Barrier Island, Cape Canaveral

I'm a big picture thinker, so let's start with the big picture of my "neighborhood." 

Barrier Island, Cape Canaveral

The limestone shelf has always been here. Porous limestone, ancient fossil limestone, an African fragment broken before time began from the great continent Pangea.  It forms a hard swollen finger pointing south. Thin sea water, skinny as a snake, slips over the shelf, falling and rising for a hundred and forty million years. Glaciers creep close from the north; glaciers recede.

At the top of the finger, the wide Suwannee Channel cuts this new shelf off from the rest of the land mass. Eventually, though, time fills the channel with sediment, and the land—a young land, a youthful land—joins the continent. Quartz-rich Appalachian sand arrives from the north. Pushed by the water, the sand is always moving across the limestone. It scurries like pale crabs, filling in the low places, piling up against the high.

On the Atlantic side, on the middle of the coastline, a long soft sand barrier island emerges like a slender sleeping body. For miles, this island stretches lazily between swirling inlets on its north and south ends, where salt water rushes in with the tides and brackish lagoon water slides out. Under it all, coquina rock composed of fragmented shells and quartz cemented with calcite, sits just offshore like a rough armor. The sea pounds on the east side of the beach in the winter, whispers in the summer. The shallow tidal lagoons languish, drifting south as a river might. The rains pour down, but the land is so porous—sand, limestone, coquina—that the water disappears into it.

A cape of sand swells like a breast into the Atlantic—Cabo Cañaveral, as the Spanish call it, “place of canes.” Tall cord grasses stand in the shallow salt marsh, and sea oats send their stalks six feet high, securing the wide dune of sand fronting the sea.

The people arrive. They walk down from the north. They paddle dugouts of palm and cypress following the water trails. They are later known as the Ais and the Timumcan. The land is good to them. They dig the clams and grow rich with shells. They weave palm fronds into hats, rope, and roofs and eat the berries of palmettos. They build smoky smudge fires to ward off swarms of mosquitoes. They wait out the winter storms, the summer storms, the long streaks of lightning. They watch how the clouds march across the wide-mouthed sky. They see how the sand moves, how the beaches change, how the animals find new paths.

More people come, this time from across the sea, the white sails of their ships spread like herons on the wing. They call themselves Spanish and French and English and investors. They are following the promises of paradise.

Their big ships stay out beyond the reef and send in smaller boats like gnats to the shore. The men’s armor flashes under the bright sun. They clang ashore. They hack through the scrub with swords. They are searching, searching for gold, for silver, for youth, for advantage. The mosquitoes crawl up into their helmets and down their cuirasses. A young Spanish explorer, Ponce de Leon, sets foot ashore twenty-eight miles south of the place of canes and names the land “La Florida,” feast of flowers.

The next wave of people come from the Carolinas. They bring indigo and cotton and black-skinned people from far away. They lure islanders from Majorca with promises of land for little work, a life in paradise, fruit dropping into their hands. Half the people die their first year. The indigo and cotton wither under the hot sun, unable to draw sustenance from the sand. The First Peoples are killed, become diseased and die, are gone by the 1700s.

Most of the newcomers, though, avoid the long barrier island near Cabo Cañaveral.  Its land is too thin. The sun is too strong with no soft shade of trees. The coquina reef makes it too hard to land boats. “No ship escapeth which cometh thither,” one Englishman says of the reef and tides.

But some Whites stay and build houses of wood with roofs of palm, live lives like the First Peoples, only with guns. They hang “mosquito beaters” made of palm fronds next to their shack’s entrance and use them to beat away the clinging swarms before they open the door. They plant scraggly orange groves and scavenge the remains of reef shipwrecks that wash onto the beach.  It’s a rough life.

At the end of the Nineteenth Century, one man builds a railroad on the mainland running alongside the barrier island lagoons, now called the Indian River and the Banana River. He carries people to his hotels in the south. No one looks out the windows on their way to Vero, to the Palm Beaches, to Miami. They speed past the tiny mainland towns of Cocoa, Eau Gallie, Melbourne.

Only a few hardy souls venture across the languid lagoons to the island. The cape is now known as Cape Canaveral, the Banana River Naval Air Station arriving with a new war against the Germans, but later abandoned to the sand and the waves and the wind. The towns remain sleepy backwaters. The old quiet prevails.

Until the Rocket-men arrive.

Copyright 2016. Linda S. Buckmaster

What I Think I'm Doing

 I've been working on the pieces in "Launched: Hullabaloo on the Space Coast" (the current title) for the past half dozen years, and many of them have been published previously in semi-obscure literary journals. But who reads semi-obscure literary journals? I know some of you do, and I (and they) appreciate it. But I want a bigger audience, so here you go. 

