll have to come back in a few hours. Looks like you need a piece of candy." Hal grinned as he reached down through the large opening and into the glass containing his favorite orange drops. "Thanks, Mrs. James," he called, pushing open the screen door. Circling Pirate's Folly and transecting it twice, the dirt road wound alongside stoney beaches and coves. It had no name. It was simply the road. Hal turned and crossed the island, past the one house with indoor plumbing, past the only year-round house where the lobster man lived, on by their community well, and through the dark coolness of Grandma's house onto the screened-in porch with its huge glass windows that pulled down by ropes when a storm threatened. Through a forest of pines and brush, Hal studied the ocean's temper. It was calm and low. Grandma wouldn't mind if he followed the path downhill and onto "the rock", a precipice almost completely out of water at low tide.
On a field by the river raging angrily against its banks, through the giant trunks of sycamores, Hal gazed out onto red and roiling waters. Branches of trees, styrofoam coolers, metal drums bobbed downstream. Gone were the etched gray river ledges, the reed-green haunts of ducks and geese, the wavering glass surface and glimmery shells askew in the river's bed. Gone, too, were the silver flat-bottomed boats, the bright-sided canoes and wooden rafts. Even the fishermen had stayed away. High tide, Hal thought, as he turned, wheels sliding in Virginia mud, toward the dirt road and his house on the hill. |
Midi music file, "Let Her Cry" by Hootie and the Blowfish, arrangement by middlesea@aol.com
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