I'm a Stranger Here Myself (15 page)

In New England, a friend here recently explained to me, the year divides into three parts. Either winter has just been, or winter is coming, or it’s winter.

I know what he meant. Summers here are short—they start on the first of June and end on the last day of August, and the rest of the time you had better know where your mittens are—but for the whole of those three months the weather is agreeably warm and nearly always sunny. Best of all, the weather stays at a generally congenial level, unlike Iowa, where I grew up and where the temperature and humidity climb steadily with every passing day of summer until by mid-August it is so hot and airless that even the flies lie down on their backs and just quietly gasp.

It’s the mugginess that gets you. Step outside in Iowa in August and within twenty seconds you will experience a condition that might be called perspiration incontinence. It gets so hot that you see department store mannequins with sweat circles under their arms. I have particularly vivid memories of Iowa summers because my father was the last person in the Midwest to buy an air conditioner. He thought they were unnatural. (He thought anything that cost more than $30 was unnatural.)

The one place you could get a little relief was the screened porch. Up until the 1950s nearly every American home had one of these, though they seem to be getting harder and harder to find now. They give you all the advantages of being outdoors and indoors at the same time. They are wonderful and will always be associated in my mind with summer things—corn on the cob, watermelon, the nighttime chirr of crickets, the sound of my parents’ neighbor Mr. Piper arriving home late from one of his lodge meetings, parking his car with the aid of his garbage cans, then serenading Mrs. Piper with two choruses of “Rose of Seville” before settling down for a nap on the lawn.

So when we came to the States, the one thing I asked for in a house was a screened porch, and we found one. I live out there in the summer. I am writing this on the screened porch now, staring out on a sunny garden, listening to twittering birds and the hum of a neighbor’s lawnmower, caressed by a light breeze, and feeling pretty darned chipper. We will have our dinner out here tonight (if Mrs B. doesn’t trip over a rucked carpet with the tray again, bless her) and then I will lounge around reading until bedtime, listening to the crickets and watching the cheery blink of fireflies. Summer wouldn’t be summer without all this.

Soon after we moved into our house, I noticed that a corner of screen had come loose near the floor and that our cat was using it as a kind of cat flap to come in and sleep on an old sofa we kept out there, so I just left it. One night after we had been here about a month, I was reading unusually late when out of the corner of my eye I noticed the cat come in. Only here’s the thing: The cat was with me already.

I looked again. It was a skunk. Moreover, it was between me and the only means of exit. It headed straight for the table and I realized it probably came in every night about this time to hoover up any dinner bits that had fallen on the floor. (And there very often are, on account of a little game the children and I play called Vegetable Olympics when Mrs. Bryson goes off to answer the phone or get more gravy.)

Being sprayed by a skunk is absolutely the worst thing that can happen to you that doesn’t make you bleed or put you in the hospital. If you smell skunk odor from a distance, it doesn’t smell too bad at all. It’s rather strangely sweet and arresting—not attractive exactly, but not revolting. Everybody who has ever smelled a skunk from a distance for the first time thinks, “Well, that’s not so bad. I don’t know what all the fuss is about.”

But get close—or, worse still, get sprayed—and believe me it will be a long, long time before anyone asks you to dance slow and close. The odor is not just strong and disagreeable but virtually ineradicable. The most effective treatment, apparently, is to scrub yourself thoroughly with tomato juice. But even with gallons of the stuff the best you can hope for is to subdue the smell fractionally.

A classmate of my son’s had a skunk get into her family’s basement one night. It sprayed and the family lost virtually everything in their home. All their curtains, bedding, clothes, soft furnishings—everything, in short, that could absorb an odor—had to be thrown on a bonfire, and the rest of the house scrubbed from top to bottom. The classmate of my son’s never got near the skunk, left the house immediately, and spent a weekend scouring herself with tomato juice and a stiff brush, but it was weeks before anyone would walk down the same side of a street as her. So when I say you don’t want to be sprayed by a skunk, believe me, you don’t want to be sprayed by a skunk.

All of this went through my mind as I sat agog watching a skunk perhaps eight feet away. The skunk spent about thirty seconds snuffling around under the table, then calmly padded out the way it had come. As it left, it turned and gave me a look that said: “I knew you were there the whole time.” But it didn’t spray me, for which I am grateful even now.

The next day I tacked the loose corner of screen back into place, but to show my appreciation I put a handful of dried cat food on the step, and about midnight the skunk came and ate it. After that, for two summers, I put a little food out regularly and the skunk always came to collect it. This year it hasn’t been back. There has been a rabies epidemic among small mammals that has seriously reduced the populations of skunks, raccoons, and even squirrels. Apparently this happens every fifteen years or so as part of a natural cycle.

So I seem to have lost my skunk. In a year or so, the populations will recover and I may be able to adopt another. I hope so because the one thing about being a skunk is that you don’t have a lot of friends.

In the meantime, partly as a mark of respect and partly because Mrs. B. caught one in the eye at an inopportune moment, we have stopped playing food games even though, if I say it myself, I was comfortably in line for a gold.

Every year about this time, my wife wakes me up with a playful slap and says: “I’ve got an idea. Let’s drive for three hours to the ocean, take off most of our clothes, and sit on some sand for a whole day.”

“What for?” I will say warily.

“It will be fun,” she will insist.

