RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

It must have been mad and idyllic and frustrating and ecstatic, this life together, in the dunes, on the streets, at sea. Pat remembers 1961, the summer with no wind, when they’d go out on the boat in the glassy calm, so clear you might reach down and pluck fish out of the depths. It was ‘a visual onslaught’, Pat says in a later, filmed interview in which her style emerges, a mix of bohemian smartness and concentrated beauty. With her wavy, centre-parted hair she might be one of the Velvet Underground, or a Renaissance model. She looks straight at the camera, but sees something else in the distance. She talks about Nanno, who wrote, ‘In moments of clarity I can sustain the idea that everything on earth is nature, including that which springs forth from a man’s mind, and hand.’ He read Robert Graves’s The White Goddess and painted birds; birds which, as Pat says, ‘he felt he might have become’, just as she might have become a wolf.

From one of her studio shelves, low down where the cats prowl, Pat pulls a brown envelope, and from it a photograph of herself and Charlie.

It’s 1961. There’s no wind. The five-hundred-pound tuna dangles between them, suspended by a rope around its tail, so huge and bug-eyed, so stuck over and spiny it’s hard to believe it’s not cut out and glued on. They each hold a fin, these two anglers, smiling for the camera, proud of their catch.

Pat has a huge rod and reel. As slight and chic as she seems, in her rolled-up jeans, checked shirt and suntan, it was Pat, not Charlie, who did all the work; Pat who struggled to hoick the bluefin out of the sea and onto the deck; Pat who was given the trophy by the state governor for her prize catch, seen in another press photograph, dressed in a dark silk shirt-waister, as shiny as a fish, her glossy hair in curls. She looks like Hepburn or Bacall, gamine and self-assured, with Charlie as her Bogart.

It was Nanno and Charlie and Pat, out fishing, part of the sea. In 1962, Nanno and Pat built this big house, created to enable thin slivers of art. They bought the land for six thousand dollars. Pat drew up the plans and the house grew up from the shore. It didn’t so much look out to the sea as the sea looked into it.

‘It wasn’t conceptual,’ Pat says. ‘It rose up out of the mud.’ Locals thought it was impractical. It seemed built out of belief alone. A factory of the imagination.

That same year came Nanno’s diagnosis, ‘and everything that goes with that’. Photographs show him bundled up to the neck, sitting on the deck, while the house rises pristine behind him, full of light and space. Living with lung cancer, he painted his last painting, of the sea, the large canvas laid flat, supported on stools. It showed the harbour flats drained at low tide. For the first time, he painted no horizon.

‘It was,’ said Pat, ‘his last word on the subject of painting.’ They moved into the house at Thanksgiving, 1962. They were there together barely a year. The following Thanksgiving – just days after President Kennedy was shot – there was a terrible storm which worked its havoc through three high tides. ‘It took the bulkhead, the deck, and almost undermined the house,’ Pat recalls. A month later, that Christmas, Nanno died.

Pat had his coffin constructed from red cedar left over from the building of their house; as if he were being launched out to sea, like Ishmael. Nanno’s tempestuous scenes of the Atlantic shores still hang on these walls: Ballston Beach bursts with energy, as if it were just a window on the wall looking over to the ocean side of the Cape. Every cupboard, every drawer, every eave of this house is filled with art. Art seeps out through the knots in the wood, like the sea under the floorboards.

There were parties here back in the sixties and seventies, recorded in flaring home movies and remembered in the stories of those who attended them and spent a night in gaol for disturbing the peace. There were psychedelic drugs, and when Pat invited jazz musicians, like her lover, Elvin Jones, she’d find rotting fish on her doorstep, left by folk who took offence at her having brought black people to town. Nina Simone visited; I imagine coming downstairs and finding her sipping tea at Pat’s long table, talking in her rich voice. A faded photograph pinned to the wall shows Pat and her friends playing congas out on the deck. The drums still stand in her living room, but they haven’t been played in a while.

Pat had other visitors to attend to. In 1982, a lone orca appeared in the bay. It was a female, apparently habituated to humans; some thought it was an escapee from a military marine mammal programme, a dolphin draft-dodger. It was the biggest animal she would meet. Pat would kayak out to meet it and drew it over and again, this time using her black marker on flat stones. With the fin rising next to her boat, Pat held out a flounder to her friend.

Others were less considerate when the whale came in close to the pier. ‘Someone poured bourbon in her blowhole,’ Pat says. After that, the harbourmaster drove the whale back out to sea.

