essay by Robert P. Barsanti
So, we were stuck. Behind me, a jeep settled, with a driver and a beach chair. In front of me, a cable truck sighed and shuddered.
I had fallen into this place through inattention and habit. Normally, at this point in the summer, I would have taken a short cut that would have sped me to my end. I might have headed up an alley, snuck wrong way down a one-way street, and rolled across a yard on my business. But as the sun had just come out, Kiki Dee had returned to the radio after fifty years, and my attention had drifted from what was necessary and important, the afternoon slipped me onto Quaker Lane.
Quaker Lane cuts from Milk Street to the Madaket Road. On the town side of the road, the houses perched on a line, facing the western sky and the sunset, on the other, the grass rolled in waves and hills. On this afternoon when I felt the music in me (thanks, Kiki) and we moved foot by foot, the grass invited us in.
As the poet Robert Lowell says, “This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale.” Beneath the waves of grass are the remains of thousands of Quakers, laid in unmarked graves, and bearing silent witness. Many were whalers, many made their business from the whale and all had died. You may have beach chairs in the back of your jeep, trash in the bed of your truck, or ladders on the top of your van. Every traffic jam ends here.
We rolled forward another few feet.
I was on my way to a rental house. The renters had arrived, settled in, visited Dionis Beach, and used the hose to wash the toes and toys off. Somehow, they couldn’t turn the hose off. So they left it running into the pool and called me.
I suspect my colleagues in front of me were burning unleaded fuel for a similar mission. Someone had static on their TV, someone couldn’t find Turner Classic Movies anymore, or someone had cut a wire when putting in a hot tub. A computer sent a message for an urgent call and here they were, moving a foot at a time for a cable emergency in August.
Behind me, she had one beach chair. It stood up in the back seat, as if it had just been tossed there. She wore sunglasses, a red baseball cap, and youth in its bursting abundance. Her jeep dated back to a time before children when sand on the floor and rainwater in the cupholders wasn’t a problem that needed to be solved. There were ten feet and half a life time between the two of us.
I have wasted my life.
Of the time that I have left on this side of the road, too much of it has been spent with one foot on the brake. One can allow, and even excuse, the time invested in picking up children from swimming practice or from work. However, the time expensed at five miles an hour earns nothing but the silent grins of the Quakers. What part of my wild and precious life is worth the time creeping along this road in order to turn off a hose
I have spent too much time waiting. I have sent good money chasing after bad staring at a phone, or a door, or a computer screen when hope over-ripened, rotted, and fell. The minutes, the hours, the days, and months signed off and expensed so that a dream does not become a fear. When I spent so much of that time, I wound up waiting not for her or for them, but for me. I waited to finally figure out that I wasn’t that guy, didn’t want to meet that guy, and needed to figure out who really was wearing my underwear today and tomorrow.
We rolled forward five feet.
The phone lit up. I no longer have the ringer on. At the moment, none of the people I love are in the army, in the hospital, or in the air. Nobody, in particular anybody with a hose in a pool, requires my attention as I am stuck next to the green grass of the Quakers. I had traded my time already, I had no need to trade any more, least of all when I was already stuck rolling forward.
After a complicated dance around Caton Circle, I drove out the Madaket Road, missed one turn, missed another, and lost both the Jeep and the Cable truck. Then, I drove past the last possible turn I could have taken to remain in the good graces of the guest, the homeowner, and my phone. Instead, like a rabbit, I darted between the bushes and headed into the deep dark of Barrett Farm Road.
I assume they figured out how to fix the hose.
After the first few houses, the bushes and trees claim the road, as do the puddles, the sand, and the odd root. But within a few minutes, I was deep into an island that didn’t have garden hoses, hydrangea bushes, or cell service. Time could no longer be measured in money. The road turned once, twice, thrice, and pulled up next to a pond.
I turned the car off.
Overhead, the last of the storm clouds tumbled over themselves eastward, leaving the deep cerulean blue to settle in from the west. Far above, circling, the wide wings of an osprey held the sky, sliding down the air, before ascending on the drafts. She may have seen me, she may not have—I merited no more than a tick of her neck as she soared. Against the horizon, the surf poked up, then hid behind a barrier beach. The slow rumble of the breakers rolled up over the pond, washed over me, and continued into scrub oak and pine. The beach grass, brown in the August sun, sang in an unknowable tongue as it waved down to the lapping blue of the pond. The air held salt and sun and pine and a hidden flower beyond a name. As time slipped, the shadows lengthened.
Seconds became hours became lifetimes and, finally, became sand.
I have wasted my life.