I was going to take some time off this week to sort out my “damp, drizzly November soul” but work stuff popped up and I didn’t get a chance to go stand on a east facing beach and throw a black needlefish into the surge with my 11-foot surf rod and old-school Penn Squidder. I was hoping to land a laggard striper headed south for the winter, even the seals and white sharks made that a dim prospect. My boats are all pulled so my mind’s at ease for the first time since the beginning of the hurricane season. I still have some motors to winterize, then tulips to plant and gutters to clean, but the urge to trudge along the Atlantic shore from Wellfleet to Truro still tugs strongly.
Which of course got me to thinking about the palliative powers of saltwater and helped me remember this quote by Vincent J. Scully, Jr., the Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art in Architecture at Yale that concluded a profile of him written by James Stephenson in the New Yorker in February, 1980:
“When the river is frozen in the winter, I carry the boat until I find open water, and then I just launch it. It’s wonderful rowing through the ice floes. I go out in wild seas all winter. The wind comes from different directions, and the water is always alive, always different. I love to row through the big waves. Way out in the Sound, there’s a triple rock, sort of a monster, and I often row out to that. Sometimes I shout Greek: ‘Polyphloisboi thalasses!’ It’s from the ‘Iliad.’ the best description of the sea: ‘the many-voiced roaring.’ And it’s exactly the sound that the big waves make: ‘polyphloisboio’ as they come tumbling toward the bow, and then the soft, sighing sound — ‘thalasses, thalasses’ — as they pass under the boat.”