Meet Cricket

To be sure she’s no rig like Rocinante or Ghost Dancing*. I can’t close the doors against the rain and crawl in the back to sleep, nor do I have a store of applejack laid in to offer an acquaintance on the road some coffee “with authority.” But she’s a good companion, comfortable and reliable enough to see me through.

I picked up Cricket used from a dealership in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn at the foot of the Verrazano Bridge. She’s a 2000 Civic, two-door, black and compact. She came with a viper alarm system, which chirps, as do the tires when I reach for a small window in traffic. It was this chirping, and her verve, that earned her the name Cricket.

Cricket and I have traveled over 130,000 miles in the past six years. There’s a dent on the hood that’s rusting around the edges from when a deer rolled up on the front end and catapulted over the sunroof. Though I’ve replaced the entire exhaust system in pieces along the way, it still rattles. But with the roof rack off (it is), the windows up (not regularly), and going 65 miles per hour (when it suits me) she can better 40 miles a gallon.

Most of my gear fits in the trunk: a one-person tent, therm-a-rest and sleeping bag; a backpack of clothes. The kitchen consists of a backpacking stove, a can of white gas and the remnants of my pantry. Like Steinbeck, I “laid in 150 pounds of those books one hasn’t got around to reading.” Ok, my library weighs in at a mere 38 pounds but I’m chided by the rest of his sentence: “and of course those are the books one isn’t ever going to get around to reading.”

As this is the season of international sports, I have one final caveat to add: if you’re wondering, those men in white who wield flat bats and play the game for hours or days on end are “cricketers” not cricketers.

For now, Cricket lies packed and ready and I, at the wheel, shall be the Cricketeer.

*Rocinante is the built-to-spec truck for John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie. Ghost Dancing is William Least Heat Moon’s home for his travels in Blue Highways. If you haven’t, read both, but beware, they may infect you with the “virus of restlessness” as Steinbeck calls it.

On the Road

On the interstate my mind dulls, or maybe there’s less to observe. I-87 climbs to the dissected plateau of the Catskills, and I cross Katerskill creek on a bridge high above the water. I long to stop, to take a hike or find some shady overlook where I could eat my lunch, but I’m on the conveyer belt and before I know it I’m back down in the Hudson Valley. Hungry, I pull into a rest area praying at least for a patch of grass and a tree. I find it and sit to eat, though dog walkers have visited before me.

A horn blares.

In the car next to mine, a mother, settling her young son and daughter back into the car announces, “This is New York, baby.”
“I thought this was America.”
“Well, it is. America is huge; New York is just a part of it.”

America is huge. I think of Kansas, Utah, Wyoming.

She gets in and starts the engine, then opens the door and walks over to me. “My son says you need an ice cold water.” She hands me a Poland Spring. Who am I to argue? “Tell him I said thank you,” I say. I open it and sip, ice bobbing at my lips. I give the kid a thumbs up and smile. He settles back into his car seat and they pull away.

Has it started yet?

Has it started yet? This was a favorite joke of Dan Wagoner, my beloved professor at Connecticut College. We would be setting up a prop or hitching up a costume in preparation to share a dance piece and he’d giggle. “Has it started yet?” We laughed, but the message was clear. From the moment we stepped in front of an audience, we were on stage, even if it “hadn’t started yet.”

And so, headed north on Route 6 towards Provincetown for a whale watch, having given spontaneity the reins, I thought, ‘why not start today?’

At Wellfleet Bay I listened to the sound of hundreds of fiddler crabs scuttling across the hardening mud of a vacant tide. They sounded like a light rain falling, so subtle I had to stop to make sure I was hearing it for sure. An out-of-focus spray of song caught my ear and I scanned the marsh. A sparrow perched on a pile of dried grasses, gave the song again, then flew low across the path in front of me. The yellow triangle around the eye identified it as a Saltmarsh Sharp-tailed Sparrow. A life bird.

The boat was already boarding when I bought my ticket, so I strode out along the wharf and down the ramp to the Portuguese Princess. As we motored out of Cape Cod bay and headed for Stellwagen Bank, I pulled on first fleece, then sweatshirt. I claimed my place by the bow railing, reveling in the wind in my face. The low dunes of the Provincelands receded behind us. Abruptly the captain turned the boat northwest and in the distance, frolicking beside another whale watch boat, I could see a humpback breaching again and again. We stayed with him, “Pitcher”, for perhaps a half hour as he dove and breached, rolled on his back and slapped his flippers on the surface, and dove to breach again and again and again. Wilson’s Storm Petrels peppered the surface with their feet and a single Sooty Shearwater wheeled low over the waves.

Full of the sea and wind, licking salt spray from my lips, I stopped by a local potter’s stall on Macmillan Wharf and bought a hand turned plate the color of the sea when a whale lingers just below the surface. “I’m taking the ocean with me,” I told the potter, and he smiled.

It had begun.

(this photo is from the Dolphin Fleet's Website: http://www.whalewatch.com/photos/photohumpback/index.php)