The Mast-Head: Things of the Sea

Three bronze nails sit on my desk. They are hand-forged, about the width of my palm, heavy, and thick. I look at them with a magnifying loupe, hoping for a clue about what they might have come from, but there is nothing.

My son, Ellis, and I found the nails while snorkeling in the bay on Sunday. Given the fact that they are bronze, that they were underwater, and there were scattered bits of copper around, I assume they are all that is left of a shipwreck of some sort. 

Russell Bennett, who works in the front office here, said he remembers a ship’s decaying timbers at the spot, which were visible when he was a child. The bay held more of these secrets when we were small, half a century nearer the time of wooden boats, and when a busy commercial fishing fleet operated out of Promised Land.

I had been at a memorial gathering of surfers on Saturday for The Star’s late Rusty Drumm. Rusty would have liked my three nails, no doubt. He was an inveterate beachcomber, like me. Many were the Monday mornings when we would arrive at the office to regale each other with tales of the past days’ finds before getting down to the (to us) far less interesting business of newspapering.

It was Rusty who gave me the idea of rifling through washed-up eelgrass on the ocean beaches in search of the money and other treasures that wash out of swimmers’shorts. At Georgica one summer not all that long ago, my kids found $30 in water-tumbled bills, along with a load of trinkets and trash. It was just as Rusty had said.

There is just something better about what one finds on the beach, as if its transport from sea to sand gives it some special meaning. My bronze nails are not just nails; they are part of what had once been a ship that moved from place to place, carrying people or fish or what we can only imagine.

Rusty’s send-off on Saturday was an appropriate sea-going affair. Perhaps 150 of his friends paddled out past the surf line at Ditch Plain, forming a rough circle and holding hands to the extent possible as the heaving wind swell pushed us apart. 

Someone said a few words, and then the circle drifted apart. A few of us lingered on the outside, maybe waiting for a wave to ride back to the beach, maybe just to think. A couple of flower leis left behind in Rusty’s honor floated by, and before I turned to head to shore, I put my hand on them and said goodbye.

As I said, I have three nails on my desk now and when I look at them, I’ll wonder where they came from. But I’ll also remember that Rusty would have said that just finding them was enough.