This morning, I kissed you at the train station where we parted for the day, and I thought how the world whips past – good, bad, and ugly. In the crowd of faces, I watched to see if I could catch one more glimpse of you as the train pulled away.
When my train came eight minutes later, I boarded, relieved that Saturday mornings are not as busy as my typical weekday commute.
I could romanticise it if I wanted to, this place where humanity confronts itself in close quarters day after day, but I won’t, because there is really nothing romantic about it. This flurry of motion is just people, trying to get where we need to go while avoiding the worst of each other, or just trying to live through another day.
A grumpy middle school girl pursued by a mother. An old woman scrolling TikTok under an advertisement over which someone has scribbled the text of the universal declaration of human rights and also drawn several penises in Sharpie. A woman in PJs sorting coupons from the newspaper. Three German students whose peacoats and scarves gave them away before they opened their mouths. A woman wearing two vibrant scarves, grey hair held back with a bright blue scrunchie. She was also wearing red leather gloves. She seemed unforgettable, but still she disappeared in the rush of faces. Twenty college boys in baseball caps and puffer vests, their ringleaders harassing a homeless man who pushed his cart of belongings onto the train just as the doors were closing.
Once we reached my stop, I got off the train and walked home to the apartment I’ve been living in since August, soaking up the blue sky and sunshine that are so rare in October.
I’m supposed to meet someone at the local animal shelter at noon. They’re going to give me a tour before I commit to six months of volunteering. The shelter is at the base of the Squantum peninsula, which protrudes from the northern end of Quincy like an enormous growth. I walk north by the bay on the side of Quincy Shore Drive.
A park curls up the coast here like a long scarf, but the thin strip of coastal grass and sand is dwarfed by the wide expanse of the road and the houses with their landscaped yards. It’s hard to imagine there ever being undeveloped shoreland here. The sidewalks, the houses, the traffic lights, the traffic, the road, the clapboard walls faded by salt, the bulky concrete blocks demarcating the beach — it all makes the whole order feel as if it could not ever have been otherwise.
But it was, once. How many tides have come in and gone out since?
At the shelter, I meet the dogs I’ll be working with. They stare at me as I pass their kennels. They are barely awake, exhausted by the Saturday-morning rush of visitors, but their eyes hold subtle signs of recognition. I wish I could know for certain what they see when they look at me, whether I look like someone who will care for them or someone who will hurt them, use them, leave them behind. Every time a human crosses their path, their world changes. Sometimes they are saved. Sometimes they lose everything.
It’s not just dogs, of course, that these interferences impact. Living on the ocean, I am becoming more and more familiar with the reality that the world is always changing, without us and because of us and before us and after us.
After my orientation at the animal shelter, I cross the street to the Moswetuset Hummock.
The sign that catches my eye is brief. “Moswetuset Hummock was the seat of Chickatawbut, Sagamore of the Massachusetts Indians; adjoining were their planting grounds. ‘Massachusetts’ means ‘at the Great (Blue) Hills. With Chickatawbut, Governor Winthrop made a treaty which was never broken.”1
Are there any treaties that have really never been broken?
According to the Quincy Historical Society, the site today is virtually unchanged from when Plymouth Colony’s military advisor Miles Standish visited the Squantum peninsula in 1621. One unchanged place in a world where everything else has been madly becoming something else.
Before Standish and co. arrived, there were thousands of Massachusetts people living between the Blue Hills and Quincy Bay. But freshly-imported diseases reached them before Standish personally did, killing as much as ninety-five per cent of the population.
On another day, you and I took a walk on a Sunday afternoon at Passanageset Park, where Chickataubut buried his mother – one drop in the high tide of annihilation. One body, turning in the earth while the earth goes on turning.
The Massachusett tribe was not annihilated. Their descendants are alive today.2 But here in Passanageset, one would hardly know. Dense reeds stretch from the road to the water’s edge. The salt marsh, restored by the Army Corps of Engineers a decade ago, is dwarfed by the apartment buildings and commercial strip visible across the water and by the freighter doing a U-turn in the port.
Before the restoration, the site was disturbed by gravel extraction and the dumping of dredging from the Fore River. Today, it’s disturbed by plastic waste, old Styrofoam coolers, and piles of domestic dog poop. Remember how fun it was as a kid to make the first footprints in new snow? This is not the kind of place where one can believe for a moment that you were first. It takes educational posters to know that the Massachusett were here, but the signs of the intervening time are more obvious; the gravel, for one thing, and the piles of stone from a lost foundation, the trash in the water, the view of the Southern Artery with its Goodwill store and car dealerships.
The reeds, which are not native to North America, wave like silky blonde hair over the gravel path. In the marsh, flocks of geese and crows rest under towering ash trees. Somewhere, surely, there are coyotes bedded down.