This house is rebuilt with every season, growing layer upon layer. Giant jade and ficus plants tower in the interior, tended by rainwater collected from the roof. Buddha sits in his lotus position in the garden. The outside comes inside. In the yard, self-seeded trees shade the graves of departed dogs; great strings of blue lights illuminate their branches as night falls. Robins and cardinals take refuge up there from the cats to whom this house really belongs, familiars to their mistress.

It is the very antithesis of the order her mother created in fashionable Manhattan. Books and catalogues rise in piles on every step of the stairs. Dusty drawers are filled with cormorants cawing and clamouring to get out. If Pat no longer paints, perhaps it is because she has said what she needed to say. Now she collects stones from the shore as she walks it in her light leaping stride, pocketing pieces of seaworn granite and quartz to be arranged on her tables outside with no purpose but every intention. Years ago, in 1954, when she was typing out Beckett’s Molloy for the Paris Review, she became fascinated with the ‘sucking stones’ section.

‘I spent some time at the seaside, without incident,’ says Molloy. ‘Personally I feel no worse there than anywhere else … And to feel that there was one direction at least in which I could go no further, without first getting wet, then drowned, was a blessing.’

He then performs a strange, obsessive rite.

‘I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about.’

‘For ten pages, in one paragraph,’ says Pat, ‘he moves these stones in and out of his pockets and his mouth, working on a complicated logistic with the order of sucking each stone and where to put it after it is sucked so it won’t get sucked again before all sixteen stones have, in turn, been sucked and put in the proper pocket. It took me a long time because I constantly got lost. I read and read this piece. Those stones stay with me …’

Stones and sea and sand. It’s the nothingness of what she does that drives Pat on. Her energy has become concentrated, as if everything was working to some Zen-like point of absolute and discard; the apparent nothingness of her paintings, the seeming emptiness of the beach; as if she has conjured it all up herself, and is content with what she has done. She needs to do no more. Pat rarely leaves Provincetown now; she is bound to this place. ‘I feel very cut off,’ she said in 1987, more than twenty years after Nanno died. ‘Come April, after a winter alone, I almost feel I don’t exist.’

Living behind her trees, looking out to sea, she might be a forgotten figure in this forgetting town, abandoned all over again. But when we get in a taxi, the young driver tells me, ‘Mrs de Groot rides for free.’

It lies there in the shadow of the wharf, as if it had sought shelter beneath the wooden struts. It has been dead for only twenty-four hours, but its distinctive markings – delicate grey and yellow swirls, merging as a graphic equaliser of its motion through the waves, as if they’d left their traces on its body – are already fading in the wind.

A common dolphin, exquisitely ill-named. Dennis writes the binomial down on his form, losing patience as his pen runs out: Delphinus delphis, a much more princely title, redolent of Cretan friezes and Greek vases. Two thousand years ago in his History of Animals, Aristotle attested to ‘the mildness and gentleness of dolphins and the passion of their love for boys’, and added, ‘It is not known for what reason they run themselves aground on dry land; at all events it is said that they do so at times, and for no obvious reason.’

This is no wild strand on the Cape’s ocean shore. It’s the town beach on the bay, overlooked by the rear porches of shops and restaurants; this stranded cetacean might well have been a late-night throwaway, along with the lobster and clam shells. Yet these tame waters can be dangerous places, too. One morning, out on my deck, I’d seen fins in the distance, between the breakwater and the pier. Through my binoculars I watched a small pod of common dolphins moving restlessly up and down. I cycled down to see them from close quarters. Too close, I realised; they were in danger of grounding. I stood barely ankle-deep, and they were only twenty feet from me, where the blue became sandy brown. It seemed impossible that they could even be swimming there. The potential for disaster turned it into a quiet crisis, a clip from a natural history documentary with the voiceover removed, a scene ignored by the townsfolk going about their business.

For a dolphin to beach itself is a drastic act. Recent studies suggest that the animals ‘will strand themselves when they are very weak because they don’t want to drown’, says Andrew Brownlow, a Scottish scientist. There seems to be ‘something very deep in the terrestrial mammalian core that fires up when they are in extremis’. It is both suicidal and a desperate last attempt at survival. At least, that is how we see it. We sanctify these creatures as salves for our own depredations, and seem always to have done so. Around AD 180, the Greco-Roman poet Oppian declared that hunting ‘the kingly dolphin’ was immoral, on the grounds that they were once humans who had exchanged the land for the sea. ‘But even now the righteous spirit of men in them preserves human thought and human deeds.’

Dennis called me with the news. Minutes later, we were driving down to the harbour. The day before, on the whalewatch boat, we’d watched the pod of dolphins moving through the clear waters in search of food. Among them was this individual. Such small groups of dolphins have close matrilineal relationships and are intensely loyal. Did it die in the night, on the dark and lonely beach, calling for its family as they called back? This beautiful, naked animal, now lying at my bended knees, was as smooth and patterned as a piece of porcelain. There was nothing morbid about it; it still seemed full of life.

