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It seems that the stew, the physical and mental stew, around me at the top of the stairs has reached a fully heated simmer. That’s when I realize that I have waited a long time, sunk in my thoughts. Too long. I realize that there will be no answer to my knock. So I get back in the car, back down the short driveway and continue on South Bowers Road, edging along to the next beach house. am the only car, but I have to weave a path between patches that are not flooded or which appear shallow enough to drive through without stalling the car.
Warm air from the car heater slow-dries my wet clothing as I continue my drive along South Bowers Road. Musky, brackish smells of the Delaware Bay are released from my clothes by the warm air from the car heater. The aroma infuses the car’s interior with a mélange of salt and fresh water, an assemblage of smells from the ocean and the seeping salt marshes surrounding South Bowers. As I drip onto the floor mats, my car becomes an estuary in miniature.
Looking out over the Delaware Bay in May is a mixed harvest of sights, sounds and smells. Every May, like every May for the last 350 million years, horseshoe crabs crawl in the thousands onto this beach to spawn. Their blue blood courses under their spiked circular shells that look like prehistoric shields for ancient combatants.
Maura looked out over this same Bay one May day more than 40 years ago. She made a funny face and squealed in discomfort when I flipped one of the horseshoe crabs onto its back. She laughed in fascination and repulsion at the six crab legs which looked like skeletal fingers as they moved in the air and its pointed tail as it struggled to flip back over. That beach where we flipped the crabs 40 years ago is covered by flood water today. I wonder where the crabs come to spawn when the Bay is flooded like this. After millions of years, they don’t just reschedule because of a little extra water.
Then I come to the fourth house, the fourth driveway stop, the fourth re-soaking of my feet. This house, like the others, is built on stilts. I walk up the steps. Water drains and seeps from my shoes, my pant legs dripping onto the steps. Each wooden step moans in protest under my weight. I walk more softly, wondering if these steps might be rotted and might break under an abrupt shift of my feet. The house is covered in wood shingles stained with peeling remnants of a vestigial coat of white paint. Rotting wood bubbles up from below the paint remnants in the corners of the windows and doors. Wilted curtains cling to the inside of the front door’s glass, flopping in moldy resignation.
There is a visible texture to the house from the salt and sand that have been wind-blasted into the shingles. This is a small house with thin walls. This is a house on the beach, where people nonetheless live year-round. This is a real house with real people, not just a vacation rental for vacation dreams.
About Brian Rodan
