Winter sports aren’t my thing. You can have your boards and blades and your glacier-gripping cleats: My feet prefer to negotiate the ground on a pair of dependable soles. Because I grew up in New England, however, I’ve been conditioned to anticipate the bracing tribulations of winter. Maybe that’s why my favorite Greek myth is the tale of Persephone, whose yearly return to Hades compares favorably, in my book, with a ski vacation in Vermont. The one place I savor the season’s bleakness and bluster is by the sea. The ocean and sky are at their most alluringly fickle, in color and texture, temper and whim. And the wind smells of smoke and frost and hibernating salty grasses.
Last winter, when we were driven from our beloved Manhattan by real-estate realities, my partner, Dennis, and I moved with our two sons to Massachusetts, to a house within harpooning distance of the Atlantic Ocean. Clinging to a series of rockbound hills, Marblehead’s houses lean precariously against one another, hip to elbow, back to back, like a gathering of spinsters on their second decanter of sherry. The lure of this place may be maritime-quaint, but it does not share the sunny sweetness of Edgartown, the posturing of Newport, or the elitist sheen of Nantucket. Marblehead boasts more colonial houses than any other town in America, yet most are relatively modest, built as homes for cod fishermen, cordwainers, and blockmakers, not for masters of the seafaring universe. Many are painted in stormy shades of olive, violet, and slate. The place is cute, but cantankerous-cute.
Nothing stirs this town more than good old grange-hall patriotism; it is, after all, the birthplace of the American navy, the hometown of Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and of General John Glover, whose Marblehead mariners ferried Washington’s thousands of troops across Long Island Sound in August 1776, and later, more famously, across the frozen Delaware River. Six hundred revolutionary soldiers lie beneath Old Burial Hill, the highest, proudest point in town. Marblehead wears its stories on its sleeve—or on its walls, lettered on countless plaques along the convoluted streets and public stairways. Stop to read one and, like a sociable ghost, some old-timer is likely to appear, offering juicier details about who lived where, what romance or betrayal or act of heroism took place under this low-raftered ceiling or down that dead-end lane.
At low tide, my sons, Alec and Oliver, love to lead the way down one such lane, where we cross Doliber Cove on foot to rough, wooded Crowninshield Island (natives call it Brown’s). There, the boys collect treasures: pungent crab claws, orphaned lobster buoys, curlicues of petrified rope. Flocks of eider ducks, resembling waterborne skunks, gather to feed in these waters through the winter. Sometimes they form a chorus line—dozens of ducks in a row, riding the swells like well-trained Rockettes. I’m counting on the right old-timer to pop out of nowhere one day and tell me what this choreography means.
In summer, you can cross Marblehead Harbor by skipping from deck to deck of the sailboats at anchor, but after New Year’s only a few hard-core trawlers remain. Nor’easters hit this harbor full force, and when they do, a favorite spectator sport is to head for the lookout point high on Fort Sewall to watch the breakers. One mother I know called me in the middle of a blizzard and said, quite cheerfully, “High tide’s at noon. Bring Oliver and meet us down at The Barnacle!” Crazy as it sounds, I struck out with my five-year-old, on foot, through a horizontal snowfall and drifts well over my knees.
Ah, The Barnacle: equal parts tourist magnet and local watering hole. Sometimes places that look too good to be true turn out to be, surprisingly, just that good. The Barnacle, off-season, is one of those places. It’s your archetypal clam shack basking like a seal on a precipitous rock, decked out in classic ahoy-matey style, walls hung with sailing doodads and photos of this tiny establishment prevailing against one perfect storm after another. Which is reassuring when you’re sitting at your table watching mammoth waves break at the roofline, frozen salt spray crocheted across the windows where your children are eagerly pressing their faces.
My ten-year-old, Alec, who aspires to be a restaurant critic, rates The Barnacle’s onion rings above those of any other nearby restaurant—and in the promised land of the fried clam, this is not trivial praise. Ditto, I’d say, for the fried oysters. His dad loves the mussels, served in honey-sweetened broth, and we’re all addicted to the Barnacle Seafood Platter (everything fried and lots of it). Other fish entrées are less successful—unless you’re nostalgic for Ritz-cracker stuffing. Service is languid, plump gulls perch on the empty deck (hoping a waitress will toss a few fries), and the faces of mansions across the harbor—on Marblehead Neck, a Hamptons-esque enclave complete with two yacht clubs—beam in the setting sun.
Up in Gloucester, winter brings out the belligerently battered look of the industrial waterfront and, in year-round residents, sports mania and a vinegared sense of humor. In Dogtown Book Shop (an avalanche of used and rare volumes) hangs a warning to parents that I, with boys in tow, deemed it wise to take at face value: “Unattended Children Will Be Given an Espresso and a Free Puppy.” In a nearby deli, the specials board announces in desperately bold capital letters, “will trade food for sox/pats tickets”!
Forget those preconceived notions of spotting doomed swordfishermen who look like George Clooney or strolling through artists’ colonies composed of twee little shacks. Gloucester and Rockport have other charms: wild surf-beaten beaches—better than a Winslow Homer retrospective—and, in Gloucester, a trove of funky thrift shops and a hidden cultural jewel, the Cape Ann Historical Museum. Its wide-ranging collection of fine art and artifacts includes several luminous seascapes by Fitz Henry Lane; a massive wooden boat that was sailed solo across the Atlantic a hundred years ago; an exhibit about the quarrying of the granite that defines Cape Ann; and—my favorite find—a hands-on sampling of the witty figurative textiles printed by the Folly Cove designers, a group of artisans, mostly women, who lived in Gloucester in the mid-20th century. A prominent member was Virginia Lee Burton, author and illustrator of the children’s classic Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.
Pinterest
