Fleetwood Mac -- "Dust" (1972)

When your swift hair is quiet in death

And through the lips corruption thrust

Has stilled the labor of my breath --

When we are dust, when we are dust!

You don't expect to come face-to-face with the death of a young man and the grief that death caused his family -- especially his mother -- when you set off to take a bike ride on the first day of your summer vacation.

It all started when I decided to take a break near the end of my long drive to Cape Cod last month and pulled off the interstate in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, to ride on the Phoenix Rail Trail.

The Phoenix is a fairly nondescript rail trail that goes through some not-very-scenic neighborhoods in Fairhaven.  This sign is indicative of the businesses that are located along the old railroad right-of-way that the trail follows:

(As that sign indicates, a "honeywagon" is a truck that's used to pump out septic tanks or cesspools.  It also refers to the mobile toilet unit used by the cast and crew when a movie or television show is being shot on location.) 

Here is an enigmatic message that someone had spray-painted on to the trail:

If you know what "We live on crumbling cries/Indulge in pleasure/And choke on the crust" means, I hope you'll tell me -- because I don't have a clue.

I had ridden to the end of the trail, turned around, and was almost back to my car when I saw a side trail heading south towards Buzzards Bay and decided to explore it.  It went past a radio station tower and several large windmills, and then dead-ended at a small body of water.  This plaque was affixed to a concrete slab upon which there was a wooden bench overlooking the water:

Next to the bench was a sort of shrine:

I don't know who created this memorial to Matt.  It could have been his girlfriend.  (There was no mention of a wife in his obituary, so I assume he wasn't married.)  It could have been his father, or one or both of his brothers, or a close friend.  But I'm guessing that Matt's mother was responsible for this collection of devotional objects.

Here's a closeup of the small metal pyramid that hangs from the wooden post that you can see in the previous picture:

And here's a closeup of the printed card you can see at the base of the wooden "T" in that picture:

It's difficult to read the words on that card from the photo.  Here's what it says:

Thinking of you --

I miss you so much.  Everyday I expect the phone to ring or a letter to come, but it doesn't.  I hope you know how much I love you and even though you have passed from this life you are forever in my heart.  You were such a fine young person ready to share with the world all the talents you had.  I count my blessings to have had you here as long as I did but I wish it were longer.

Love always and more --

Sounds to me like a mom wrote that -- but regardless of who the author is, it's a lovely message.

I got on the computer the next day and found Matt's obituary, which said that he had died from injuries suffered in a car accident.  His survivors included his parents, two brothers, three grandparents, five uncles, two aunts, and several nieces and nephews -- according to the obituary, he loved spending time with those nieces and nephews.

Another story in the local newspaper reported that Matt's mother -- who worked at the hospital where he died -- was also the assistant coach for the local high school cheerleading squad, which was scheduled to travel to the state championships a few days after Matt's death.  The girls thought about cancelling their trip, but decided that Matt's mom would want them to go.

Fairhaven High School

Mrs. Lovegrove showed up unexpectedly when the team assembled at 6:30 in the morning to board the school bus that would take them to the competition.  The girls took third place in the statewide meet, and on the drive back to Fairhaven, asked the bus driver to drive them to the Lovegrove home so they could show her their trophy and give her some hugs.

Click here to read that newspaper story.  

"Dust" is from the 1972 Bare Trees album.  I originally was going to write about the title song from that album, but there are several songs on Bare Trees that are suitably somber and elegiac for this post -- in particular, "Dust."

The lyrics to "Dust" are taken from the first two stanzas of the Rupert Brooke poem of the same name.  Brooke was an English poet who was born in 1887.  He was admired equally for his brilliance and his good looks.  (Yeats described him as "the handsomest young man in England," and Virginia Woolf claimed to have gone skinny-dipping with him when they were both students at Cambridge.)

Rupert Brooke

But Brooke's life ended in 1915, when he was just 27.  He was stationed on a Royal Navy ship in the Mediterranean, and developed sepsis after a mosquito bite became infected.  He was buried in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros.

Click here if you'd like to read Brooke's poem.  

Here's "Dust" -- one of the most haunting songs you'll ever hear:

Narnia -- "Sail Around the World" (2009)

Storm is coming

I cling to my rope

In 1892, a friend of Joshua Slocum's offered him a derelict 37-foot Chesapeake Bay oyster sloop that had been sitting in a meadow in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, for years. 

Slocum spent a little over a year repairing the sloop, which he named the Spray.  He then used it to become the first man ever to sail around the world solo.

Joshua Slocum,
circumnavigator extraordinaire

He left port in 1895 and returned just over three years later, having sailed over 46,000 miles. (There was no Panama Canal then.)

Slocum's feat truly boggles the mind.  Spray had no engine, but was completely dependent upon the wind, and Slocum navigated using a primitive technique, dead reckoning -- he didn't have an accurate chronometer to use to determine his longitude, much less GPS.

A model of Slocum's Spray

His solo circumnavigation brought Slocum considerable fame, and in 1899, he wrote Sailing Alone Around the World.  One reviewer said, "Boys who do not like this book should be drowned at once."

Slocum was sailing the Spray when he disappeared without a trace after leaving Martha's Vineyard in 1909.  (His destination was South America.)

On my recent drive to Cape Cod, I stopped to take a bike ride on the Phoenix Rail Trail in Fairhaven, which sits across the Acushnet River from the famous whaling port of New Bedford.

Today, Fairhaven is home to quite a few fishing boats.

Golfers may know it as the home of the Acushnet Company, which makes Titleist golf balls, FootJoy golf shoes, and other golf equipment and apparel:

Acushnet was also the name of the whaling ship that carried the 21-year-old Herman Melville when it departed from Fairhaven for the South Pacific in 1841.  

Melville, who later said that his life began the day the Acushnet sailed, probably based much on Moby-Dick on what he observed and experienced during the 18 months that he was aboard the Acushnet.  (He deserted the ship in the Marquesas Islands in 1842, eventually making his way to Honolulu and later returning to the east coast.)

Herman Melville

The Phoenix Rail Trail becomes the Mattapoisett Trail when it crosses the line dividing Fairhaven from its neighbor to the east, the town of Mattapoisett.  (The trail is currently less than five miles long, so it's hardly worth two names and two signs.)

Narnia is a Swedish Christian metal band that formed in 1996 and disbanded in 2010.  "Sail Around the World" is from the group's final album, Course of a Generation.

Narnia's music was inspired by C. S. Lewis's seven "The Chronicles of Narnia" novels, which he wrote between 1949 and 1954.  The books incorporate elements of Greek and Roman mythology and British and Irish fairy tales, but they are first and foremost Christian literature.

The first of the Narnia books

The Narnia novels are usually described as children's books, but there is plenty of drama and food for thought in them to fully engage the attention of adults. 

I was not aware of the Narnia books until I had children.  I read all seven to my oldest son, but didn't do quite that well with my other children.  I think I read three or four to my twin daughters and to my youngest son, and he and I have seen the movie versions of the first three books in the series.

The most recent one, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, was released in 2010, when my son was 16.  We both enjoyed it thoroughly, and were thoroughly moved by it.  Here's the trailer for that movie:

Here's "Sail Around the World":

Click here to buy the song from Amazon.