Earth Air Fire And Water

iUniverse, Inc.

Chapter One

The ocean is where the first speck of life emerged, some 3.8 billion years ago. The speck evolved into algae capable of photosynthesis, resulting in the first supply of oxygen. This oxygen, interacting with ultraviolet rays from the sun, encased the earth in a protective vale called the ozone layer

Then, some 420 million years ago, life took its first step out of the water, and fed itself from the depths of the ocean with the help of oxygen and the ozone layer.

Masaru Emoto, The Hidden Messages in Water (New York: Simon & Schuster Atria Books, 2001), 59.

I remember someone grabbing me under water and hauling me up by the hair, but my father claims I came up on my own and that I splashed a few strokes toward him—he had swan dived directly after me from the ledge of the pool. From that time on, anything that had to do with large amounts of water was something I looked upon with suspicion. I grew up in Indiana, a landlocked state, so all I had to fear were lakes and large rivers, not the true terrors of dark oceans and black seas.

I had a hard time growing up. The only thing that seemed to give me respite from the violent world around me, which my father controlled, was finding a place to hide and then pulling out a book and reading. I lived in books. I thought the people who wrote them were gods. They could create and control whole worlds, and the thing I wanted most to be was one of them. From the time I was eight, I wanted to be a writer.

This is ironic, because I have dyslexia, a term not widely used until the '70s. At the time I was growing up, you were just labeled dumb or stubborn about not learning to write right, or you were a cutup for transferring your numbers around, as if you were setting up a code to test the teacher.

That I could read at all was a miracle. Lots of dyslexic people never figured out coping skills to be able to bury themselves in books. I had to teach myself so that I had an escape to worlds that were not so dangerous as the house I lived in. I read and I dreamed of a family like the one in The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie.

I think that's how I came to marry so young, while I was still in college. In those days—the late '40s—you had to have the permission of the president of the college (a stern man who belonged in the pulpit of a chastising church, who ruled with a male iron hand over the women's college Emily Dickinson had fled in consternation). My about-to-be husband's reminiscences of his family were straight out of the fantasies of The Best Families of All Time. As a young boy, he had spent every idyllic summer on an island off the coast of Connecticut. His grandfather was one of those '20s Fitzgerald tycoons; he couldn't find an island that suited him, so he had one constructed, which I believe he named Potato Island, but surely a man like that would have named it after himself or found a more romantic-sounding tribute to his ingenuity.

My husband's grandfather constructed the island, whatever it was called, by having rocks piled up and then cemented together until they formed the rudimentary outlines of an island. Then he sent barges out with good top soil to fill in the outline of the island, until he had earth rich enough to sustain vegetable and flower gardens he could plunder all summer.

On his man-made island, he also built a fourteen-room house, a seven-room bungalow, a tennis court, and a large boathouse next to a seven-hundred pound mushroom anchor. He equipped himself with a seventy-foot yawl, a forty-foot ketch, a Star Class boat, something I thought my husband said was a Weskit, two or three dinghies, and several motorboats. Then, with the same determination that he had exhibited in constructing his own island, he taught himself to sail.

Every year during the winter, the sea knocked part of his island's perimeter wall out, and the precious topsoil seeped away. Each spring, before the annual migration of the family to Potato Island began, barge after barge made the three-mile trip out to refill the island. It was on this man-made cement-and-soil oasis that my husband had spent all his summers from the time he was three or four until he was fourteen, sailing a small boat alone, much the same way, I thought as he told me about his adventures, as I had escaped between the covers of adventure books.

In 1938, The Big Hurricane put an end forever to the island, washing the bungalow away, smashing the big house in two as if it had been struck by a giant fist, depositing the seven-hundred pound anchor in the midst of the tennis court, and spilling the top soil back into Long Island Sound. From that time on, my husband never again set a sneaker on a small boat, but he had never stopped dreaming about getting another one so that he could relive the magic moments of those long-ago summers.

One weekend, when we were first dating, my boat-husband, as I now always think of him, and I drove up to Stony Creek and hired a boat. He rowed us out to see what was left of Potato Island. It was not a happy sight, and my husband said he never wanted to go back. So far as I know, he never did. But then, I haven't seen him in several decades, so I couldn't testify to that in court, and now that he's dead (in 2008, at Belfast, Maine, loyal to the water to the last), I will never know. I was not mentioned in the obituaries, nor was his second wife, who had helped him put together a book about contemporary fiction. Of course, the obituary was written by his third wife, also a writer. Make of this what you will (and there seems to be a lot).

Even after five decades, I still recall the stories my soon-to-be husband told about the cohesive lovingness of his family—how a group of mothers would get together the day after Thanksgiving to make Christmas fruitcakes, how in spring they planned the annual Easter egg hunts that were filled with excitement because whichever child found the golden egg collected a twenty-dollar bill. (In those days, twenty dollars was a fortune.) At the Fourth of July picnic—with all its splendid food, each part of the family vying to bring bigger and better dishes—the dark night would be splashed with the splendor of sparklers and fireworks. Most of all, the tales my soon-to-be-husband told centered around those memorable moments when he had been out all by himself in his small sailboat, exploring the nooks and crannies of Long Island Sound.

"They let you go alone when you were that young?" I asked, horrified. From the look on his face, I was missing the point. After we were married, it turned out I missed the point of most of what my husband tried to tell me. At the time, I put it down to a bad marriage; now, I wonder if men and women don't usually miss the point of what they are trying to tell each other.

I was envious of that island off the Connecticut shore, where a family went every summer and seemed, the way my boat-husband told it—I never think of him now as anything but my boat-husband, as if he were a species of a generic brand. This was a family that had traditions and got together to laugh, a family that seemed straight out of a child's primer, one I would have given anything to have had. My own family had been so filled with arguments, violence, rage.

The first time I was...