I think of the core samples scientists extracted from Crawford Lake in Canada – samples that show millennia of Earth’s history transcribed in sediment, the history of all things, written in the dust of all things. Those samples prove that the earth changes as we change, but also that it remembers. The samples contain the dust of nuclear blasts, acid rain and the increase in carbon dioxide concentrations that signify climate change. They show, too, the impact of human responses to these terrors. As we curbed nuclear testing and strengthened anti-pollution policies to prevent acid rain, signs of those things in the sediment lessens. In the case of carbon dioxide, it could be tens of thousands of years before levels return to normal. If we are lucky, there will still be sediment settling on the bottom of the lake in tens of thousands of years. But I don’t know the future. Even the most advanced earth science can’t predict what choices we will make in the time intervening.
But the past – that’s right here with us. The record of the choices we have made in previous times intervening could not be clearer. The things that were, the living things that lived and died, and the things that we have done, never disappear from the earth’s memory.
A sign at the hummock describes the site as one of the very few ancient historic sites in New England that remain undeveloped. To read this sign in the parking lot while looking up at the small hill to which it refers is worrisome. To walk the 0.2 miles trail around that hill and discover that there are few points from which you can’t see the Squantum Yacht Club to the south or the bulky homes clinging to the coast of Squantum to the northeast and that even those points that might otherwise allow for the illusion that we are still standing in the seventeenth century are polluted by graffiti and beer bottles is nothing short of depressing.
From the rocky outcrop over the bay on the east end of the hummock, I see a seagull perched out in the marsh on an artificial nest designed for osprey, and that’s how I feel, standing there with one hand on a tree that has seen more of life and death than I would ever wish to.
After the hummock, I walk along the edge of the marsh to the park at the tip of the peninsula where Squantum stretches north into the Old Harbor, a hand reaching out toward the south of Boston, getting a little closer every time the city fills in or reinforces the shore and a little farther away every time the ocean gets a tenth of a degree warmer, a centimetre higher.
A housing development – 10 stories tall, shiny new apartments still under construction – towers over the entrance to the park. Between the rows of uniform black balconies and the well-worn path into the park is a wide road with a landscaped median and four or five rows of parking, all wrapped in a fence.
I follow a woman leading a small dog wearing a sweater into the park. On the other side of the apartment building is a boardwalk with upscale restaurants and shops from which you can look out over aisle upon aisle of bobbing boats. On this side, the shore is relatively unceremonious. A paved path follows the edge of the water, girded on one side by tightly packed apple trees, crabapples and shrubs and on the other by fields of spartina and goldenrod.
Here and there, unofficial paths weave in and out of the woods. I follow one out to the beach, where blocks of concrete and rusted rebar loom out of the rising tide like a fossil. A sign nailed to a tree warns: No shellfishing. Contaminated area. The great white egret poking around a sandy tide pool maybe forty feet up the beach from where I’m standing doesn’t seem to know.
Under us are the remains of an airfield, closed in the 1950s, and a shipyard, shuttered since the 1980s. Under that is the bountiful summer home of the Neponset Band of the Massachusetts. The Neponset Band came to Squantum in the summers for shellfish.
I wave to a Delta flight roaring in low over my head on its way to the waterside airport in Winthrop. Every time I land in Boston, I am shocked by how quickly the water appears, how the runway pops up out of it seemingly just in time.
The egret, startled by the plane or maybe suddenly aware of my presence, takes a few awkward steps into the water before extending its tremendous wings and catching some current of air, too subtle for a wingless creature like me to even feel, that takes it airborne.
Who will warn this bird that these shores for which it abandons a warm winter home in the Bahamas every year may be laced with human sewage?
I follow the spine of industrial leftovers up the beach, watching the water lap indiscriminately at the sand, the rust, the chunk of concrete on which someone has written “MEET ME HERE” in sky blue paint. The water is oddly clear; I can see every limpet, moon snail, slippersnail, and periwinkle that will be dragged between worlds here in the next few hours.
A few weeks ago, I took a bus out to Hough’s Neck, another peninsula in Quincy, south of here, to see the park at Nut Island, which, as it turns out, is not even an island anymore. It used to be one, with a narrow land bridge accessible only at low tide. Then came a bridge, and the fill, and more fill. Today, you wouldn’t even know if it weren’t for the name that the piece of land that holds the park was once alone out there.
At that point, I had been living in Quincy for a month. I was looking for somewhere quiet and untamed to clear my head – somewhere that would remind me of my childhood in rural Vermont.
Because my exposure to flora for the past month had been limited to morning glories dying on my neighbors’ fences, I was delighted by the park’s abundance of goldenrod, wild roses, red clover, vetch, and milkweed, but it was a grey, windy day, and everything that had bloomed seemed to be dying.
Still, I love to rest a hand on the trunk of a tree and wonder what the tree has seen.
