A Walk to Caleb's Lane

The leaves were turning and the weather was, too, back to the Fourth of July kind, as the wife and I with our boxer Mollie set out Sunday to walk again the lane to the sea.

Not that I particularly cared to go a-laning when the Braves, my favorite ball club, and the Dodgers were in the home stretch for the Nats' pennant. We'd even suffer through a Bosox spasm just to catch the flashes from the two real battles.

But the wife had other ideas, single track of course, and that was to inhale more of the Rockport atmosphere while the weather lasted. All along the way, announcers were blatting the score, so we had no real gripe coming. Even the good husbands who stayed home and raked up leaves had portables at hand tuned to the right spot.

There are those who say that Labor Day ends the summer on-slaught on Sandy Bay. They should have been here the 27th trying to straddle Broadway. It would take Brigitte herself to stop that double line long enough to reach the other side in safety. Even wary Mollie, the four-footer, almost found herself climbing the hoods to escape automotive vivisection in broad daylight.

Up School Street, down Pleasant, we came up against one of the most spectacular Fall-tinted maples we've seen anywhere in New England. It was directly across from that oddball three-storied structure that thrills outsiders...but not us. Along the way we collided with a sure sign of torrid weather. a gentleman stripped to his waist while he worked on his bright red little car. He had the right idea for comfort. And that car looked swell. We envied him his saving on gas.

From here onto Cove Hill and the sharp climb that Labor Day marathoners shudder at, we noted that the Boy Scout grounds, once the school house's, sported a long spar apparently ready for a spot in the earth to become a flag pole.

Passing Selectman Ernie Poole's homestead we saw cedars growing neat and proper to a degree that made us jealous. Us who are doing our darndest to breather life into the handful we brought down from West Burke, in far north Vermont, out of our farmer host's west pasture. Maybe it's adrenalin, they need.

We'll never get over the weird naming of Rockport streets. All in one straight line, Main Street became Dock Square, begat Mount Pleasant Street, begat South Street, begat Thacher Road, to bounce into Gloucester. we got only into South Street, where we both loved an old-hat stone wall at Number 10 that was the real McCoy. Just plain stones, laid one on top of the other. Real native, no less.

And then we hit the lane to the sea, Caleb's Lane, and read the sign, though there was no explanation if it once belonged to 17th century Caleb Norwood or equally as 17th century Caleb Poole. Both were dominant squires of the period. Rockport Historian Everett Sanborn could probably recite plenty about both.

It's a narrow dirt road flanked at its start by a real old home sporting a white chimney. A road lined for a charming spell with gleaming red barberry bushes on the port side, poignant blue elderberry bushes on the starboard. Those bushes were loaded to the gun'ls. That's why the birds came to them a-chirping their sweetest.

A hidden-old country style barn with rusty horseshoes for decorations over the wide door and across from it, a new home made to look ancient formed an inviting contrast.

Then it came! We began a slight descent, only to be joyously hit by the sight of the sea in the distance, a lone sail showing on a soft blue tranquil expanse. It was moments later as we emerged from the lane that we saw that one sail multipled tenfold and more for this was a day made for marine small fry.

A lane of thick goldenrod and brilliant blue asters, a lane with the new and the old, and with nothing but nature in between, that's 17th century Caleb's Lane. May it forever stay that way for us Sunday walkers. J.P.C., Jr.

NOTE: Boston Braves and Brooklyn Dodgers then.