Tine Searches for Sea Captains' Houses

Tine has been away from the village for a night, checking on the doughty sloop Puffin. Few things are quite so comforting as falling asleep on a boat bobbing at its mooring, Tine thought as she returned home this morning.



Though she was gone for only a night and part of a morning, it seemed like a week to her. "Did you miss me?" she asked Rubob as she returned home. "I did, Tine, and I've made a blueberry pancake for you."

"We've got to look for sea captain's houses in town on our walk today," Tine said after she finished her late breakfast. "You'd be surprised, but there are a lot of sea captain's houses in our little village."

Rubob looked skeptical, but Rubob was probably thinking about something entirely different, as he often was; and even when he was thinking about something entirely different he tended to look skeptical.

"Well, maybe not sea captain's houses precisely, but houses of people who owned ships that sailed to China," Tine said. "Did you know that?"

But Rubob was indeed thinking about something entirely different.

"I think we're growing a football in the garden," he said.


The world's largest fungus

"Yes, I saw that, Rubob. It's the world's largest fungus," she said. "Our garden has gone to seed. I've been spending far too much time at sea."

"You were away only a night, Tine," Rubob said.

"So I was," Tine agreed, wobbling a bit from mal de dembarquement as she made her way down the path.

"Did you notice anything different about your pancake, Tine?" Rubob asked.

"Was it made from a giant mushroom?" Tine asked.

"It had buttermilk powder in it, rather than milk," Rubob said. "That's why it was so fluffy."

"It was awfully good, white and fluffy like the giant fungus," Tine said.

As they made their way down the driveway, Rubob seemed lost in his thoughts. "Oxen," he said, apropos of nothing. "Oxen," he said once more, looking out over the distant hillside and seemingly rolling the word over in his mind.

"There, he's said it again," Tine thought. "I wonder why." She then remembered the village tour they'd taken on Saturday and how the tour guide had told them about an old store being moved in the 1920s from Main Street to Mill Lane on logs, with the help of oxen.


Store moved by oxen from Main Street to Mill Lane

He must be thinking about that, Tine surmised -- maybe about oxen being driven up to the fields above the village on Rattlesnake Mountain. She would have asked him, but she was distracted by something white and fluffy that was neither pancake nor fungus.

A dog much larger than Tine dashed to the edge of the lawn to bark at her. It most certainly would have viciously attacked her, but it was restrained by an invisible electric fence.



One doesn't face such perils at sea, Tine thought. She thought of the cormorant watching her go by in her dinghy this morning.



The two turned down Hatters Lane and passed a new house, and Rubob took issue with the placement of the newly planted trees.



"They need another tree in the center, and the one on the right, the maple, is far too close to the evergreen. I'd like to ask the landscaper what he was thinking at the time," Rubob said.

"It could be moved with oxen," Tine said.

"The sapling?" Rubob asked. "Why would you need oxen?"

"The house," Tine replied. "Like the old village store that was moved from Main Street. They could move the house away from the trees with oxen."

"Oxen?" Rubob said, somewhat flummoxed.

"And they did move trees with oxen at Mrs. Riddle's estate," Tine said.

"Have you thought any more about moving to the house on Main Street?" Rubob asked.

"What?" Tine said, alarmed. "I never said I wanted to move to a house on Main Street."

"We could cut our mortgage in half," Rubob said. "And the taxes are less."

Rubob was always thinking of cost-cutting measures, Tine thought.

The two turned onto Main Street, and Tine stopped at one of the houses that the guide said was owned by a merchant who sent ships to China.



"That's it, Rubob -- the sea captain's house," Tine said.



"It looks more like a shipwrecked captain's house," Rubob said.

"Well, it's a nice house, all the same, and a sea captain lived there. We could move there and cut our taxes in half," Tine said.

"Our mortgage, Tine, but I don't think so," Rubob said.

Tine reversed direction and hurried along to another former Cowles house, on the other side of Main Street.



"Now here we have another remarkable example of a sea captain's house in a landlocked village," Tine said. "Note the Oriental design in the gate, no doubt brought home by the captain on one of his voyages. The design means peace and prosperity."

The wide-open gate wasn't easy to see, but Tine poked her nose around the wall and took a good look.



"A merchant's house," Rubob corrected. "The Cowles were never sea captains."

