Yours Sincerely Winter mornings, it’s quiet at the Town Landing. There’s a dog walker or two, and the ice creaks and groans with the tide. But it’s quiet. There’s often a couple of pick-up trucks there, parked across from Ring Bolt Rock, looking down river toward the salt marshes and the ocean. They’re quiet, too. Older guys in them (almost invariably), sipping their coffee with the paper propped on the steering wheel – our local store is just up the hill. Quiet, not a cell phone among us. The light changes as we sit, it always does near the ocean. The whites and blues and grays of winter take the light well. I like the pale yellow of the reeds, too. Perhaps the men in the trucks are thinking of the clamming last season, or 50 years ago. There’s a reason they come here to read the paper: “Here” has been the core of the town for nearly 400 years. Their thoughts are their own, but I know what’s drifting through my mind – thinking is too active a word for it. I’m watching a two-masted schooner, her bulbous hull full of coal, coming silently upstream on the tide. Just enough sail to steer by, but it’s the tide that’s bringing her in. On deck are three men; on shore, more men and boys are waiting. The man on her port bow heaves a line to a boy on Ring Bolt Rock who feeds it through the ring, coils it, and throws it back on board. The W men on her starboard, one fore and one aft, toss ropes to the men on the opposite bank, just to my left as I’m looking down river. They slowly walk the ship around the right-angled bend, pivoting round the ring bolt. The man on board pays out the rope through the ring, letting the tide push the schooner toward the landing. Right in front of where I’m waiting. Another full load of coal brought to town, and hardly a muscle strained. If you know the wind and the tide, you can do that: you don’t need an 18-wheeler. What you do need, of course, is time. Nature moves slowly, quietly. It’s easy to forget that in summer, when the river is alive with boats, and I putter around the rock and out to the ocean, covering in 20 minutes what took the schooner half a day. The past is within us, as the wise man said, and surely we all have a quiet spot that will bring it out. When the ever-onward rush of technology threatens to over-stretch our links to the past and to nature, pulling up in a good spot and sipping coffee can do a lot to set our world to rights. I’d like to be that boy on Ring Bolt Rock… Page 74 ■ Antiques Journal ■ February 2010