Women and the Sea

The West End Theater in Gloucester’s historic Blackburn Tavern building is turning into quite an appealing endeavor. I’ve attended half a dozen performances there over the last couple years and have consistently been impressed. Friday night’s Women and the Sea was as fine a performance as you could ask for anywhere.

The play, written by Shelly Berc and Anita Stewart, is constructed entirely of actual quotes from women in the Portland, Maine area who Berc and Stewart interviewed between 2000 and 2002. Told in sixteen different voices enacted by six very accomplished actresses, the play was far more engaging than I had expected - partly due to the gifts of the actresses and the clever staging but more so because of the stories themselves.

Throughout the narrative we meet fishermen and the wives of fishermen, wharf workers and fish packers, clam diggers and a 100 year old lighthouse keeper, the captain of a ferry boat, an aquaculturist, and well-known swordboat Captain Linda Greenlaw. All relating their experiences - warm, funny, crude, and heartbreaking. I just loved every minute of it.

Since long before I moved to Gloucester I’ve been intrigued by people who live their lives at sea. When I was in college I worked in a diner where a lot of seamen came to eat during brief periods of shore leave. I loved talking to them for many reasons not the least of which was that so many of them just were happy to have someone female to talk to for a little while. They were well tired of the company of men. During that time one of my friends lost a brother who was working on a barge on Lake Erie. It was caught in a “muzzler” - the sudden fierce ice storms that the Great Lakes are famous for - and half the crew was swept overboard.

Later my nephew Mark told me a harrowing story about the time he and my brother Jack were caught in a similar storm on Lake Erie. Hearing the story from this boy I have known all his life made the reality of it far more immediate than any story I had heard before. I had heard of storms that came up so fast there was no time to prepare but always found that hard to fathom until Mark told me his story.

I well remember the so-called Perfect Storm. I was house-sitting a house on the ocean in Marblehead and stopped on my way home from work to see my friend Judy. It was Halloween and she said there wouldn’t be any trick-or-treating that night. She said I should go home and “batten down the hatches”. By the time I got there the waves were crashing half way up the lawn and when I went out onto the porch to bring some chairs in the wind was so violent it sucked my breath away and I had to work keeping my back to the wind and my head tucked into my shoulder to finish what I needed to do. I’d been through a few hurricanes in Texas and decided to ride it out in the house. During the night the house shook so badly the water sloshed out of toilets and I had to mop floors.

The next morning when I came downstairs everything was quiet and dark - the windows were so plastered with leaves I couldn’t see outside and when I opened the door to the deck over the ocean I couldn’t believe my eyes. The pier was gone. The yard was completely covered in jumbles of lobster traps, gear, ropes, and assorted junk. A 35 foot cabin cruiser lay on its side on the beach. It looked like a bomb had gone off.

Later that afternoon my friend Trudi and drove up to Gloucester to see how they had fared. We were sitting in a restaurant listening to men tell stories of storms they had weathered. While we listened a young guy came in and pulled up a bar stool.

“Did you hear?” he asked.

What?

“The Andrea Gail is missing.” The room became very quiet.

So that is my contribution to the on-going stories of Women and the Sea.

Thanks for reading.