"Be that as it may," Tine said, "it's connected to the sea. Neighboring Hartford was a shipping center, you know, and that's how old Zenas Cowles became prosperous. They went down the Connecticut River out to the Sound, just like you and me in Puffin."

The two turned down Meadown Road and then onto Garden Street. They walked through Riverside Cemetery to take a quick look at the Meadows and the river. With all the leaves, Tine could get only a glimpse of the river.



"It strikes me that there were two paths to riches in the village," Rubob said -- "farmers working their fields at home, and then the merchants and traders, those open to the whole world."

As Tine and Rubob continued down Garden Street, they stopped to look at the old canal basin, Pitkin's Basin, where the canal boats had stopped in the early 1800s.



The canal was developed in part by another member of the Cowles family, George, who wanted the town to have a link to the sea, for trading with Europe, the West Indies and Europe.

"You know George's house, the one on Main Street, where the architect Jim Thomson used to live," Tine said. It's another sea captain's house, as it were."



"Sea merchant's house," Rubob said.

"There are certainly a lot of sea captain's houses in this landlubbing village, aren't there, Rubob?" Tine said. "It's like you said: The village was open to the whole world, and this basin was its link to the world. And it's where Foone died, too, swimming in the basin."

Foone was one of the Amistad Africans who'd lived in the village in 1841, after he and his fellow Mendians took control of a slave ship off Cuba, sailed it to Long Island, and won their freedom in court. Foone had drowned in the basin one afternoon after working in the Meadows. He may have taken his own life because of homesickness. "Foone going to see his mother," he told a friend the day before he died. Tine and Rubob had just passed his grave in the cemetery.



"Foone was someone who knew the land and the sea," Tine said. "And did you know he went to school in the Village Store, the one moved by oxen to Mill Lane -- on the second floor?"

"I didn't, Tine," Rubob said.

"That was Deming's store, owned by Samuel Deming, an abolitionist," Tine said. "Stuff from around the world was sold there, as well as produce grown in the Meadows. Somehow everything is connected in this village, isn't it? And everything seems timeless at times."

"It is, Tine," Rubob said, looking at his watch. Rubob, a gentleman farmer, had to be getting back to tilling his own fields.

"'Time present and time past are both contained in time future' -- and in Pitkin's Basin," Tine said.

"You like that little book, don't you?" Rubob said.

"What little book would that be?" Tine asked.

"Eliot's Four Quartets," Rubob said.

Never heard of it," Tine said. "'And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time," she added.

"That's the one,"Rubob said.

"It's lost," Tine said. "I can never find it. At the end of all my exploring, I arrive where I started, a pile of books, clothes and other junk on the bedroom floor."

"Look, we can stop for a cup of tea on that porch," she said.



"No time," Rubob replied, hurrying Tine along.

"Time and the hour run through the most pleasant day," Tine said, hoping to distract Rubob with a line from Rubob's favorite bard.

But Rubob wasn't listening. He was several paces ahead of Tine.

He didn't stop to notice Timothy Pitkin's house as they turned down their own street toward home.



"Was he related to the Pitkin of Pitkin's Basin?" Tine wondered. "No doubt he was, wasn't he Rubob?" Tine said to herself. Even when she talks to herself, Tine often addresses her comments to Rubob.

They passed yet another Cowles house, but Rubob didn't stop to take a look there, either.



"Doubtless another sea captain," Tine thought. "Sea merchant, Tine," she corrected herself, quickening her pace to catch up with Rubob.

"We passed another Cowles house," she said, as she drew up alongside Rubob.

"Did we really?" Rubob asked distractedly. His mind was clearly on the fields needing tilling at home. Most likely, he was thinking of oxen.

"We have the whole world before us when we're out and about in the village," Tine thought. "Its history reaches down the Farmington and Connecticut rivers, out into the Sound, across oceans. There's no limit to it all. We're sea captains sailing on the seas of history. "

"'History is a pattern of timeless moments,'" she said to Rubob. "We've had a few timeless moments on our walk today, haven't we?"

"Yes, Tine, I suppose we have," Rubob agreed, checking his watch once again.

"Timeless moments certainly make for rather pleasant walks, all in all, don't they?" Tine said as she followed Rubob up the driveway.