As David Abram rightly points out in The Spell Of The Sensuous, when human communication made its dramatic transformation from the spoken to the written (particularly the alphabetic) word, non-human nature suddenly fell silent and men began speaking only amongst themselves, mesmerized by the magic of their own written discourses.  It is at this point that the fundamental dichotomy between human and non-human nature fully emerged, with a dead and now alien nature confronting humankind, simply waiting to be managed and controlled.  And, of course, this was validated by the written biblical word, while being executed almost flawlessly by missionaries, explorers, and developers ever since.

This is as clear and concise a statement of a central impulse for writing Shoal Hope the way I did. It’s an experiment in a pictographic use of alphabetic language to break through the binds of alphabetic writing. This may be a Quixotic enterprise, but in that way it builds on a long strain of novelistic writing that focuses on the force of perception as a means to broaden the story to include non-human actors, from the place itself, the sea itself, and on to the creatures cohabiting our world.

A difficulty in placing this novel, along with Something for Nothing, is finding a context for them. That was why I was so enthusiastic to have had a chapter of that novel published in the Dark Mountain 2 anthology last Spring. Sandy’s parsing of David Abram’s insight into the way written language has brought about the silence we confront when facing the natural world is even closer to where these novels came from, an insistence on presenting the physical acts of perception that can establish and maintain our embeddedness in the world.

| Three |

Set in Five Fathoms

On a long, protected shore it was possible to erect a structure at the edge of shoal water that would interrupt the passage of schools of fish swimming parallel to the beach sending them first seaward and finally into a circling mass to be dip-netted into a trap-boat. The fish-traps off the Beach Point shore descended from an ancient technique. Their underlying principle was simple, block a school’s intended path along a contour and they instinctively turn for deeper water. Array a set of barriers to channel their desire for escape into an ever tighter enclosure and you have them.

The earliest fish-traps, built by hunter-gatherers in many parts of the world, were made up of closely spaced stakes set in a line from the shore arcing into a spiral that turned back in on itself. Fish coming along swam into its spiral. With their one and only idea defeated, they were still there when the canoes returned.

While simple these traps had severe drawbacks. They eliminated the need to actively chase fish; but building them took intensive effort. Tall, wispy saplings had to be cut, stripped of bark and branches, taken out to the spot, driven into the bottom, and tied together to make a screen. The closeness of their spacing meant even minor storms sent waves smashing into the barrier instead of washing through. Equally disruptive; masses of eel-grass mowed by a storm’s breakers clogged the trap so fish avoided them; reacting to the foot-long tendrils waving in the current as a warning to stand clear.

Yankee ingenuity had focused on this ancient tool, as it had on so many others during the Nineteenth Century. Various improvements and enhancements were developed. These traps consisted of a pattern of piles and panels of netting. The Leader, as the long perpendicular barrier was called, ran for almost a thousand feet, twenty-three poles set thirty-five feet apart. From them hung panels of netting with a broad two-foot mesh. The Leader ran out to a pair of cupped chambers, the Hearts. These channeled fish from either side through the Gate and into the final chamber, the Bowl. The mesh in the Hearts was finer, about sixteen inches square. These acted as fencing hung from the poles. Their bottoms roughly conformed to the sea-floor. In the Bowl, a fine mesh only three quarters of an inch was arranged in two parts. Extending from lead-sinkers below the gate a bottom panel covered three-quarters of the Bowl’s bottom. The Rim was hung around its perimeter and attached to this panel. Hickory poles up to seventy-five feet long were brought down by schooner from Maine and driven into the bottom to support the nets. Sheets and halyards ran on blocks, allowing the Bowl’s nets to be drawn upwards to dry and to clear them of weed.

The Bowl’s entrance remained open until the net was full and the catch ready to be gathered. The Hearts presented curving walls at the Leader and Gate. The momentum of circling schools sent the catch in through the Gate and endlessly circling the Bowl until the boat arrived. Fish first met an inconvenience, a wide mesh most of them could have easily passed through; then, in mounting confusion and irritation, they were swept on into a tighter enclosure before finally entering the fine-meshed barrier. Their instinctive reluctance to stop and change direction sealed their fate.

Traps were laid out in pairs or groups of three, the outermost in about forty-five feet of water. The Offshore Trap had the longest piles and the best and newest equipment. Next came the Middle. The innermost was the Skunk and was furnished with the weakest, oldest, hand-me-down gear.

Traps were set by crews in early spring. They used a Pound Scow, a barge with a tall gallows-like gantry above one end to support the poles as they were driven. It carried a pump. Water pressure loosened the sand as the butt-end was driven down. Before these pumps were motorized, they were operated by bellowed gang-handles, similar to those on ship’s bilge-pumps, some windlasses, and most familiarly, on horse-drawn fire-engines. Pilings were set vertically or nearly so. They trailed away along the length of the Leader like a line of wispy telegraph poles running along a country track. The piles that held the Bowl netting were stayed by anchors set in the hard sand of the bay bottom. These were splayed outward and guyed giving the Bowl the look of a ragged crown.