I abandoned this blog in 2012 but now I'm back. I'm seeing the format as a more flexible platform than print in that I can play with the text, comment on it, update, run counter narratives, and make up new stuff. It's primarily nonfiction combined with imagination. I'll be doling it out in installments.

I promise not too many rocket allusions, but I will say that "engines are fired" and the gantry is falling away.

 Who She Is

Linda Buckmaster has lived within a block of the Atlantic most of her life, growing up in “Space Coast” Florida during the Fifties and Sixties and being part of the back-to-the-land movement in midcoast Maine in the Seventies. 

Her poetry, essay, and fiction have appeared in over thirty journals, and one of her pieces was listed as a Notable Essay in “Best American Essays 2013.” Former Poet Laureate of her small town of Belfast, Maine, she enjoys collaborating with visual artists and performers. Her monograph “Northern Run” with Book Artist Jan Owen is in the collection of the Center for Book Arts, University of Southern Maine. She has read and performed her work locally and internationally, and has held residencies at Vermont Studios Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Obras Foundation, among others. She teaches in the University of Maine System and has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast program of the University of Southern Maine. 

Linda writes about Florida, boomer women, life in Maine, and whatever else comes to mind.

A somewhat seasonal story . . .

 . . . and what, for me, we can really count on.

"We lived in an efficiency at the Silver Sands Motel in Cocoa Beach the winter I was eight as we waited for our cement-block tract house to be built. At the motel entrance, a full-size cement dolphin rose continually out of the waves, the spotlight at night making shadows on the cement foam. My father would slowly drive his Chevy on the left side of the horseshoe-shaped patio court in the center to stop in front of our unit. Dim lights illuminated the walkway, and the ceaseless sound of surf, louder at high tide, more faraway at low, surrounded us. Next door lived a boy named Robin. I had never heard of a boy named Robin before, but he seemed intelligent, I thought, and his family had just moved there from New York, waiting for their cement-block tract house.

 It was at the Silver Sands my mother admitted there was no Santa Claus. Robin and I had been talking about Santa’s existence, sitting on the rusting seats of the creaky motel swing set. Later when I was flipping through the toy section of the shiny Sears & Roebuck Christmas edition catalog, I started to wonder why there were price tags listed for all these toys if Santa Claus made them in his workshop and was going to bring them. I had already started to suspect that some things didn’t fit with the Santa Claus story, like the part about coming down the chimney since I didn’t see any chimneys at the motel or anywhere else in Cocoa Beach. And I’d heard rumors on the playground. I posed the question to my mother.

“That’s because mommy and daddy are really Santa Claus,” she said gently. “We buy all the toys and put them under the tree for you and Ricky. All the parents do. There is no real Santa Claus, honey.”

I felt a sick rush in my stomach. “That’s not really true,” I said in my know-it-all way. “You’re just saying that.”

“Really. It is,” she said flatly.

 Why did I ask her that question? I scolded myself. Although I wanted her to answer, I didn’t really want to know, not yet, anyway. I ran out the jalousie-windowed front door and climbed onto the sea wall that separated the sand-ridden patio from the beach below.  I swung my legs, my heels banging against the sea wall as I watched the winter-sized waves rolling in endlessly. 

The waves seemed unconcerned about Santa Claus or any other human matter.  There really is a Santa Claus, I told myself, trying to make time go backwards. But the longer I sat, I knew there was no going back.  I could see the indifference of the waves to my small plight, and this somehow comforted me. They just carried on day after day, year after year, for eons."

(Excerpt from "Launched" in "Hullabaloo on the Space Coast: A Memoir of Place," copyright 2012 by Linda Buckmaster._

"I was born on the cusp of three hurricanes"

 Seeing how Hurricane Sandy is set to cruise through midcoast Maine later tonight, I thought I'd post this:

"I was born on the cusp of three hurricanes. September is prime hurricane season in Miami, and in 1950, several circled my mother’s due date. “Charlie,” “Dog,” and “Easy” bounced over the South Atlantic as my father carried my mother’s suitcase onto the hospital elevator. When the elevator door opened, the nurse picked up the suitcase, took my mother’s hand, and closed the door in front of my father.

 In the bed next to my mother’s lay a young, laboring Seminole woman who was brought in from her chickee in the Everglades. First the Indian woman was put under anesthesia and then my mother was. When my mother awoke some time later, the hurricanes were veering away from Miami, and she had a new baby girl sleeping down the hall in the nursery. The Seminole woman was gone, disappearing with her new baby back into the ’Glades.

