Why did I move to Newburyport? At the time I was living in Boston and saw in the Globe that a tentacle from a giant squid had washed up ashore on Plum Island.
A giant squid tentacle!
I had to see it.
But I grew up around New York City and even though I’d lived in Boston for six or seven years, I never had a reason to leave the city except to go home to see my parents and it took me a while to work my way north. For some reason I missed the highway and drove through Revere, Lynn, Swampscott, Salem and it was fairly interminable but at last, I reached Plum Island and through divine intervention, parked and walked onto the beach right where the tentacle lay stretched out on the sand. It was a pallid gray, with what looked like the ends of arrows that had suction cups at the tip that I had as a kid. The part where it had torn off looked like shredded Styrofoam.
Every time I tell the story, the tentacle grows in length. It was up to 30’ long, which would have made the squid capable of battling Captain Nemo and I still have to catch myself from stretching it to that length whenever I tell the tale. It really should have been 30’ long, but it was about 8’-10’ long and even now I can’t help myself from exaggerating. It’s too good of a story.
But it took four burly guys to haul it on their shoulders and even that was a remarkable sight because it was squishy and gooey and slippery and it took the guys through a lot of gyrations to get a handle on it and when they did, they dumped the tentacle into the back of a pickup truck. Where did it go? To be examined by serious marine biologists? Paleontologists? Or over to Jimmy’s Fish Shack where it would be turned into calamari for 100 people?
I hung around at the beach for a while; I loved it. How could you not?
It was beautiful. And exotic because I’d only been to the ocean for a few days each summer when I was a kid, visiting my grandmother on the Cape, and the beach was somewhere in Hyannis and as tepid as the lake my family went to in the Adirondacks. Plum Island was different; it has waves. I’d like it if the surf was raging and frothing but still, it was great.
Heading home, I got lost in Newburyport and I loved the ancientness of the architecture. It was beautiful and varied and unlike anything I’d ever seen; downtown was like Beacon Hill but the houses were from Federal, Gothic, Victorian and I hardly know my architectural periods, but the variety is stunning.
When I was a kid, my father read me A STORY OF A BAD BOY by Henry David Aldrich. It was set around the time of the Civil War and was Aldrich’s autobiography of growing up in “Rivermouth”.
He and the kids he hung out with lived in a world largely unfettered by adults and they did spectacular, outrageous things that most kids could only dream about, things that could land you in jail now, but while the stuff they did had a criminal element to it, it really wasn’t hard core, or mean spirited, they just were able to do things I could never get away with, well, actually, the book influenced me enough so that I did have my, well you get the idea.
The giant squid, the architecture and being the setting of the book I loved made me want to move to Newburyport.
And I tried to, right away. My girlfriend and I came up and we couldn’t find a place we wanted to rent, but we thought long and hard about buying a run down but infinitely charming small brick house but didn’t, for two reasons. One – it needed a lot of work. A lot of work. It would have meant doing the work ourselves and while my girlfriend had carpentry skills rivaling Norm on THIS OLD HOUSE, I try my hardest at that kind of stuff, I really do, but just didn’t come equipped with that kind of DNA.
The other thing was the house was right on top of a graveyard. I mean, you could open the windows on the bottom floor that bordered the graveyard and reach out and touch a tombstone. That’s all you saw from one side of the house; tombstones. It was just plain creepy. So we passed and about ten years later, when I actually did move to Newburyport, someone had fixed up that brick house next to all those graves and I saw it sold for a small fortune. To someone who had no problem living next to a zillion dead people.
But what I like most about Newburyport is that there’s so many parts of town where you wouldn’t be surprised if Tom Sawyer came around the corner, so little has changed that the past is the present. When you’re skating on the Frog Pond or sledding at March’s Hill, you look around and literally, it could be 1825. You have to squint a little but if you do, there isn’t a sign of a power line or a SUV. It’s remarkable and beautiful and a treasure. And it’s on the ocean, which is still as exotic to me as it was when I first came up from Boston.
I finally did move to Newburyport. To Merrimac Street, between the North End Yacht Club and Kathy Anne’s Bakery. My wife and I got a terrific deal on a small house that was built in the torn down barn’s footprint that was attached by a common wall to the big house that fronted Merrimac Street. It was new but made to look like it had been there for 100’s of years. It was great.
