An Escape Hatch

Each weekend of the pandemic I force myself to go on an adventure. OK, maybe “adventure” is a bit hyperbolic since I’m limited by social distancing and my only modes of transportation are my feet and bicycle. There’s only so much adventure to be had in these circumstances. But I try.

Before you get to the Harbor, you walk through this brackish marshland, where many of the pine trees are dead, frozen in time from when the saltwater first seeped into their roots. It is an eerie sight, especially right now. There were only a few other people hiking that day, and we passed and greeted each other in that careful, somber way that has become common. Most boats and planes are not operating for the time being, so even their background noise was absent. It was a still, ghostly scene, especially once the peepers were behind me. The pinecones were especially haunting, as they hung on to mostly dead limbs.

But eventually you get through this pine tree graveyard and come to the Harbor, with its endless dunes, pools and eddies of clear water, colorful rocks and shells, and seagulls and cormorants.

I wrote the poem below in the days after my hike. Some of it is quite literally about that adventure, but it’s also about how plans change unexpectedly and how to look for some hope even in the bleakest of situations. And although there are plenty of foxes in Provincetown, I did not chase one during my hike. That line was inspired by a Zoom session I recently had with my therapist, when she asked me if I had a habit of chasing men who on some level don’t want to be caught. But that’s maybe the subject of a future poem or Medium post.

The Hatches

I chase a fox that does not want to be caught,
running after his red tail. He leads me toward
a pine forest that rings a brackish marsh.

He vanishes once we’re under a canopy of grey,
where saltwater has seeped into the roots of the trees,
stripping bark from trunks and splaying branches into
twisted arms that reach to the clouds.

Blanched pinecones still somehow hang on those
begging branches.
Hundreds of these little round ghosts
fill my line of sight, holding tight to their seeds
and hoping for a miracle.

09 April 2020

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