GH O TI

f i sh

Issue No. 2

A Gap (Between Trials)

We stayed late – after all the other folks cleared away to drive home, shake sand from their clothes, settle tenderly sunburned into bed – to break into Fort Popham. The idea came to Bill like a dream, a eureka: let’s do it. Abandoned sandcastles melted with the encroaching tide. We waited for the sky to thin to black.

Each night an hour before sundown, a state-park worker would come and shoo away the last few lingering sightseers, then lock the heavy wrought-iron gates of Fort Popham, sealing the inside from without. We waited on the narrow strand of Popham Beach with the Kennebec River emptying behind us, the Atlantic before us swelling with the rising moon. An old man in rubber waders wielded his surfcaster at the darkening waves like a spider, extending his line, oblivious to everything but the vast grey plane that began where his legs met the water. I was nine years old.

In my memory, the sky turned inky black while an electric tangerine sun opened and oozed on the horizon. It couldn’t have been that dark. The state worker rattled his keys, eased shut the gates, dropped the lock and started his truck. He was probably happy to go home. With professional patience, Bill glanced at his watch. The revolving beam from Pemiquid Headlight spun its distant orbit. The truck’s engine faded. The old man hauled in a mackerel. Bill and I approached the gate.

This late in the day, Fort Popham was little more than an empty shadow garrisoned above the tide. Like a well-practiced thief, Bill made a subtle movement, gesturing to the gap between gate and ground. His mustache had sand in it. I slipped through to the other side and just like that: I was a criminal. A ridiculous sense of power – I’m a bandit – quickened my heart thrumming, almost aching in my head. I ducked into the shadowed side of the wall and waited like a cutpurse in the dark.

A moment later, Bill followed me in.

It was only once we were together inside that I finally began to see where we were. The fort was shaped like an undrawn bow, or an outlined half-moon, seaward wall arcing evenly while the mainland bail ran a straight and solid line. Four squat towers with shallow nests rose above the esplanade; arced buttresses stretched like tendons. Where cannons once nudged forward their mouths, angled portholes opened narrowly toward the sea. Above us, two flags – one for Maine, one for the nation – snapped in the hefty gusts off the bay: silence filled the gaps.

Keeping to the wall, we crept toward a tower.

For years – even before he had moved to the coast – Bill had taken me to Popham Beach. In all that time, the fort had never been anything more than a mysterious stone barnacle sprouting from the crest of rough ledge, far above the scorching beach, the willow green sand-fleas, the nets of bubbled seaweed. In all the years we’d come to this beach, it had only been the walls of Fort Popham I had ever known. This was our first time inside.

Another gate cordoned the tower’s entry, its gaps too narrow for even me to slip through. The rest were barred as well. Stepping back onto the esplanade, we looked for another way up – a stairway, a ladder – but there was nothing. All ascending ways were blocked.

Bill turned to me then, and as he smiled and pointed at the cracked and mortared wall of the fort – silently encouraging me to grab hold, start climbing – I suddenly saw him as a stranger, bright and mischievous as a possessed child and urging me to hedge gates, scale walls, risk my life because it was mine to risk.

This was my father, two months before he lost me for good.

Flags snapping above us, we climbed to the second floor, then onto the rough-hewn cobblestone roof. Hand- and footholds were ample. It was easy.

Keeping low to the roof, we scurried to the cramped nest of a tower and nestled down within, blending into evening shadows. Sitting closely, I breathed in Bill’s smell of sun-block and sweat while his pointing hand guided my eyes to everything that sprawled below us: the fighting confluence of the Kennebec and Atlantic, the islands dotted with lit houses and headlights, the distant boats and ferry, the dot-heads of seals lounging in the waves. Never from this angle had I seen the world, this beach I knew so well. Gulls were gliding high overhead. The old man was still fishing on the shore.

Bill and I quietly watched these faint motions and prolonged stills, his thick arms surrounding and holding me to his chest, my head tucked under his chin. The stubble on his neck scratched my ear. I could feel his pulse on my neck.

This would be our last trip to Popham.

Though the horizon was clear, an island foghorn droned. The old man packed up his gear, headed up the beach with his fish. Quietly, carefully, Bill and I crept down from the fort, under the gate and to his truck to drive north through the clear June dusk. The next day, he took me back home to my mother’s farm. It’d be eight years before we’d see each other again.

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