Waves washed through these traps much more freely than they had the old sapling weirs. Algae and barnacles still grew on the piles and nets. Marine borers honeycombed pilings as they do wharf-piles. To combat this nets were dosed with a brew of copper salts and pine tar and creosote.

To kill off any growth that took root and remove entrapped eel-grass clogging the net; the Bowls’ panels were hoisted above the water, brailed like so many sails every two weeks during the season. At those times, from a distance, the traps looked like giant, woolly spiders hulking amidst strands of filamentous web. Dark, hairy bodies surrounded their fuzzy, fat bellies suspended over the water. From the right angle the resemblance was disconcerting. The foreshortened leader and the pilings at the entrances of the Hearts formed the mandibles. Clumps of tackle that hung in knots in the rigging looked like the many eyes of a tarantula.

Traps appeared menacing enough to those who saw them from above, but they were deadly to those who stumbled upon them from below. Fish, never aware of the contraption as a whole, reacted to the barrier by turning along it. One by one or in vast schools they concentrated in the Bowl joining a growing and restless mass. They maintained their routines, congregating or separating by species, hunting or avoiding nearby predators, maintaining normalcy as best they could in a world askew; where straight ahead no longer existed and every turn could only be in one direction and lead to a single result.

As their numbers increased bursts of panic swept the enclosure. Their endless circling created – with the right conditions of calm slack-water and plentiful fish – a whirlpool, faint yet visible on the surface, evidence of an aquatic Tarantella no more efficacious to its practitioners than had the medieval dance been at protecting its adherents by warding off the Plague.

*

Trap boats set out before dawn making one or more round trips in a day. They were usually finished by early afternoon. The Nellie & Mary had gone out that morning and emptied the middle and skunk traps in a single trip. They hadn’t bothered with the offshore trap. It had been brailed up as a result of damage. As they headed off to repair the breach a nearly new moon shimmered in the West, lost in the glare of the setting sun. This conjunction of sun and moon brought a Spring Tide with extremes of high and low. Timing their arrival for low-water made it easier to reach the lowest rigging on the piles as they repaired the remaining net and hung the new section they’d brought out from shore.

Approaching the Offshore Trap, leaving the town behind, they passed close by the tip of Long Point at the very end of the spiral of sand that turns and turns again in on itself. This last, hooked point of impossibly steep, hard sand points back towards the center of its harbor enclosed at the top of this great bay.

The sand banks of Long Point, below the high tide mark, stand like the yellowed sandstone walls of an eroded pyramid fighting off the ages with mineral integrity. Though only sand, not sandstone, they withstand erosion and make nonsense of the angle of repose. A raw, living edge raked by strong currents rising from a trench more than a hundred feet deep only a stone’s throw from shore.

A few miles away on the back side of the Cape substantial cliffs and bluffs tower up to a hundred and fifty feet above the water. Yet these erode at an average rate of three feet a year. Year in, year out, acres of land-mass melt like so much ice cream left out in the sun, while this wispy tip of bare sand has held its position over the years. Old timers speak whimsically of land on the backside the way an amputee refers to a lost limb, land long gone under the breakers and now up to half a mile from shore. Long Point, in contrast, has maintained itself at this vortex-tip like the curl of smoke off a cigarette in still air, a lasting balance of ephemera and stability.

Those Highlands lay ahead and to port as they gradually closed on the Beach Point shore; a low grassy dune marking its edge backed at a distance by the muddy, maroon waters of East Harbor. The great dunes rose up behind. These glowed with a golden light. These dunes were as though breakers on the exposed back shore had transubstantiated into waves of sand that marched down out of the Northeast, the direction of storms. The power of wind pushing water locked-up in these arcs of sand, seeming still, but always moving at a pace perceptible within a human lifetime.

At this distance the dunes stood out more by their glow than their height. To the east of the offshore trap these sand-hills petered out at the foot of a high moorland. This land-mass responds more conventionally to gravity sagging under a cover, a fine pelt of dusty-green vegetation. Proper land, in contrast to the rolling dunes, the Highlands form the backbone of the Cape. They sit where they were dumped by a glacier that skimmed the mountains of Maine and New Hampshire and dropped sands, gravels, and fine-milled clays here in a long arc.

Highland was rolling and soft edged. It was covered, not with grass or trees, but a short nap of Bearberry; a blanket of tiny waxy leaves and hard, bright-red berries. Low spots, out of the wind more than the rest, cradled clumps of Bayberry and Beach Plum. Dwarf Scrub Oaks and Beech trees filled the more protected hollows; their twisted, gnarly branches towering over the rest, rising ten or twelve feet above the ground; branches draped with lichens and punctuated by hard, black galls. This canopy rarely stood over fifteen feet high, spreading over an undulating landscape without extremes of height or slope. The vault of ocean sky enveloped it all in a luminous intensity, subtly nuanced and ever-changing.

