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Friday, August 23, 2013

when we were in rhode island

When we were in Rhode Island, we were living a New England fantasy. We canoed across Indian Lake at sunset, stopping in the dead middle of the water to drink bottled beer, becoming trapped at times in beds of lilypads topped with yellow and pink lilies, only to free ourselves into beds of lotuses. We used our hands to splash water onto the lotus leaves and watched the beads roll off of one of nature's most water-repellent surfaces. We paddled by the island inhabited only by wild geese and blueberries. We were like Clark, Merriwether Lewis, and Sacagawea. We pondered the snapping turtles and eels resting in the mud below and watched thousands of small silvery herring jump out of the water to catch their evening meals under a ridiculous purple sky. The water was piss warm even through the night, and we waded and sunk our toes into muck and crouched on big slime-covered rocks that you could see through the clear lake water. For the first time it felt like I was doing exactly what I needed to be doing at that moment and had no interest in doing anything else.

We sat down to a lobster dinner that began with fresh watermelon martinis and grilled cherrystone clams. The lobsters, bought off a fishing boat that morning, surrendered peacefully and I ate mine from claws to tail and goop. We lied out at Sand Hill Cove, where the sand glittered and the water was a clear tropical green. Schools of fish visibly swarmed in the waters and I picked up crabs left and right and held them in my hands. The shore was littered with blubbery moms and tan, leathery old people rubbing themselves with oil and laying back in their beach chairs. We ate frozen lemonade and experimental burgers and then went back to the lake to sit around a fire pit in the dark. We laid on our backs on the dock as raucous frogs went wild in the trees and watched the Perseids going wild in the sky. We saw the biggest, brightest smears of stars fly by from all sides.





2 comments:

Andrew said...

also clamcakes.

everyman said...

most certainly clamcakes