The Rising
by Robert P. Barsanti
For Easter, the neighbors and I are picking up trash. This winter, the wind delivered squalls of blowing garbage. Plastic bags were transfixed onto the gray thorns of old blackberry bushes, the hedge had picked up beer cans, and the beach grass of the "wetlands" had stopped and deflated a soccer ball. Accompanied by children, and fortified with garbage bags, we set about mending the yards.
Even though the clock and the calendar have changed, the weather hasn't. It was forty degrees and drizzling sideways in April as it was in January. The days are longer, the mornings less likely to see frost perhaps, and the peepers are roaring through the night. I have seen pictures of surfers in their dry suits, though I am not sure if I believe they are really out there. The Right Whales have swum by without anyone rowing out after them. Still, the brown and gray of Nantucket's winter slides pretty easily into the brown and gray of Nantucket's spring.
For most of January and February, the wind is too strong and the air is too cold to spend much time outside. Unlike the Berkshires where 100 inches of snow fell, very little fell on-island and even less lasted long enough for a sledding run. The evening has dropped dark and fast. Most of us go to work from a dark yard, and then return home to the same darkness. In the half light, I saw the trash build in the grass, but it didn’t seem as if it was my problem. The wind brought the Sun Chips bag into my life, it would remove it soon enough.
Out here, winter isolates. We turn the heat up, put on a sweater, and turn our backs to the windows. Once inside, the windows reflect the Bruins game, the soup bowl full of chili, and the unfolded laundry on the sofa. The island has no winter activity that will unite us: no ski areas, no frozen ponds, no wing nights. In our familiar past, the island tricked us into at least traveling in the same ruts as everyone else. Whomever I missed at the post office, I ran into at Orange Street Video. If they weren’t there, I might see them at the Atlantic Café, at the Downyflake or in the paper goods aisle at the Stop and Shop.
But the new and exciting Broadband Universe has replaced most of those places with a remote and a screen. I buy my books and my toilet paper from Amazon, rent my movies from the cable, and gaze at the dark Downyflake windows.
The twenty-first century winter lasts longer than the previous several million. In the new Broadband World, we don't need to get off the couch and out the door. My neighbors aren't getting off the couch either, so they aren't likely to complain about the line of plastic bags hanging halfway up the hedge.
Still, a day comes when I silence the chattering, angry birds and grunting pigs, look out on the gray on brown on gray, and see a flash of yellow amid the windblown plastic and paper. Its rebuke is deafening: “Here I am, back after months away, and there are sandwich bags here?” So, the neighbors and I have to take our yards back from the wind. In the bright chill quiet, we mend.
It’s familiar work. Thirty years ago, I caddied at Bear Hill Country Club in Stoneham. On a day in April, when the snow was still frozen into a blackened berm in the cool shadows of woods or trap, or it had puddled up in the cold mud of the fairway, we were summoned to the pro shop for Clean Up Day. All of us were called: golfers, greenskeepers, caddies, and pros.
We each got a rake, a box of bags, and a golf hole. Then, all of us, greenskeepers, caddies, and members, went off to one of the nine holes. We trudged about with our rakes, cleaning out the leaves from the rough and even the far rough, picking up the blown trash and investing in the summer. In a week, I would be lugging the bags and finding the golf balls for the men that I was raking with right now.
Bear Hill was an odd country club. Suburbia let dozens of these clubs grow and thrive in the last century. The members were not the well-heeled blueblood Cabots and Lowells, but middle class guys who were doing just well enough so as to afford spending a few thousand dollars in the summer to play golf. They were salesman, carpenters, retirees, and crackpot inventers. They were more Rodney Dangerfield than Ted Knight. So, they weren't going to stand on ceremony for the spring clean up.
Thirty years on, I know more now than I knew then. These were remarkable men. Even the ones who sprayed their drives into the pines and the high grass, the ones who barely tipped, and the ones who threw their clubs; they all believed in something bigger than themselves. On Clean-Up Day, they weren't going to drink in the club room and claim that “they paid good money for the privilege of golfing” here. The club, as threadbare as it was, was going to be handed down to us. In their heads, they saw the caddies as the future of the club and the sport. To that end, they limited the golf carts, paid us, and raked with us in the spring.
We come back to ourselves in the spring. You and I and everyone else emerge from our front doors and step out into the billion-year-old wind. Shoots, buds, mud, and leaves—the green engine that brings the daffodils back—brings us back into the world as well. I am not who I am in the winter. I am not the face in the screen, the hands on the wheel, the dent on the sofa. We are not what winter forces each of us to be. We are what spring allows us to be. We are deep in wet earth, chilled by the sea air, but with each other in silent labor, mending.
