The Sentient House

At the Elizabeth Bishop House, Great Village, Nova Scotia

Great Village is on the Bay of Fundy. All you need to know about the Bay of Fundy is that the tides are huge, the highest in the world. During a full moon the water in the bay can rise up fifty feet and sometimes over, twice a day.

The house is a simple wooden one, bigger than it looks on the outside, painted white and with a porch at the back where you can sit at dusk and watch a blanket of mist, a sea fret, approaching across the fields. Then it gets dark, the moon rises and (mosquitoes notwithstanding) you don’t want to go inside.

I was told when I arrived that the little house is sentient, I hoped in a friendly way. It has a set of steep, uncarpeted stairs to get you up to the top floor, exactly like my grandmother’s house in Ireland, of which the whole place reminds me. There are old photos, a few family paintings on the walls, three cozy bedrooms with slanted roofs and each with its own rampantly optimistic floral wallpaper. Folded patchwork quilts and crochet blankets lie on beds as befits such a dwelling, but the grandmother is long gone and so is the Little Marvel Stove, the kettle, and the almanac in the kitchen—some of the objects her granddaughter’s “Sestina” made so famous.

I also heard that the house, sentient but not sedentary, originally stood further up in the nearby Cobequid Mountains, where it had been known as a wayside inn of ill repute. As in a Buster Keaton film, many of the clapboard houses all around the province may have moved a few times before settling at a final spot. When residents upped and left, they took their houses with them. Or they were sold to strangers and rolled away. On logs.

So instead of going inside, I cross the road, carefully—the house is on a busy tarmac bend these days, not the modest dirt track of the old photos, and opposite a filling station that has always been there. When it’s wet, which is quite often, the colored signs reflect in the oily puddles and it’s a little like stepping into an Edward Hopper night scene. Wilsons Gas Stop is now a hub of the village—it is open late and you can get good coffee there and food.

Adjacent stands a big wooden church with a steeple silhouetted against the evening sky. At the Bishop house there’s a good view of it from her bedroom. These days the congregations have declined and the basement of the church has been converted into a café, to help with the upkeep and to provide fuel for tourists who travel up from Maine to trawl the antique stores that are now proliferating. All around the Maritimes you see these plain buildings, painted white against the backdrop of somber forest—“bleached, ridged as clamshells” as she so precisely describes them in “The Moose.” Some have had to be put up for sale—you can buy a beautiful white church for a Canadian dollar. Not the land though, so you would have to move it.

When I do go to bed (with some old New Yorkers), it gets noisy. All night long bikers roar round the bend or stop to fill up and take a break. There’s a huge motorcycle convention at the end of August, the biggest in North America I’m told—the Wharf Rat Rally in Digby, Nova Scotia—and they are gathering from all over to spend a week or so riding around the province before meeting up in force to display their shiny machines, like stags 
showing off their antlers.

 

 

So here I am, “in the village”—to quote the title of a Bishop story set in just such a village in Nova Scotia. Not only that, I’m in the bedroom, where the mother in the story screams.

During the day, Great Village itself is quiet and discreet; I hear occasional car doors slam but I don’t see many people. I rarely see children or teenagers running around even though it’s the summer holidays. I wonder where they all can be.

Every day I’m outdoors, out of the house driving through the tree-sided roads, everywhere a dark green diagonal mass that only stops when it reaches the water’s edge. Most of the routes that lead off the main road end up at the sea. They are often dirt tracks and the ground is deep red clay complementing the trees. Some of the original people to settle the area were the Mi’kmaq, “People of the Red Earth.”

Even out of the house I am haunted in a lovely, irreverent way. Wherever I go I feel her there before me. Maybe I should write a “travel” piece. After all, Bishop wrote about Brazil, although she moaned to Robert Lowell about it, because it was writing for money.

