This post is contributed by Coastal Rivers Trustee Barnaby Porter from his archive. Read the previous post here.
An aside from Barnaby about the photo: This piece is about a bath house that was a far cry from the last one I visited in 2007… which, believe it or not, was on the Isle of Scorpios in the Ionian sea… built by Aristotle Onassis for Jackie. It’s a long story (but true).
When we were kids, there was a dilapidated structure, a small bath house, down on our shore on Old Broad Bay that got altogether more attention than its builder had probably ever anticipated. It had a times-gone-by aura about it, a feeling we all sensed that it had seen better days and good ones too.
One look would have told anyone that the newness was weathered right out of it long ago. My grandfather had had it built some time before I was born. At one time it had been clean and white with green trim, a proper bath house with a girls’ side and a boys’ side, and a little porch on the front with a railing to keep bathers from stumbling off onto the rocks. Each half had a sliding window to let in fresh air, hooks to hang clothes and towels on, benches, mirrors for combing hair, and there were barrel bolt locks on the inside of each door. Strictly speaking, those were the features of the bath house.
There were other things about it though that I recall with great clarity. That little house had a decided tilt to it, a characteristic slant toward the bay that not only caused the doors to slam with conviction but also caused all who climbed onto the porch to lean toward the vertical – it gave us the sense that we were walking the deck of a heeling ship. In fact, on many an afternoon when the tide was high and wavelets lapped at the front porch, it didn’t take much imagination at all to believe we actually were at sea.
I also remember the mats and salty smell of the dry, golden sea straw that must have washed in through the doors on exceptional tides, and occasionally we’d find dried up horseshoe crabs in there, which shouldn’t have surprised us, as our gravely shore thereabouts was their habitual spawning ground. Hornets were fond of the bath house too – throwing rocks at their paper nests, clad in nothing but bathing suits, was, to say the least, pretty exciting. And there was usually a pair of phoebe’s nesting under the eaves in the month of June. Until they were through with the place, we had to tread lightly on the porch and limit our activities to quietly changing in and out of our bathing suits.
But then the heat of July and August came, and with it a lot of high-spirited shenanigans took place under that bath house roof. A good deal of the commotion had directly to do with defeating the whole purpose my grandfather had in mind in the first place – privacy and the preservation of modesty. That all-important partition between the girls’ half and the boys’ half got a whole lot of scrutiny, and there wasn’t a crack or a knothole that wasn’t peeked through a hundred times every summer. Many of those holes got stuffed with bits of paper and rags, but such attempts at frustrating the eyeballs of the opposite sex only resulted in their finding some new breach in the wall. There simply was no end to the tactics, both original and tried-and-true, contrived to elicit shrieks and screams from whoever was on the other side.
That was the bathhouse I remember. Most of the time it sat alone and quiet, the sunsets twinkling off the water against its weathered walls, the wind rattling its door latches, the salt air rusting the hooks inside and etching those mirrors in which we saw our child faces. Then one winter, the ice took the bath house out into the bay. No one was around to see it.
Artist and author Barnaby Porter has had a varied career in marine research, aquaculture, and woodworking, among others. Most recently he partnered with his wife Susan as co-owners of the Maine Coast Book Shop & Cafe in downtown Damariscotta. Barnaby currently serves on Coastal Rivers’ Board of Trustees. For more about Barnaby, click here.