I run my hands over its body. The fins are finely shaped, rubbery and tactile, caressed and caressing when alive; the taut flanks taper to the muscular tail. The eyes are disconcertingly open, unseeing, untouched by the gulls, which often fall to feed on stranded cetaceans even before they’ve expired. Clearly displayed on its underbelly is the animal’s genital slit, flanked by two smaller mammary slits, betraying, in this indecent exposure, its sex. I insert my finger, ostensibly to investigate if she, as she had now become, had bred, but in reality out of prurient curiosity.

I say a Hail Mary for my sins.

After we have recorded her dimensions as if measuring her for a new outfit, I stretch out beside her for comparison; not for scientific reasons, but my own: head to tail, toe to beak, sensing how similar we are. I imagine her as a human in a dolphin wetsuit. I think of her bones, lighter than mine since they did not have to bear the full weight of gravity; I might replace my burdensome skeleton with hers, transformed from the inside out. I think about how much of my life is spent vertical or horizontal, upright on land or level with the water – a sensation known as proprioception: the apprehension of one’s body in space; the way we want to be comfortable in the world, yet are never really reconciled to the business of being physical.

I lie there like a lover, her body a mirror for my own. Her blowhole would never again burst open in exultation, in the joy of being a dolphin. She wouldn’t wriggle free of the sand, working her vigorous tail to swim away. The patina of decay had spread along her flanks like the silvery bloom on a plum. Dennis’s knife cuts into the dorsal fin as the instructions on his form dictate, slicing off its tip in a liquorice-allsort sandwich of black skin and white fat. I feel an odd compulsion to bite down on the excised morsel. The teeth come next, each ivory needle arranged regularly along the narrow jaws. Research suggests that they may act as a sonic tool, helping to transmit sound back to a dolphin’s inner ears.

Compared to this complex animal, I am sensorially inept, a dumb being barely able to feel anything. She could hear-see in the depths, heat-seeking sand eels and surfing with humpbacks; she could bond with her pod, using her signature whistle and those of her friends to call them. She could echo-locate her peers, sensing their emotional states, knowing how they felt, almost telepathically. She had a culture and expressed her self in a state of collective individualism and, as we now know, exhibited an emotional maturity possibly in excess of our own. But her life of apparent ease has been brought to an end on this urban shore. Passersby ask, ‘What kind of fish is that?’ Waiters sit on restaurant steps smoking cigarettes before the start of their next shift. In another age, their counterparts might have served it to their customers. In the nineteen-sixties, the town’s Sea View diner had humpback on the menu.

Dennis saws at the jaw, hacking out the four teeth required for analysis by the organisation for whom he is acting. The serrated blade grates against bone, the worst hour in the dentist’s chair you could imagine. The gums part and, two by two, the teeth are extracted. Blood trickles into the sand. The outrage is complete. Our samples bagged and the animal’s flanks duly marked with the organisation’s acronym, we drive off, leaving her alone on the beach, ready to roll in the next tide, as though its comforting waves might wash her back to life.

Dead or alive, we all strike the same pose; the same way my mother sat in a sepia photograph of her as a young woman in the garden of her suburban family home, resting her weight on one hand on the chair as she half turns to the camera like the movie stars she’d seen; the same way she’d sit in the last photograph I took sixty years later of her in our garden barely a mile away, adopting the same position; the same pose that, I realise, I too take up as I sit and turn to a camera which is not there.

Out in the bay, the moored boats act as weather vanes, swivelling and turning with the direction of the wind. I look out from my deck to the horizon. It’s my barometer. If it’s straight, there’ll be whalewatching today; if it’s wavy and irregular, perhaps not. Today it is level. So we go to sea.

There’s nothing so exciting as that rising feeling as the boat readies to leave the harbour, potent with the prospect of the day ahead. Even as it stands tethered to the wharf, Dolphin VIII is a vessel invested with its own momentum, as though it would leave whether or not anybody was on board; a great grinding mass of steel plates and engines whirring deep down below, a powerful industrial connection with the resisting churning water. As I board with its crew – the fisherman turned captain, the taciturn first mate, the poet naturalist, the East European galley staff with professional futures back home – I feel a perennial outsider, for all that I’ve been sailing on these same boats, watching the same whales, for fifteen years. No one is ever sure of their place here, no one quite secure: the crew only work if the weather is good and the punters are paying their wages. Weather, work, people, whales: it is all an uneasy alliance, a nervous contract drawn up on an inconstant sea, agreed by a common pursuit. At least, for those few hours.

