Reflections on Owning a Shantyboat

摘要

Together with a loyal pilot fish, our shantyboat meditatively noses about her mooring ball in a shallow bight of the West Branch of the Westport River in Massachusetts. Neither fish nor boat has much ambition to travel anywhere else. The mooring lies in 2' of water at low tide off a long, wooded shoreline that we and our neighbors have placed under conservation easements so that an uninterrupted holly-and-oak forest will always descend to salt water, much as it might have done in the 15th century. By day, kingfishers patrol the shore, ospreys soar on the updraft when the afternoon southwesterly meets the trees, and a solitary oystercatcher rests on the rocks at high tide before feeding on the flats as the river flushes. At night, screech owls whinny among the oaks, blue herons cough as if from a two-pack-a-day habit, and the surf booms on the barrier beach to the south. From our shantyboat we enjoy the retrospection of our quarter-century of land conservation effort. In this sense she is a humble reflection of the villas that attended many great Western cities. While sometimes characterized as mere escapes from pestilential overcrowding, the grand villas of the wealthy were also sited to look back, both over the cities and one another, in reflection and admiration. The shantyboat looks back over our woodland in much the same way, though we rejoice in our trees rather than an urban landscape.