Cover Lay Down

Originally posted, with slight modifications, in August 2009, and again in 2011. Because it’s one of my favorite sets – and because bloggers need vacations, too.

We’ve just got back from a short week in Truro, in the same rented beachhouse high on the dunes above the Cape Cod sound. It’s peaceful out there on the bluff: wakeless trawlers and shore fishermen, beach wanderers and bathers are few and far between, mere specks on an otherwise natural landscape that fills the sense with color: green grasses, faded yellow sand, the variable blues of sky and water.

At night the lights of Provincetown shone brightly just on the edge of the vista, a line of stars marking the difference between pitch-black sea and an invisible sky. The first year we were here a shooting star dropped towards them while I watched, as if longing to join the tourists and summer people in their shared debauchery. This year, the full moon showed its evidentiary head only once through the after-dark clouds, its tidal effect was visible in the disappearance of the dunes and meadows at dusk. I stayed up late reading the usual borrowed beachhouse paperback, the autobiography of an island lobsterwoman, and fell asleep before eleven.

The weeks ahead burn and roil on the horizon like sunset: crew chiefdom and a chance to steep in the community of music next week at Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, a two week run of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) at the Hampshire Shakespeare Company up in Amherst, and then back to work, with new students to greet, new courses to teach, and new classrooms to maintain from then until eternity. But sitting there on the deck in the shade of the house, the marsh below me, the ocean beyond, this browngrey hawk drawing lazy circles in the blue overhead, I was reminded once again how vital it is to sit in stillness at the edge of it all, how centering it is to squeeze peace from the last fleeting weeks of summer.

It’s a good life. Here’s a soundtrack for it.

• Richard Shindell: The Storms Are On The Ocean (orig. A.P. Carter)
  (from South of Delia, 2007)
• Ollabelle: The Storms Are On The Ocean (ibid.)
  (from Ollabelle, 2004)
• Aoife O’Donovan: The Storms Are On The Ocean (ibid)
  (from The Storm is Passing Over, 2012)

• Peter Mulvey: The Ocean (orig. Dar Williams)
  (from Ten Thousand Mornings, 2002)

• Rose Polenzani: When The River Meets The Sea (orig. Paul Williams)
  (live on WERS, 2007)

• Ann Percival: Tide and the River Rising (orig. Cindy Kallet)
  (from The Sweetest Hours, 2005)

• Solas: The Maid On The Shore (trad.)
  (from Celtic Tides, 1998)

• Lissa Schneckenburger: Fair Maid By The Sea Shore (trad.)
  (from Song, 2013)

• Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson: (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay (orig. Otis Redding)
  (live on MOKB, 2009)

• Robert Skoro: Michael Row the Boat Ashore (trad.)
  (from Down By The Riverside, 2006)

• Jenni Muldaur: Row The Boat Child (trad.)
  (from Son of Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanties, 2013)

• The Unthanks: Sea Song (orig. Robert Wyatt)
  (from Diversions Vol. 1: The Songs of Robert Wyatt and Antony and the Johnsons, 2011)

• Jonathan Rundman: Come Sail Away (orig. Styx)
  (from Too Much Time On Our Hands: A Styx Tribute Album, 2003)

• Tim O’Brien: Sail Away (orig. Randy Newman)
  (from Sail Away: The Songs of Randy Newman, 2006)

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