One thing that makes Newburyport unlike any other town I’ve ever seen is that even though it seems like a beautiful town when you meander through the streets, the miraculous thing is that behind the houses is this immense patch of green that predominates in all the older neighborhoods. Because one backyard lawn backs up to an adjoining back yard along with back yards bordering on the sides, so when you are in your back yard, there’s just a green swatch that goes on forever. For the most part, beautiful gardens are in front of these old houses, and you can’t help but marvel at the thought and horticultural knowledge that went into constructing these gardens. Something is always in bloom from the forsythia, tulips, daffodils, crocuses, pussy willows and crab apple tree white blossoms in the spring and when they fade, something else springs up and this constant cycle of blooms continue until the first frost. And the variety of things blossoming all through summer rivals the best Fourth of July fireworks.
So, what drew me here and keeps me here is the variety and beauty and ancientness of the architecture that has survived intact for hundreds of years, the fact that I’d like to think that interesting and eclectic people were drawn to these old houses because they are so redolent of character and lives of a life that seems like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life.
And there is the magnificence of the ocean; I can see it from my window, where the river flattens out into a bay that leads to the open ocean. The color of the water is always interesting, often bluer than the deepest ultramarine in the heart of winter and what a great site it is to see miniature icebergs flying along at breakneck speed, drawn by the tide from towns upriver and out to the open ocean where who knows where they go. Low tide makes the water iridescent, like a cracked open pearl and during a Nor’Easter, the water is the color of lead, and you can’t tell where the water ends and the land begins.
Most remarkably, when I come home late at night, down Water Street, at the far end of the seawall is a landing and in the middle of the night, there is a bee hive of activity. Mostly, there are kayakers, flash lights strapped on every appendage, heading out into the bay to fish for Stripers. Joining them is the most amazing site; men, again regale with flashlights strapped everywhere, but they insert themselves into truck inner tubes and paddle far out in the bay, fishing rod stowed wedged between their belly and the inner tube. But the fisherman that top them all came in the day time. They tied a kite 40’-50’ from the end of their line, which is heavily weighted at the hook and bait end of the line. The kite carries the line way, way, way out into the bay and those are the guys that bring home a lot of fish.
Perhaps the most beautiful ocean view I have is that across the bay, a mile and a half, maybe two miles across, is the honkey tonk of Salisbury Beach. It’s far enough away so that it can be raining in Newburport but bright and sunny on Salisbury Beach. And when the sun glistens on the buildings, they shine brilliantly and gain a certain dignity from being scrubbed clean in the brilliant sun and it reminds me very much of Morocco.
I love the salt water and the strength of the tide. Once, at the mouth of the river, where the current is prodigious, I dove in to see if I could make headway in the current. I kind of held my own; I’m a decent swimmer, but it was pulling me out into the channel, where the boats were, so I headed back in. I wish I had a little more walrus blubber to endure water that is most of the time as cold as a bathtub packed full of ice cubes, which is a secret cure for unrelenting hangover’s. It’s cold enough that after a knee operation and I was ordered to keep my knee perpetually iced, but I achieved the same results by wading out up to my thighs and my legs quickly went numb.
Here’s a hint; this is a beautiful way to numb a sore ankle or knee but DO NOT put your car keys in your pocket because invariably a large wave or an even bigger one will soak you up to your chest.
When you finally approach your car in the parking lot and you use your key fob on your key ring to unlock your car, nothing will happen. Zilch. Salt water and electrical devices don’t exactly see eye to eye and when you open up the key fob to resurrect it, it’s no go. The wires, circuit board and solder connections which were only soaked for a few wave seconds in your pocket… when you open it up, it looks like something Jacques Cousteau brought up from a Spanish galleon off the coast of Florida, a brass fixture corroded beyond belief.
In addition to the ocean and spectacular, varied architecture there are the people who painstakingly and tediously restored these old houses.
The buildings represent the iconoclastic nature of the people who have renovated them. Their restored house shows an awful lot of people that someone special and someone you’d like to know cared about saving it. And that’s why I love living here and feel real solace on this street. Driving toward home I feel the aggravations of the day melt away and I have grown accustomed to it’s beauty. I’m here for the long haul. I love the town.