“I don’t think so,” I will reply. “People find it disturbing when I take my shirt off in public. I find it disturbing.”

“No, it will be great. We’ll get sand in our hair. We’ll get sand in our shoes. We’ll get sand in our sandwiches and then in our mouths. We’ll get sunburned and windburned. And when we get tired of sitting, we can have a dip in water so cold it actually hurts. At the end of the day, we’ll set off at the same time as thirty-seven thousand other people and get in such a traffic jam that we won’t get home till midnight. I can make trenchant observations about your driving skills, and the children can pass the time in back sticking each other with sharp objects. It will be such fun.”

The tragic thing is that because my wife is English, and therefore beyond the reach of reason where saltwater is concerned, she really will think it’s fun. Frankly I have never understood the British attachment to the seaside.

I grew up in Iowa, a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, so to me (and I believe to most other Iowans, though I haven’t had a chance to check with all of them yet) the word
ocean
suggests alarming things like riptides and undertows. (I expect people in New York suffer similar terrors when you mention words like
cornfields
and
county fair.
) Lake Ahquabi, where I did all my formative swimming and sunburning, may not have the romance of Cape Cod or the grandeur of the rockribbed coast of Maine, but then neither did it grab you by the legs and carry you off helplessly to Newfoundland. No, you may keep the sea, as far as I am concerned, and every drop of water in it.

So when last weekend my wife suggested that we take a drive to the ocean, I put my foot down and said, “Never—absolutely not,” which is of course why we ended up, three hours later, at Kennebunk Beach in Maine.

Now you may find this hard to believe, given the whirlwind of adventure that has been my life, but in all my years I had been to American ocean beaches just twice—once in California when I was twelve and managed to scrape all the skin from my nose and chest (this is a true story) by mistiming a retreating wave as only someone from Iowa can and diving headlong into bare, gritty sand, and once in Florida when I was a college student on spring break and far too intoxicated to notice a landscape feature as subtle as an ocean.

So I can’t pretend to speak with authority here. All I can tell you is that if Kennebunk Beach in Maine is anything to go by, then American beaches are entirely unlike British ones. To begin with, there was no pier, promenade, or arcades; no shops where everything is miraculously priced at £1; no places to buy saucy postcards or jaunty hats; no tearooms and fish and chip shops; no fortune tellers; no disembodied voice from a bingo parlor breathing out those strange, coded calls:
“Number 37—the vicar’s in the shrubs again,”
or whatever it is they say.

Indeed, there was nothing commercial at all—just a street lined with big summer homes, a vast, sunny beach, and an infinite and hostile sea beyond.

That isn’t to say the people on the beach—of whom there were many hundreds—were going to go without, for they had brought everything they would ever need again in the way of food, beverages, beach umbrellas, windbreaks, folding chairs, and sleek inflatables. Amundsen went to the South Pole with fewer provisions than most of these people had.

We were a pretty pathetic sight in contrast. Apart from being whiter than an old man’s flanks, we had in the way of equipment just three beach towels and a raffia bag filled, in the English style, with a bottle of sunscreen, an inexhaustible supply of Wet Wipes, spare underpants for everyone (in case of vehicular accidents involving visits to an emergency room), and a modest packet of sandwiches.

Our youngest—whom I’ve taken to calling Jimmy in case he should one day become a libel lawyer—surveyed the scene and said: “OK, Dad, here’s the situation. I need an ice cream cone, an inflatable lounger, a deluxe bucket and spade set, a hot dog, scuba equipment, some cotton candy, a zodiac with an outboard, my own water slide, a cheese pizza with extra cheese, and a bathroom.”

“They don’t have those things here, Jimmy,” I chuckled.

“I really need the bathroom.”

I reported this to my wife. “Then you’ll have to take him to Kennebunkport,” she said serenely from beneath a preposterous sun hat.

Kennebunkport is an old town, at a crossroads, laid out long before anyone thought of the automobile, and some miles from the beach. It was jammed with traffic from all directions. We parked an appallingly vast distance from the center and searched all over for rest rooms. By the time we found a rest room (actually it was the back wall of the Rite-Aid Pharmacy—but please don’t tell my wife), little Jimmy didn’t need to go any longer.

So we returned to the beach. By the time we got there, some hours later, I discovered that everyone had gone off for a swim and there was only one half-eaten sandwich left. I sat on a towel and nibbled at the sandwich.

“Oh, look, Mummy,” said number two daughter gaily when they emerged from the surf a few minutes later, “Daddy’s eating the sandwich the dog had.”

“Tell me this isn’t happening,” I whispered.

“Don’t worry, dear,” my wife said soothingly. “It was an Irish setter. They’re very clean.”

I don’t remember much after that. I had a little nap and woke to find that Jimmy was burying me up to my chest in sand, which was fine except that he had started at my head, and I managed to get so sunburned that a dermatologist invited me to a convention in Cleveland the following week as an exhibit.

We lost the car keys for two hours, the Irish setter came back and stole one of the beach towels, then nipped me on the hand for eating his sandwich, and number two daughter got tar in her hair. It was a typical day at the seaside, in other words. We got home about midnight after an inadvertent detour to the Canadian border—though this at least gave us something to talk about on the long drive across Pennsylvania.

“Lovely,” said my wife. “We must do that again soon.”

And the heartbreaking thing is she really meant it.