After a long bitter winter, the Cape has come to life. As I peer down into the green water, the reason is clear: fields of silvery sand eels, roused in their millions from the sea floor by the sun and now pooling in wriggling tangles, turning this way and that as one mass, just below the surface. These slender fish supply an entire food chain; their arrival could equally herald the crowds that will soon teem through the town’s streets.

Only half an hour out from the land, a frenzy is in progress. Northern gannets are plunging into the bait like white-and-yellow torpedoes. A raft of loons, with stiletto-sharp bills and freckled oil-green wings, are working the same source. Harbour porpoises roll through the waves; grey seals bob like bottles.

Suddenly, something much larger appears in the one-hundred-and-fifty-foot-deep water that runs right up to Race Point: the falcate dorsal of a fin whale. For all its size, its black back too big to belong to a mere animal, it too is feeding on fish barely bigger than my finger. A pair of minkes, more modest rorquals, bearing the same strangely pleated bellies, join in. Then, as the boat pushes out over Stellwagen Bank’s great drowned plateau under the wide Atlantic sky, the ocean begins to erupt anew with the blows of dozens of humpbacks, back from their winter stay in the Caribbean.

Then we are upon them, along with a thousand white-sided dolphin, weaving in and out as the great whales trap the sand eels in their bubble nets, rising through the corralled fish with mouths open wide, throats like rubbery concertinas, pleats clattering with barnacles like castanets. Gulls perch on the whales’ snouts to pick out titbits. And just when it seems the scene can sustain no more predators, a dozen more fin whales arrive, lunging on their sides, displaying the bristly baleen in their jaws.

In this moment of witness, nothing else matters. Passengers delete images to make room for new ones on their cameras. My friend Jessica sees a couple frantically pressing the trash button as one says, ‘Dump the wedding ones.’

Up on the bright white fly bridge, we watch the performance. A pair of adult fin whales aim straight for us. Each of them sixty feet long, at least.

Hands tight to the wheel, our captain, Todd Motta, shouts, ‘Whoa!’ as the nearest whale sheers off our bow, surfing on its side to display its great white belly like some enormous salmon.

‘I thought it was going to hit us,’ says Todd.

As experienced as he is, he’s momentarily shaken. The second largest animal on earth, normally betraying barely a tenth of its mass as it moves through the sea, has flashed its entire physical self at us, using our boat as a fish stop. We are an instrument as much as an engine of observation.

All around us, the humpbacks continue to feed. One of the whales called Springboard rolls over to swim for a while on her back, displaying her genital mound, a region so gathered about with barnacles that it must make life uncomfortable for her suitors.

‘I’ve never seen that before,’ says Dennis.

Or maybe he has; it’s so difficult to tell. Are these the same whales we just saw? The boat rocks and I stagger as I hold on to the clipboard and the rubber-encased GPS, regaining my footing to read off the coordinates for the pink photocopied sheets.

70 degrees north 18 degrees west. Mn: 1/2.

A calf holds its tail out of the waves, its body perpendicular in the water column. It trembles with its own life, the way a young boy’s body trembles in adolescence, quivering with hormones. Then it starts to smash up and down on the water.

‘Are these new animals?’ Dennis asks.

I’ve no idea. The boat has turned round on itself, leaving a green swirling trail in its wake. The animals rise again, mouths as open as birds’ beaks. The passengers look over the railings, ecstatically, loudly excited or overcome with lassitude and boredom, in the way of all ordinary miracles. None of this is of any consequence, because it happens day after day. Only in the actual moment am I transported. Only then does it leave me, this sense that I am not really here at all. We shiver with life, and its alternative. Waiting to come out the other side.

A few days later, we sail out of the harbour on another sunny morning. In the wheelhouse, I lean over the broad counter covered in what looks like wood-effect Formica from a seventies kitchen, peering at the chrome-ringed dials, updated with computer displays of the underwater terrain and a green radar screen silently scanning a black sea. We have left the land and its safety. An adhesive label announces the instructions for Marine Distress Communications to be relayed on the Submersible Plus VHF radio. Stuffed behind the sticky cup-holders is the Weekly Payroll Sheet.

Everyone on the bridge is in a good mood, looking forward to the day. But as the depth gauge draws 206 feet, the outlook changes as abruptly as the ocean floor falls away beneath us. The land to our starboard – such as it is – has been submerged under a sea fret. It’s as if the view had reached the edge of an old projected film, fading into fuzzy nothingness.

