Life on a wharf
Long Wharf in Boston, United States, 19th Century, jutting into Boston Harbor
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I’ve spent a lot of time on wharves, and I especially think of them in August, when their smells of salt water, fish, creosote, diesel and gasoline reach their greatest intensity. Standing there at the edge of water, maybe looking at the eelgrass wave in the water a few feet away, I think of how summer is waning as a back-door cold front replaces the sultry southwest wind with a salty breeze from the east that’s cool enough to remind me of fishing for smelt as a kid in October off the “floats’’ (wooden floating wharves) in the harbor near our house, using a bamboo pole and multiple hooks. (Smelts, by the way, are best fried in butter.) Or I remember the east wind coming off Boston Harbor and cooling off my summer work mates and me as we smoked on the loading platforms along the promiscuously polluted South Boston waterfront and I mulled the threats and opportunities involved in returning to college in a couple of weeks.
On the Cape’s West Falmouth Harbor, there’s a very old and small granite-block wharf in front of what used to be my paternal grandparents’ house, since torn down and replaced by a tall McMansion but, as the builder emphasized to angry neighbors, on the “same footprint.’’ The little wharf provided me with a couple of lessons in the passage of time:
Low tide now exposes sand and mud flats going right up to the front of the wharf (or “dock’’ as we called it, even though docks are more precisely the area between wharves).
So why was it built? It turns out that a little stream emptying into the harbor had silted up the water abutting the wharf. In the 19th Century the water in that part of the harbor (once famous for its shellfish, before a disastrous oil spill, in 1969) was much deeper. And the rather mysterious structure was apparently built to provide access for people coming in small boats to a fresh water spring a few feet up the slope from the wharf.