Along I go, up and over the hills, the sea always close by, flashing past yellow hazard signs in English and French, picturing a moose. Every so often a motorcyclist appears, a small figure in the side mirror, before overtaking on the otherwise empty roads. Usually I drive west down the 209 Highway from Great Village toward Advocate Harbour on the tip of the bay. This is in the opposite direction to the giant smiling strawberry sculpture on legs in a field on the road to Truro, the nearest town. I’m not sure why it’s smiling so widely, as in recent years there has been a serious strawberry blight, and it’s one of the main crops of the region, along with the wonderful wild blueberries, a particular favorite of local bears, who risk all for a mouthful of heaven. It must have been a worrying time for farmers, as the regional economy is reliant on this produce and has been since the first European settlers arrived.

A notice board in a friendly local diner with a huge parking lot for trucks to pull into announces yard sales, chowder get-togethers, an upcoming dance in the church hall—activities that all could have taken place a hundred or two hundred years ago—gas or candlelit winter evenings with couples spinning around in church halls, waists tightly held, skirts billowing and shoes clattering over the floorboards in time to the clapping and fiddling, music that is still so prevalent in the Maritimes today.

Truro has a famous racetrack where I have been planning to spend a day. It’s harness racing, the driver in a small, two-wheeled cart, like a chariot, behind the horse. Popular all over the province, it’s a regional sport that grew from farmhands chasing across bumpy fields for fun after work, on summer evenings golden and immanent. I read in an interview that Bishop spent some months on a writer’s residency at Yaddo, the artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, and she admitted that while there she was mostly out at the races!

In the diner I am advised to avoid driving at dusk. The big moose stand their ground in the dark and their eyes are far too elevated to be caught in the headlights. I keep thinking about the actual antlers lying in the antique store in Great Village, close to the Bishop house. They look like they have been there for years—gathering dust, unnoticed, the same color as the unvarnished floorboards, and made of solid bone. I haul one of them up with both hands and it tips me over—how can they walk around with such hefty displays of handsomeness? Nobody wants them now, not even the moose, who sheds them every year.

One day on CBC Radio there is a news item that adds to the interest of the drive: two bikers, a man and a woman, are riding around Cape Breton, the woman up in front a hundred meters or so. At one point she looks back and he isn’t there. Nothing but the long, straight incline cutting through the trees. Her partner and his purple Harley Davidson, the radio journalist says, have vanished. Over a couple of days the story stays in the news. By now police helicopters have been deployed but the man has gone. You cannot help but picture him on the bike, looking up the hill. At what point does he make the decision to turn off—or turn back? Has it been building up, has there been an argument at lunch—or is it a quick existential decision, like Jack Nicholson jumping out of his car and up into the cab of the articulated truck at the end of Five Easy Pieces, away from his girlfriend and his life?

Another day driving along, I switch channels and catch the end of a love story between a woman and a bear.

Trees, trees, trees, trees, trees, trees, trees, trees, trees ...

sick of trees? shouts a billboard—This way to the beach! Come and visit.

So I swerve off the main road and head into the forest, to get to the sea. I have just driven through places called Economy—Lower and Upper, already familiar names from Bishop poems. Now I am at Five Islands village and this is the road of “The Moose” and the bus at night.

 

 

Hot, just after midday, I flop down on the grass near the beach. Across the water are the five small islands, all in a row. As I drift off, the Three Sisters, massive, misshapen, red and black basalt stacks that ascend further down the bay, come to mind, visible even when the tide is in, fifty feet high. Orange and blue kayaks, tiny in comparison, negotiate around them.

I wake to the sireny, tinkly sounds of laughter and splashing. Three teenage girls, all with long wet hair, up to their shoulders in the water. They have their arms round each other and look fused together like a Hydra. Under a tree, sitting up on a picnic table smoking, a man, probably one of their fathers, also stares out at them, the rest of the family in a bunch further up the bank in the sun, asleep.

With now sunburnt arms where I’d forgotten to spray lotion earlier, I get up and walk away from the picnic area toward an empty part of the beach. Spectacular driftwood, the best I’ve ever seen—huge, white broken branches lie all around. As I approach the lapping sea the ground starts to yield under my feet. Water seeps into my sneakers and it’s not unpleasant. The marshiness is straw-covered—this is the nutritious grass that famously makes the coats of the local horses shine so beautifully. The early French-speaking Acadian settlers built an ingenious system of dikes in the salt marshes all around this part of Canada, creating fertile farmland below sea level, far richer than higher up the country.

