Watching the Sun Go Down

The other night I met Mark in the parking lot of the art association to sit and talk and watch the sun go down. We do this a lot - meet somewhere to talk while the sun sets - but both of us particularly love the art association parking lot on Pirate’s Lane because it is a special place for us if for different reasons.

When I first moved to Gloucester in 1994 the North Shore Arts Association was one of the first places I visited. I got involved as a volunteer during the Mulhaupt Retrospective and shortly afterwards was elected to the Board of Directors. The NSAA has filled my life and made a lot of connections - both personal and professional - for me. Pirate’s Lane has been a part of Mark’s life since, as a kid, he worked for his Uncle Howie who had a lobster pool there. He moored his boat, F/V Black Sheep/ down there for all the years he fished and, once he gave up fishing, he sat in that parking lot in his truck writing what has turned into his book.

We talk a lot about writing while the sun sets. I’ve been writing since forever and have attended countless writing seminars and workshops, writer’s groups, classes and more. Writing is relatively new in Mark’s life. Once he stopped lobstering he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. He would sit in his truck and look at the harbor and think about all the things that had filled his life for 17 years as a lobsterman - storms and dangerous creatures and feuds with fellow lobstermen and women, too. Finally he started writing them down. He didn’t realize he had a book in him at that time. He didn’t realize that he had a gift for narrative and a way with words that was compelling either.

In one of the chapters in his book he wrote these two lines: My house sits on a tidal marsh in back of Good Harbor Beach. I work on my lobster traps there and watch hawks soar.

The first time I read those lines they brought tears to my eyes. I told him that there were people who could write their entire lives without writing two sentences as perfect as those. He thought I was daffy.

Now, over the past year and a half of spending time together he has gotten used to my observations on his writing. In fact we talk about writing a lot - about craft, about other writers, about this strange need to get it down and get it right. In some ways we are a lot alike - both committed loners who like having special people in our lives but need a lot of solitary time. We are both tough and earthy and yet oddly romantic in our view of the world. But it is this bond of writing that fascinates us. This obsession with story and why that story matters.

From the NSAA parking lot we watch the sun set behind the Gloucester skyline, directly behind City Hall. Mark’s book ends in that building. In a way, my life in Gloucester began there. I was a volunteer at a sculpture show held in the auditorium there. For eight months I spent Sunday afternoons sitting at a table selling tickets and looking into the stairwell. The stairwell of City Hall in Gloucester is famous for what is written on its walls. Names, over five thousand of them. Names of men who died at sea. It begins in 1716 with Jeremiah Allen. Some of the names are wonderful - Nehemiah Elwell. Abraham Thurrell, Ebenezer Parsons, Duncan McMillan. Some are horrible - Thirteen Unknown. I read those names over and over and over imagining what their lives had been like and marveling that, over all these years, names continued to be added to the wall in homage and respect and the simple human need to write things down lest they be lost.

Mark went there, too. I won’t give away the end of the book but he went to look at the blank spot on the wall where his name could have been written. I am extremely grateful it is not there.

So we sit, and talk, and watch the sun go down behind the tower of City Hall, and think of the names written there - and the name not written there.

Thanks for reading.