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     I arrived back from Nantucket at 9 p.m., two hours
earlier than anticipated, because of the rain, intermittently
very heavy, which curtailed my work on the land.  Nonetheless
it was, in its way, an eventful trip, details of which I need
to record tonight, because by tomorrow they will have begun
to fade from what's left of my memory.

     Klemens' plane had been half an hour late, hence I went
to bed only at 12:30, and when the alarm went off at 3:45, it
roused me from slumber so deep that for a few moments, I was
at a loss to explain to myself why to what purpose I was
being awakened. I had put my packframe and the ice chest into
the car the night before. No further preparations, except for
a quick breakfast were required.  Soon I was on my way,
Belmont and Cambridge streets were deserted.  I selected
Storrow Drive through downtown Boston, and then through those
tunnels whose ceilings have been collapsing on unsuspecting
motorists. I had chosen to listen to a CD of Haendel's Acis
and Galatea on this trip (Part One on the way down, Part two
on the way back) The irony occurs to me only now, in
retrospect, that being crushed to death for ones Galatea
makes more sense than being crushed to death for no reason at
all.

     I like driving into the dawn and being witness to this
daily re-creation of the world out of darkness. By the time I
arrived in Hyannis, it was light, and the town was blanketed
in a bright, lustrous fog. I seated myself on the deck of the
ferry with a printout of the trailing pages of my novel on my
knees.  To paragraphs that seemed successful, I found it easy
to make small stylistic improvements; but as I encountered
more and more passages that seemed awkward and weak, I
suddenly felt too tired to tackle the radical rewriting that
they seemed to demand.  I put the typescript on its clipboard
back into my packframe, and contented myself, for the rest of
the voyage, with gazing into the patchy fog.

     The boat arrived on schedule at 9:45;  I had no
difficulty making it to the ten o'clock bus for Madaket. I
was its only passenger and had the capacious vehicle all to
myself for the entire trip.  As usual, I alighted at the
Cambridge Street stop, and trudged past the summer homes and
condominiums of Tristram's Landing, reminded how offensive
their architectural individuality was to the HDC, down to
Long Pond, across Massassoit Bridge, past vacationing
children angling for fish, and up the hill to our land.  The
blue Plymouth, I saw it from afar, was exactly where I had
left it the week before, but the windshield looked different,
as if a strange orange object were reflected in it.  As I
came close, I saw that it was not a reflection, but a
placard, a large sticker, glued to the windshield. I
extracted my glasses from my trousers pocket to read the
message. It was from the Nantucket Police Department:
Warning! it said. This car will be towed unless it is moved
within 48 hours. The threat was dated July 14, It was now
July 20. A hundred and forty four hours had already passed.
Maybe they got cold feet, I thought to myself. Maybe they
reconsidered when they discovered the car was in fact
registered to the precise place where it was parked, 3 Red
Barn Road. I felt sorry for the police. It was obvious that
they had goofed. "When constabulary duty's to be done, to
done, the policeman's lot is not a happy one, happy one."

     I realized immediately that the label itself was perhaps
important evidence of the town's determination to harrass me,
and I tried to remove it carefully so as to preserve it, but
the glue was too tenacious.  The label would not peel; I
should have to scrape it off.  It occurred to me that driving
with so prominent an obstruction on the windshield was
recklessness prima facie, and I needed to drive to town to
confer with Mr Shugrue,  felt therefore that I had no choice
but to scrape off the incriminating message, notwithstanding
the fact that the Nantucket authorities may deny its
existence. Only later did it occur to me that I should have
taken a picture. But even that thought, if timely, would not
have been helpful, because I had deliberately left my camera
at home, assuming that I would have no occasion to take
pictures. The label came off in small, unidentifiable
fragments, a layer of glue, however remained, and and when I
next return to the island, I will bring the camera to
document the residual adhesive on the windshield. Meanwhile,
I am composing in my mind a letter to the Chief of Police.


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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
