The ocean was ill-suited for swimming, being cold and rough with a beach that dropped off sharply, and it was all stone and gravel out there beyond the gray-black beach sand. The sea air was often cool and there was a great deal of fog most days. We might have been on any coast; it seemed to me that the sun did not always set in the same place, and once or twice I had remarked on that to Paula, without either she or I ever much caring to investigate or to keep a record. The cottage itself was warm and comfortable, not quite large enough for a real estate agent to call it “spacious” nor quite small enough for him to call it “cozy,” neatly kept and well maintained, with gray shingles and a stained brown and gray tin roof that made it blend pretty well into its surroundings.
We had evolved our particular way of enjoying the days there, and we seldom varied it. We never got up before dawn, because we preferred to conserve electricity. The propane generator’s tank was expensive to refill, and we wanted it to last all summer. Paula usually got up a few minutes before I did, just when there was light to see by, and lit the fire I had laid the night before in the woodstove. Insulation on the chimney tank was good enough so that there would be enough hot water left from the day before for her to run some of it into the bathroom shower tank, and take a quick, pleasant shower there before dressing. By the time she would emerge, naked and dripping, to towel off in the kitchen, the fire would be going and it would be pleasantly warm. She’d set the first coffee of the day, in its tin percolator, onto the stove, put on the clothes she had left hanging on hooks by the stove the night before, and climb back up the ladder to our bed loft to give me a hard shake and get me started.
Then it would be my job to pull on clothes, go downstairs, chop up some potatoes and onions, and put on a skillet of bacon. When there was enough grease, the onions and potatoes would join the bacon and I’d start whipping eggs with some parsley, chopped tomato, and crumbled tinned corned beef. As soon as the potatoes were brown, I’d pour the egg mixture in and stir the whole mess until it was solid, then split it onto plates. I always ate mine with Worcester and Tabasco; Paula took hers with ketchup, salt, and pepper, “the way God taught midwesterners to do it,” she would explain. “On the tablets that Moses brought back from his vacation trip to Florida.”
“Are you a midwesterner?” I would ask.
“My parents were. Or my grandparents. Or then again maybe I was. I don’t know. Anyway, a Farmer’s Breakfast doesn’t taste right without ketchup, salt, and pepper.”
“Maybe not, but this is a Hobo’s Breakfast,” I would say, “which I learned to make from someone who once met a hobo, and Worcestershire and Tabasco are the true and key ingredients, based on that authority.”
Paula would get a curious expression. “I can understand farmers eating a big breakfast, but why hoboes? A long hard day of catching trains and then lying around the railroad yards?”
That conversation, or one very like it, would continue through breakfast, and then it would be time for our morning walk together. Most mornings it was foggy but not raining; we both remembered days when it had been sunny or rainy, but not recently. We would set one of our alarm watches and walk one way or the other along the beach, for forty-five minutes, until it was time to turn back.
The beach never became really, solidly familiar, even after all these years. It didn’t seem to have any features distinctive enough to become familiar, for one thing. Going either way there were places that curved into the sea and places that curved back from it, broad shallow bays and peninsulas. There were places where the beach was wide and gentle, others where it was narrow and steep, a few where the pine trees came right down almost to the water. There were often things that were interesting on the beach—jellyfish, starfish, shells, things washed off ships, and once we had found a dead dolphin, though again, that had been some other summer than this one. Whichever way we went on the beach, since we always wanted to be ready to meet Jeff when he brought the mail—he came a long way from town and we wanted to make sure that he got his coffee and a bite to eat—we only had an hour and a half to walk, and Paula and I would therefore turn around at exactly forty-five minutes. Exactly forty-five minutes after that we always arrived back at the cottage, agreeing that it had been a terrific walk.
Jeff would arrive just as we finished brewing the second pot of coffee of the day, with both our mail and the groceries we had ordered. We’d get the new stuff put away as we talked to him, and give him the list for the next day. We tried to keep it a short list each day because it all came in the basket of the bicycle, an old clunky red single-speed Murray Missile, which he always leaned against the big column on the left side of the pillar. Given the awkwardness and weight of the bicycle he rode, we didn’t want him to overload his basket and have to work too hard.
The only mail was always the ConTech package, and in it there would be a list of things that we were to look up and write a report about; we looked everything up in the big, comfy reference room that we had put in upstairs—the landlord let us leave our books over the winter—and then typed the report on a manual typewriter and put it in the outgoing envelope for the next day.
I always meant to watch to see which way Jeff came from, or departed to, on the bicycle, because what we could see of the road from our porch gave us no indication as to which direction town was, and I was always afraid that in the event of an emergency, I might not be able to figure out which way to go. Paula always pointed out that if he could ride that heavy old bicycle from town, town just could not be too terribly far. The cottage had no phone, and we always meant to ask the landlord to see about getting us one for the following summer, but we never did.
We’d chat with Jeff for a while, hearing about doings of people that we didn’t know in town and about local politics that didn’t matter much to us.
Usually it would get to be about eleven-thirty, and then Jeff would say he had to be going, and we would urge him to stay to lunch. Lunch was always Campbell’s soup, either tomato or chicken noodle, and some grilled cheese sandwiches, always sharp cheddar on the sourdough bread that we made for dinner the night before. Jeff would have two, I’d have two, and Paula would have one. We’d usually talk Jeff into eating an extra half sandwich and having a second on soup, since he had a long ride to make every day.
Finally, Jeff would ride away, we’d do the little bit of lunch dishes, put on a third pot of coffee, and go upstairs to do our work. That really never varied; we would be asked to find and analyze all the synonyms for an English word, in all the languages we had dictionaries for, of which there were a great many. One day we would do all the synonyms for “stop,” one day for “good-bye,” one day for “leave,” and so forth. Then we would work out how they were all related to each other, and finally prepare a summary of how they were all linked to each other, type that up very carefully on the manual typewriter, and put the whole thing into the envelope for the next day.
We’d have a couple cups of coffee and go for the second walk of the day, along the beach, one hour out and one back in whichever direction we had not gone in the morning. When we returned we’d stoke up the fire with some fresh wood, and I would split some from the big pile on the back porch so that we’d have enough for the next day. I’d go out and do a little surf casting, and whatever I caught would be the basis of a chowder that night; Paula would make up some bread dough from the sourdough, then sweep out the house (it was so hard to stay ahead of the sand), and sit down to read poetry while it rose. I’d come in with the fish, about enough for the chowder—I never seemed to have particularly good or bad luck—and get that under way on the now-hot stove, which would feel lovely after I had been out in the windy cold of the late afternoon. The bacon, onions, and spices would spit merrily away on the bottom of the pot while I gutted, filleted, and chopped the fish; I’d give it a stir and add the potatoes and the cans of crushed tomato and creamed corn, then finally the fish itself and enough beer to make it soup. About the time I had it simmering, and felt like sitting down to read for a while, Paula would get up, carefully mark her place in her book, and punch the bread dough down. We’d sit and read companionably for half an hour, and then she’d knead the bread dough and set it out in loaves; half an hour later, when the chowder had been cooking for a good hour and it was definitely getting to be evening, she’d slip the loaves into the box oven of the woodstove, and then get out the wine. We’d both have a glass while the bread was baking and toward the end of that we’d pull the chowder off the stove and season it.