Ghosts in the Machine

Hal had been working as a treecutter for a few years when he and I took a short vacation together in 1996. We went to Assateague, an island off the Maryland Shore, where an old friend, Sis, was working for the month on the beach. Sis was actually Hal's teacher, a long time ago, and although I hadn't seen her in years, she and Hal had remained friends. So she invited us down to spend a few days with her there at the State Camp Site...car camping, lots of trailers...not what I'd grown up with, but after a night or two in an army pup tent, with wild ponies snurffling about my wary head...basically forget trying to sleep when a horse is about to crush your little skull like a walnut] we gave up and slept in the hot little camper with her. At least there were no mosquitoes in the camper. No air, but no bugs. OK, I'm making it sound miserable. But here's what wasn't miserable:

• clamming on the Bay side...wandering out in water with a basket floating attached by a rope to your waist, using your toes in the mud to suss out wily clams, RAKIN' 'em out, quick...
  
• riding bikes and watching the brilliant flash of red winged blackbirds in the tall rushes
  
• going to the Nature museum there and seeing what lives in tidepools
• Sis's marinara with clam sauce made with the aformentioned clams
• waking up at dawn and walking along the pink-sand beach
• being on the beach at dusk, watching the colors fade to lavender and the palest blues
• riding across the bridge onto the mainland and seeing what was for sale at the local farmstand: fragrant fat peaches, ripe melons, beans, jars of local jams and jellies in jewel-colors, the first red-ripe tomatoes, "Silver Queen corn." She crab soup at the local diners. "Waterman's" in Ocean City, " where they covered the table with brown paper and a heap o' crabs was placed in front of you to attack ((((I, alas, am not the type, but the crab cakes were yummy))).
  
• going to the beach after dusk with flashlights, which we shone along the length of the beach to illuminate HUNDREDS of scuttling little ghost crabs, their eyes a-wobble atop slender stalks.
• And finally, to tie this even tangentially to blogdom, I learned something about wood: Hal and I were walking along the beach, a very long walk, and we kept seeing the edges of old shipwrecks, which must have been uncovered by recent storms (I've been back since and never seen them again). Hal showed me the cross pieces in the wood and said the shipmakers chose the crotches of the wood, because it was so strong, and he showed me how, in these days before metal nails, the pegs used to hold wood pieces together were just jammed in. A friend who was moving just gave me an old (circa 1700) oak chair and it has the same look--wooden pegs inserted into the wooden plank. There was something profoundly beautiful about seeing these weathered, wave-smacked ribs, and how amazing that these immaculately pegged beams were still holding together, even now.