Rick Boyer: Billingsgate Shoal

"I don't want to be Dr. Charles Adams, tooth-puller."

"I'm so worried about you lately, Charlie. We thought the month down here would help you, but I think it's made things worse."

"I think you're right. And now I'm beginning to see what the problem really is."

"What?" She looked at me, searching for a ray of hope.

"Boredom. It's what you've been saying, Mary: we've got it. We've done it. So what do we do now? I think what set this whole depression off was a line I read in John Berryman's Dream Songs."

"Who? What? Never heard of him."

"John Berryman was an alcoholic poet who ended his life by doing a swan dive off a bridge at the University of Minnesota and blasting himself to pieces on the rocks a hundred feet below."

"Oh that John Berryman. Christ, no wonder you're depressed."

"No. His death was the good part. The 'funsies' at the end. It's the words he wrote, a line from Dream Songs that's got me down. It's got me down because it's so damn true."

"And the line is'?"

" 'Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.' "

Another silence.

"That's it?"

"Yep."

"Well, Charlie, I think you should go and see Moe Abramson on a regular basis."

"Nah. I already asked him about therapy and he said I don't need it. But I'll tell you, this vacation has done me no good and I don't want to return to my practice. I don't seem to want to do anything, including sleep. It's all boring, Mary. BORING!"

She snuggled her fanny down on my lap and put her arms around my neck. Thank God for her at least-

"What about Betsy Kelly?"

I luxuriated in the thought of Betsy Kelly (which is not her real name). If I want anything on my tombstone (and I suppose I'm bound to have one-another discouraging thought), it's the fact that I performed a four-hour operation on a girl that changed her appearance, personality, and her whole life.

Betsy Kelly was born, poor thing, with a prognathic jaw so pronounced it made her look like a cross between a bulldog and Tyrannosaurus Rex. Needless to say, she wasn't pretty. But four hours under the knife, bone saw, chisel, and mallet had made her emerge looking not only normal, but almost pretty. Her parents cried and wrung my hands for three hours. That wasn't pulling teeth.

"If all my patients were Betsy Kellys I'd be the happiest person on earth."

"But you're not."

"No. I'm dissatisfied and bored."

"Look: you can't keep being a dropout, Charlie. You left medicine after two years-"

"When Peter died."

"When Peter died. Then you settled on dentistry."

"That was really boring-"

"Fine. Then you compromised on oral surgery, a profession that combined medicine, surgery, and dentistry. You're good at it. You've provided for us well with it, you-What are you staring at?"

"There's something out on Billingsgate. A dark blob. See it?"

"Uh huh. But what I'm driving at is, that's two dropouts in your life, Charlie. You can't do it again. You're almost fifty. Especially when you're so good-"

"It looks small from here. But of course-it's over two miles away. It's not a tent or trailer. It's gotta be a boat-"

"I think Moe can have you squared away in no time. And I think you should read Passages. It explains a lot about these midlife crises."

"Yeah. It's a boat. Aground out there on the. sand."

"You know Moe really thinks you're very talented-"

"But why did they run her aground? Maybe they just want to get her hull up out of the water to work on it-"

"Maybe just a couple of talks with Moe… maybe he could make a few concrete suggestions?

I left the deck and retrieved my aluminum camera case from the inner depths of our bedroom closet. I keep it hidden there under piles of dirty clothes in hopes that thieves, if any, I will overlook it. I took out the Canon F-l, a 500-millimeter lens, and grabbed my tripod. I returned to the sundeck and rigged up the equipment. What I now had, besides a camera, was a telescope of sorts. Viewing through the camera I could get a close look at the boat wedged up against the toe of Billingsgate Shoal.

"Will you see Moe or not?" Mary demanded, taking little interest in the proceedings.

"Sure I'll see Moe. I always see Moe; his office is two doors down from mine, remember? Except that if I let him even think for a second it's professional the Shylock will take me for every cent we've got."

She sat back down in the chair.

"I'm assuming," she said with a deep frown, "that's meant in irony."

"Of course. The dope gives away more than he earns, and he earns plenty, believe me. The jerk doesn't even buy himself a house. Do you know that that Airstream he lives in was built in nineteen fifty-seven? Can you believe it? One of New England's finest shrinks living in a beat up old trailer in Walden Breezes Park? But you know what they say about psychiatrists: they're all nuts-"

It was low tide; the sand flats were extended to their maximum length. Billingsgate was barely visible as a low patch of tan on the horizon. I aimed the huge lens at the distant speck on the tan patch. Long lenses, even on a heavy tripod, exaggerate camera motion and cause the viewed image to shake and dance about. I draped a sand-filled sock over the end of the lens to reduce this tendency and brought the long tube into focus. I peered through the eyepiece and made the necessary adjustments. The wavy blob of green became clear and crisp. I viewed the trawler as if I were a few hundred yards away instead of on the deck of our beach cottage over two miles away. The conditions could hardly have been better. There was low cloud cover. A sky of stratocumulus clouds rolled away endlessly into the distance, like an inverted ocean. The light shone through these clouds with various stages of intensity, giving the sky a metallic, galvanized look like crumpled lead foil or hammered zinc. But as is often the case with this kind of sky cover (which usually means nasty weather coming), the level visibility was superb, causing objects on the horizontal plane to appear clearer, closer than they ordinarily would. I don't know why this is so, but it is. I could now see the stranded vessel with amazing clarity.

Naturally, I assumed the grounding had been unintentional. Had she lost power in the ebbing tide and been stranded? Was her skipper foolishly trawling near Billingsgate as the tide fell and ran her aground? Either one did not seem plausible; the weather had not been bad and all the local skippers knew about Billingsgate and the tricky Wellfleet channel in general. Didn't he have a chart?

Two men were walking around the boat. They looked calm. Of course they were in no danger. They could even have walked to Wellfleet via Jeremy Point and Great Island less than an hour if they wished. A third man appeared on deck. He was lugging at something heavy. Soon afterward he threw something over the side: a sledgehammer. One of the men on the sand picked it up and swung it low underhanded at the boat's hull. I could hear the rhythmic deep booming from across the sand flats. It sounded like a muted timpani when the wind was right. Clearly they were making some kind of repair to the hull, however crude.

Perhaps they had grounded the boat deliberately by anchoring her over the shoal in high water, then letting the ebbing tide strand her. This would be less expensive than having the vessel hauled out on a donkey. It would be the sensible, thrifty thing to do (in true Yankee fashion), if the repair was it minor.

I was losing interest in the whole project when I noticed one of the men return to the deck and enter the wheelhouse, only to re-emerge immediately with binoculars. He stationed himself behind the bows and swept the glasses to and fro. Since the early morning sun was directly behind me, I could see its reflection off the lenses as they swept by me. Now why were they doing that? Perhaps they were in difficulty after all and needed help. I stood up on the picnic table and waved my arms slowly, as a sign I'd seen them. But in all likelihood I was invisible-hidden in the rising sun as a fighter pilot is hidden when he dives out of the sun at the enemy plane below.