For beginnings, you start at the start. Like when we came to Marblehead. From my vantage point in Wyoming before we came here, Marblehead was a mere dot on a Google map, somewhere close to where the land ended. The first time I saw this town was from the front seat of a moving truck, maneuvering down Pleasant Street, almost comical in its narrowness after Wyoming’s wide boulevards. It seems like a blink of the eye now, but 2,000 miles of driving that U-Haul, took us from hundred-mile vistas on the high plains to a New England postcard.
In similar fashion, my daughter has gone from a tiny bologna loaf wrapped in swaddling clothes in the hospital in Thailand where she was born to a graduate, this week, of Marblehead High School. When the nurse brought her to me I was so overpowered that I could not keep to my feet. I had to sit with her. I clearly remember thinking that I had done nothing of real importance in all my days before. Now I had this little life to guard and protect and guide.
Along the way we came to Marblehead, where she has received the finishing touches on the first part of her education. My next job will be to let her go.
But! This also means that these days she gets to take me places. Her whole life I’ve been protecting and guiding, as I said, but since we’ve been here, she’s learned a thing or two I didn’t know. For instance, when I asked her what I should write about for this column, she suggested Castle Rock. Not to ruin it for the young people, but apparently this is a favorite hangout spot for teens in town. (If I had to guess, it’s been a favorite since the teenage days of many readers…)
Because she’s a good sport, she agreed to drag her dad there.
I haven’t spent a ton of time out on the Neck since moving to Marblehead, but I have circumvented the peninsula enough times to know I had no idea Castle Rock existed. Another of Marblehead’s hidden gems, it lies a short walk off Ocean Avenue, easily missed from the car. Its preservation stands as a testament to the foresight of our local forebears. I have been impressed at the robust protections landmarks and landscapes enjoy in Massachusetts. The entrance to Castle Rock is only a walkway, no more than 30 feet across, and could easily have been swallowed up in an earlier time of breakneck development. I hope we do as well in our time at preserving such places for future generations.
Future generations of teens among them. Like my daughter, who showed me the rock ledge atop Castle Rock where she likes to go with her friends. The rock itself is a formidable slice of ledge that juts out into the Atlantic. She told me that at high tide when the wind is up, sometimes the waves come crashing all the way up her favorite spot. I decided not to ask her what the heck she was doing out there at high tide in the first place. This, as I said, is a time for letting go.
We clambered down off the rock to the beach below. Unlike its counterpart over on the mainland at Devereaux, this beach (unnamed according to Google Maps, although I hope an alert reader will name it for me) was black. There were a couple private stairways that looked as though they had been carved directly into the rock as though in a movie, and interesting beach flotsam and jetsam. Seaweed (sea vine?) is always going to be of interest to the landlubber.
It was a windy, gray day and we sat on the beach and watched the sea churn. My daughter pointed out that the sea looked green. She’s a big fan of the classics and I asked her if she’d ever seen it looking wine-dark, as Homer had. She told me, not yet. I told her that one day she could find out if that Homer fellow knew what he was talking about, when she went to see the Aegean Sea for herself.
“Oh, for sure,” she replied.
That’s where she is now. All the fullness and certainty of youth and all the world laid before her. She’ll always be a Wyoming girl, but now a part of her formative learning has come from Marblehead, too. From the lowland tropics to the sweep of the Rockies down to the high plains and all the way out to the Atlantic, I’d say she’s off to a pretty good start. And when she wants to come home, we’ll be right here waiting in this town where the surf pounds Castle Rock, and I’ll still be out exploring.
As always, if you’ve got an idea upon which I can embark for a Marblehead First Time, drop me a line at court.merrigan@gmail.com. Wyoming transplant Court Merrigan is a new Marblehead resident. His column “My Marblehead First Time” appears regularly in the Current.
Court Merrigan
Wyoming transplant Court Merrigan is a new Marblehead resident. His column “My Marblehead First Time” appears regularly in the Current.