Heading further down the coast, passing through even more evocative place names: New Salem, West Apple, Diligent River—ah the bonnets, the aprons and the skirts held up as feet pick across the muddy tracks. My car rattles over an exciting one-lane metal bridge to Spicers Cove and then on to Eatonville, a beach on Cape Chignecto, an inlet with 600-foot cliffs.

Around the cliffs is another empty beach called Spencer’s Island, the place where I end the day. It was a shipbuilding center in the last days of the Age of Sail and here is where the Mary Celeste was built and launched into a precarious and strange life. Her maiden voyage was to Five Islands and was a simple, easy journey to pick up some timber. Who would have thought then that she would end up as the brigantine famous for a series of mysterious, almost slapstick collisions into rocks and cliffs all over the world and then, finally, as the poetic enigma floating unmanned, in a potentially explosive, etherized mist in the middle of the Azores, her hull still full of (untouched) denatured alcohol?

All this reminds me of Bishop, who had her own share of shipwrecks, in every sense. Her great-grandfather was lost at sea, drowned in a storm near Sable Island, off the Maritimes coast, and when she was eight, on a trip from Boston with an aunt, the boat they were in, The North Star, was wrecked in the fog—but everybody was rescued.

On the shores now there is no trace of all this industry—the buildings all packed up and rolled away. Or blown away. Although on this lovely summer 
day there is no trace of wind, the driftwood here tells another story. On stormy winter nights whole trees have been uprooted and hurled against the cliffs, and the slew of bleached debris here on this beach is so terrifying that all I can do is sit down on a log and weep.

Dusk, and I’m by the side of the road. I have pulled in after passing a church that is half dismantled and decide to get out and walk around. All the gothic windows have been wrenched out and lined against the wall. The church is a shell, the roof gone. The grass is wet. I take a few photos but it’s almost dark, the grainy, shadowy images on my phone only just making sense. The sky is dramatic though, purple and streaky. I go back to the car and sit and look out, the trees and buildings softening as the sea fret whispers in. So quiet I hear a little buzzing and realize that here is the source of the bites on my legs. A mosquito has been living in the car. What does she do in there all day? Hours of lonely expectancy, waiting for the source of blood to return, which it always does. I turn on the interior light, softly pick up the tide timetable on the dashboard and swipe. I miss my target of course and spend the next minute twisting and flailing around in the tight space trying to kill her. Turning back in the seat, in the moonlight outside I see a man with silver hair, hands in the pockets of his dungarees, standing on the opposite side of the road, watching me. Are you all right? he gestures, about to step across. I gesture back to him that I don’t need any help, even though it might look like I do, and drive away, waving reassuringly.

Another day, on my way back “home” again, I turn onto another dirt track down to the sea. I can’t help thinking about Bishop’s poem “Questions of Travel.” It is still light and I know from the well-thumbed and now blood- marked timetable that it is around high tide. It is one of those in-between times, getting on in the afternoon when there is nothing else to do. As I drive fast and straight down the rough track I glance back to see if I am creating a satisfyingly big enough red cloud of dust and it is exciting to see that I am.

I park the car and walk down to the beach. It is gusty and wild. I arrive and it feels like I’m late to the party. So this is where everybody is. The shore is busy, full of people fishing. Young and old face the waves, their lines taut, black curves into the water. There are boys looking cool, sitting on boxes, smoking. Someone’s knife, that most useful of objects, lies on the pebbles.

I remember the knife in “Crusoe in England,” which “reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.” Dogs mooch around. A young mother expertly casts her line, baby buggy braked up on the pebbles beside her. All summer long. Nobody talking, it is too windy, and noisy, the high dramatic waves with the water close to the beach tinted pink by the clay and the spray hitting our faces. A long, bleached log drifts past.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
—From Questions of Travel
 

This piece originally appeared in The Poetry Review. You can read the other essays in this exchange in the April 2019 issue.