My mother held me in her lap as we rode in my father’s ’46 Chevy along the narrow strip of asphalt that is Southwest 8^th Street, known as the Tamiami Trail, which stretches a hundred and ten miles through the Everglades to Tampa on the west coast. The Silver Court Trailer Park sat on the edge of Miami, and the buildings that lined the route squatted modestly under the relentless sun. Their low-pitched roofs were designed to deflect hurricanes and the shabby porches looked like they had been through a few.

 Our trailer park was lush and green with tropical vegetation and song birds. Friendly chameleons scurried across the screens of the porch my father built, which doubled as the living room for our tiny silver trailer. The heavy smells of night-blooming jasmine and gardenias hung in the humidity. Variegated crocus and palms reached over the trailer park’s crushed coquina shell road as my mother pushed my stroller along, showing me off to the other residents. One stop, since we didn’t have a bathroom in our trailer, was always the common bathrooms housed in a whitewashed stucco building with green stains creeping up the outside. My mother, who grew up in the same South Philadelphia neighborhood as my father,  put me out in my playpen every day in just a diaper, because what could be better for a young child than that fresh Florida air?"

(Excerpt from "Launched" in Hullabaloo on the Space Coast: A Memoir of Place, copyright  2012 by Linda Buckmaster)

Statement on Marriage Equality

Among the many hats I wear is being a member of the congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Belfast, Maine. I am very proud to say that the congregation has engaged in a process of drafting and approving a Statement of Conscience in support of the upcoming vote on Marriage Equality on the Maine State Ballot this November. Here it is:

"We, the Congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Belfast, Maine, stand on the side of love. We unconditionally respect and affirm the right of all adults to marry, and in doing so, strengthen Maine families and communities.

Today, many fundamental benefits are denied same-sex couples who seek to live in a bond of love and compassion within the sanctity of marriage.

As people of justice and conscience, we honor and respect marriage as a cornerstone of our freedom and the pursuit of happiness. We urge our neighbors across Maine to join with us in support of marriage equality and vote YES on Question 1."

Blog-view: Arielle Greenberg

 Arielle Greenberg is  a new  member of the lively Maine poetry scene, and we’re glad she and her family chose to settle in Belfast after she left a tenured position in poetry at Columbia College Chicago. She is co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of the hybrid-genre Home/Birth: A Poemic, and author of My Kafka Century, Given, and several chapbooks, including the forthcoming Shake Her. 

Not only that, she is co-editor of three anthologies, most recently the not-too-missed Gurlesque with Lara Glenum.  And she teaches poetry out of her home, in the community, and through the University of Tampa's low-residency MFA program. She can been seen in her regular column for the American Poetry Review on issues and trends in contemporary poetics

LB: What is an artifact you have in your studio or writing space, and what does it mean for your work?
AG: I don't really have a writing space per se: I usually write the first drafts of my poems long-hand, preferably while lying horizontally across my bed, or on scraps of paper while I'm driving, or on the backs of other sheets of paper.  Later I type them in at my computer, which is on a little vintage Danish modern desk in my "office" next to the kids' playroom.  My desk is covered with papers, books, things I rip out of magazines, etc., but none of these are exactly artifacts.  So, no artifact and no writing space! I don't mind, though: I'm generally kind of adverse to things or routines that mythologize and idealize the act of poem-making.

LB: We're interested in knowing what you've read recently but we'd love to know what you wish you had read at some point, or sometimes pretend you have read.

AG: I really want to read Lydia Davis' translation of Proust.  Quite a project, and one I've been meaning to undertake for years, but still have not. I've never read Proust. I love the idea of Proust, but I'm not sure I'll like the actual thing.  I love Davis, though, so I feel like if anyone can get me to read him in translation, it will be her.

LB: What is something you would like to tell the world?

AG: Oh, gosh. I'm such a loudmouth: I'm sure that I've already shouted everything I want to tell the world more than I ought to have.

Some random quotes I like

"A word is a way to speak about something that really, in truth, no word can touch. . . . A word is, just for a moment, what arriving might be like--before there slips into here. And here goes in earnest search of another 'elsewhere.'" --Lia Purpura, Rough Likeness

"Get those words out of your mouth and into your heart." --Jack Spicer quoted in my vocabulary did this to me. Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian

"I am calling the stars in to me
come in through the head
come in through the chest
come in to my heart"
--Gary Lawless, "Sardine Songs"

"World, world, I can't get you close enough." Edna St. Vincent Millay in something