In Virgil’s Aeneid, the hero Aeneas uncovers the death of his compatriot Polydorus when the tree branches he is gathering for firewood start to bleed. According to legend, Polydorus was murdered by the King of Thrace and robbed of all the treasures he had carried out of the falling city of Troy. The spears that killed him took root and became branches.
Virgil, it seems, was keenly aware that the land has a much longer memory than most men. But these days the blood isn’t always obvious. It’s easy to mistake the spear for branches.
On Nut Island, I touched the native black cherry and aspen trees, the imported Norway spruce, but the rushing of the grass and the bugs in the meadow couldn’t drown out the cough of cars back in Houghs Neck or the chortle of boats’ engines out on the water.
In terms of wildness, the cormorants, rabbits, and gulls that crowded the outer edges of the park did little to compensate for the sewer treatment plant that dominated the middle. The landscaped trail around the park never dipped down to the water’s edge, where all the action was, but stayed on the high part of the island overlooking the rocky beaches where the birds gathered.
As I trudged back toward the bus stop, cold and disappointed, I was tempted suddenly by a set of stairs not clearly intended for public use but also not clearly prohibited. Clinging to a white polyvinyl railing, I descended past some fenced-off facility equipment and, as I had secretly hoped, down to the beach.
From the path, it looked like the whole beach was black and rocky. But here the water ended only where a mountain of purple mussel shells began. There were so many of them, piled so high, that the whole bottom step was covered in them.
For a moment, I forgot how to walk, or maybe I was too overwhelmed by this monument to a million creatures to even consider how I might walk on it. When I finally took a step, the beach crunched beneath me. Of course, I thought, most beaches are made of shells when it comes down to it – most of them ground down to sand by years of friction and disintegration. But when you look at sand you can forget that it was once something else. On the beach of a million purple shells, where a hundred more are washing up even as you stand there, you can’t help but remember: Everything we have, everywhere we stand, everything we are, has already been.
Now, on the beach in Squantum, there is no one else around. I lose track of the large things – the trees, the wreckage, the city in the distance, even the planes, which emerge from distant lights in the clouds every few minutes – and lose myself in the small things – a few bold clumps of sea lavender, a dead crab lying face-up in the sand, the cap from a bottle of Heineken washing in and out with the water.
Now and then, I hear rustling in the woods to my left, but I don’t even look up; all of the parks here are crawling with grey squirrels and cottontails. This time of year, as autumn ends, they tear through the dry leaves in a panic, packing away food for the winter. I pick my head up only when the stretch of beach I’m walking on dead-ends into a pile of rubbish and dead trees. I look up from the sand to the place where the beach clears again on the other side of the debris. I am looking into the golden eyes of a coy-dog.
There is a kind of recognition. I have seen him before – not here, of course, but far to the north at my parents’ house in Vermont, as a pair of eyes glowing by the side of the road, a flash of fur as I turn a corner. And more likely than not, he has also seen me – or, not me exactly, but a woman who could have been me, one of the many women who have stood somewhere in this park.
But this is the first time I have stood this close or locked eyes with him like this. I find myself hoping it is a first for him, too.
I take a step back and turn my eyes toward the water. To see a wild thing in this place that has lost its wildness, to have another creature look back at me with two eyes – the universal mark of the hunter – has my heart pounding in my chest, my wrists, and under my ears.
I am filled with delight and hope and terror, the thrill of recognition, the waiting to see how I will be received.
The coyote lowers its head, and I turn away from it and walk faster. Every time I look back, he raises his head, as if he knows, and we assess each other again. Electric shocks of perception whip back and forth.
Where the beach curves, I stumble through the woods to return to the beaten path, the asphalt, the flat ground where a landing strip once must have been. I see the woman with the dog in the sweater again, both of them on a green bench, resting. I remember something the head volunteer at the shelter said earlier. “They were wild this morning,” she said, facing the kennels where the rescue dogs were resting. She meant, of course, that all the visitors had riled them up and worn them out, but the phrase stuck in my head because of its other meaning.
In the timescale of all the universe has ever been and will be, it was really just this morning that all the dogs were wild – every canine in North America was some mix of wolf and coyote like the one on the beach. Not one sweater on any of them.
Only hours ago, the Neponset were here, eating uncontaminated shellfish from the bay. The tide came and went, and no one worried how it would rise over generations or imagined that one day we would be making maps forecasting how much of Squantum will be gone in ten years or twenty.
A hemlock tree can live a thousand years. The things the hemlocks on the hummock have seen. The things they will see yet. I am amazed that they do not start bleeding.
But you and I, we are only here now, in a moment as short in the scale of the universe as one glance exchanged between creatures. Here, with everything under us and everything over us, everything in a headlong rush to survive. If we are lucky, we will be here long enough to see some beautiful thing in the remainder – perhaps long enough, even, to look again.