Unlike some western desert landscape with a high dome of sky, mountains hovering above the horizon a hundred miles away, this was an intimate landscape. Nothing natural here was over a hundred-and-fifty feet above the level of the sea. Pilgrim Monument was not much taller. But there was a grandeur here out of all proportion. Perhaps because scale here was so deceptive and hard to pin down. Under a high, open sky or lost in mists and fogs, the ever changing light appeared to have more substance than the landscape it colored. Perception flickered between the modesty, even meanness, of a little place of low scrub hills and scant vegetation and the immensity of sky and ocean that both began and ended here.

This land was small, precariously perched on the edge of things. The bay not much more than a salt lake whose far shores could be glimpsed in clear weather; but many of this land’s inhabitants lived large lives, and this bay opened to ocean, their conduit to the globe. There was a narrow parochialism here, but alongside it existed a deep awareness of a wider sphere. Among a people who looked to little Barnstable as their county seat were many who had seen Hawaii’s volcanic peaks, the hills of Hong Kong, the expanse of the Plate, and the teeming Pool of London.

Once away from the wharves and bustle of the harbor as the town faded into a jumble of low gables amongst the trees, Pilgrim Monument became the focal point of any vista. Theodore Roosevelt had laid its corner stone and William Howard Taft vied his massive bulk with the completed tower’s height at its inauguration. The incongruity of placing a Sienese Campanile on a sand-mount thirty miles off the New England coast was no more remarkable than that a congregation of English dissenters living in Holland would self-exile themselves to a colony in Virginia and end up anchoring under the lee of this curl of sand.

As if to ensure that no future misfits failed to find this sheltering arm, the Monument was visible from many miles at sea when silhouetted against the light. At other times, it was lost in haze until long after the low sands became visible, materializing slowly from out of the encircling sea horizon. Two-hundred-and-fifty feet of Stonington granite melted into invisibility by a trick of the light. Flesh and blood, steel, dynamite, barges and cranes had recapitulated the glacier’s work by dragging Maine to these southern New England waters and depositing its minerals in strict verticality atop a flattened hummock of sand and gravel in this most horizontal of worlds.

Cover Illustration by Rima Staines

The Dark Mountain 2 anthology is out! Follow the link to the announcement on their site.

I’m deeply honored to have a chapter from my novel, Something for Nothing included along with this incredible list of poets, writers, and thinkers.

Naomi Klein, David Abram, Vinay Gupta, Paul Kingsnorth, Glyn Hughes, Luanne Armstrong, Charles Hugh Smith, Wilfried Hou Je Bek, Venkatesh Rao, Warren Draper, Darren Allen, Catherine Lupton, Tom Keyes, Jay Griffiths, Melanie Challenger, Nick Hunt, William Haas, Simon Lys, Albert Pierce Bales, Antony Lioi, Em Strang, Joel Moore, Mario Petrucci, Adrienne Odasso, Robert Walker, Benjamin Morris, Stephen Wheeler, Andrea Dulberger, Heathcote Williams, Gerry Loose, and Dougald Hine.

My apologies to anyone whose web presence I’ve garbled – please set me straight if you can! Also links for the ones I couldn’t find.

Writers Voice Cafe: Antonio Dias from Provincetown Community TV on Vimeo.

The Dark Mountain 2 anthology can be pre-ordered here.

Wednesday, May 11 at 7:00 pm upstairs at Napi’s I’ll be reading from both Shoal Hope and Something for Nothing, including the chapter, “…Peter” that will be included in the Dark Mountain II anthology due to be published in Britain June 17. They are taking pre-orders now!

Come early and let’s have dinner at Napi’s then head upstairs for the Writer’s Voice Café. PTV will be taping my reading to air and stream on their site.

Remember there’s an open mic following. Bring something to share with the group!

Dateline Provincetown: An Interview with Antonio Dias.

We talk about writing Shoal Hope and I read a short excerpt from Something for Nothing and my poem, From Wood End…

A last corner of net ran from Sammy’s fingers down to where Josey and Stevie walked it into place, avoiding the potential snags of the ladder and the masses of barnacles and mussels that coated the lower reaches of the pilings alongside.  Joe C. bent down clearing space in front of the engine’s flywheel, getting ready to crank it over as Antone appeared on the dock and swung down onto the foredeck from the waist of a dragger alongside.  Lacking the agility to attempt the ladder at this state of tide, he made his way from the dockside to the foc’sle of a dragger, crossing its deck to the outboard boat, and dropping over the rail with a huff and a thud.  Catching his breath, he took the last few feet of net as it was lowered and folded it on top of the rest, picking up the work without preface or prelude.  Brief nods of recognition passed between him and the others.

“Giving up on all optimism and pessimism, one is free to be courageous; one places no trust in tools and instruments; one comes to hope based on human beings.”Ivan Illich