The boat sails straight into the mist and everything around us disappears. The land and sky vanish into one vast cloud; all we are left with are the few yards of water immediately around the boat. We’re entirely isolated, wrapped up in damp cotton wool. One minute, holiday sun; the next, murky obscurity.

‘How do you look for whales in conditions like this?’ I ask Lumby – Mark Dalomba, our captain for the day.

His camouflage cap is pulled down over his eyes; he doesn’t turn round as he talks to me.

‘Cut off the engines and listen,’ he says. ‘For the sound of their blows.’

But today Lumby has assistance. Chad Avellar, another young fisherman of Azorean descent who could sail these waters in the dark, is ahead of us, and radios back what he is seeing. Lumby charts a course ahead; or rather, he follows his own instincts. He plays the sea like a pinball machine. Perched on his captain’s seat, eyes always ahead, he stabs at the radar screen.

‘See those blips?’ he says, pointing at the luminous green blobs shaping and reshaping, coming together in one mottled mass, discrete from the sea clutter that the fish-finder produces when reflected by the waves. ‘Those are the whales.’

Conditions deteriorate. The boat rolls with its weight and ours, lurching from side to side.

‘Crappy weather on the way,’ says Lumby.

We seem to be moving ever slower, dragged back by the banks of fog. My heart sinks. It’s my last trip of the season. Even if we come upon whales, will we actually see them? Everything is grey. There’s no horizon, no context. We might as well have drifted into the Arctic, or the Bermuda Triangle, for that matter.

The silence explodes with blows. Of course it does. We are surrounded by whales, as if they’d been there all along, only now choosing to break cover. The water bursts with their exhalations. We can’t tell sea from sky, but these animals are producing their own weather, their spouts merging with the mist.

They are feeding, voraciously. Bellowing, blowing, rising up through their own bubble-clouds, eight whales at a time piercing the surface, cooperating in an orgy of consumption. It is a visceral, indisputable, audible furore. Whales are not tentative. They do not fuss and bother. They do not falter. They act, uproariously, greedily, and utterly in-their-moment.

Lumby climbs up to the fly bridge. As he does so a dozen whales loom up right off the bow, their cavernous mouths open like gigantic frogs, fringed with baleen and roofed with pink strips like engorged tongues. It’s a fearsome sight. We follow Lumby aloft, clambering up after our captain as if trying to get away from the beasts.

From our eyrie, we look down through the mist. Everywhere there are whales, lunging and fluking and kick-feeding, taking advantage of the fog to cover their gluttony. Fifteen humpbacks, maybe more.

Then, as if roused by their mothers’ furious feeding, the calves begin to leap. One after another, spindle-shaped bodies shoot out of the sea like popguns going off. We don’t know where to look. Lumby holds the boat in position; he seems to be conducting the whole scene, even though he has lost control, like the rest of us.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I exclaim, then apologise, hoping the passengers haven’t heard me.

‘No,’ says Liz, the poet naturalist. ‘That’s quite appropriate.’

The calves have begun to breach simultaneously: two, three, four, five, all together.

‘They’re more like dolphins than whales,’ I shout.

No marine park could rival this show. They might as well be Eocene cetaceans leaping out of an ancient ocean, celebrating their leaving of the worrisome land. Two centuries ago, as a young man on his maiden voyage, Melville saw his first whales not far from this shore; his ship, too, was drifting in the mist.

‘The most strange and unheard-of noises came out of the fog at times: a vast sound of sighing and sobbing. What could it be? This would be followed by a spout, and a gush, and a cascading commotion, as if some fountain had suddenly jetted out of the ocean … But presently some one cried out – “There she blows! whales! whales close alongside!”’ To the young sailor, they sounded like a herd of ocean-elephants.

As the sea bursts with the blows and foraging of the adults, it is blown open by their breaching calves, creating abbreviated geyser-spouts of their own. Up on the bridge, we’ve run out of superlatives. John, our hardbitten first mate, is speechless. Later, in the afterglow of what we’ve witnessed, in a kind of apologetic embarrassment of emotion, he volunteers that, out of seven thousand trips, this is one to remember – ‘And it takes a lot to impress me.’ Liz and I assure our passengers – should they assume that this sort of thing happens every day – that it is one of the most extraordinary sights we have seen, out here on the Bank.

Then I look at Lumby. Under the peak of his cap, tugging at the cigarette jammed in his fist, he too is smiling to himself, as if he had summoned it all up. As if the scene, all the more amazing for the inauspiciousness of its prelude, were a vindication of his magical skills, far beyond those of naturalists or scientists or writers. Like his fellow captains, Lumby has never taken a photograph of a whale.

He doesn’t need to. They’re all there, in his head.