1956 – Swampscott – Black Will’s Cliff

Black Will’s Cliff was a tall ragged mound of solid red granite that stretched for 1200 feet from the northeast end of King’s Beach to the southwest end of Fisherman’s Beach. It may have actually been Blackwell’s Cliff, I never knew for sure, usually referred to it simply as “the rocks”. It was a bluff below the commercial stretch of Hawthorne Street and its top was lined with expensive houses and the Hawthorne-By-The-Sea. At low tide the Atlantic lapped around the huge boulders buried in the sand along its base and, at high tide, it covered these rocks and splashed up the wall of granite and into its crevices and canyons.

We first saw Black Will’s Cliff on the day we arrived in Swampscott. While Mother tried to get us settled into our hotel room, we were looking out the window and demanding to go and see the ocean. We got permission and hurried out of the hotel to stand on King’s Beach and I discovered that Humphrey Street had buttons on the Walk lights to stop traffic for pedestrians and I would have liked one back home on Washtenaw Avenue. King’s beach was fifteen or twenty feet below street level, with an old concrete sea wall curving up from the sand to the sidewalk above. A pipe railing ran along the sidewalk and, where there were gaps, there were concrete steps leading right and left to the beach below.

It was January and the beach was cold and it stank from dead fish, seaweed, and sea life that had washed up on the sand. I hadn’t expected the smell, but above the rotting smell was a cold wind that carried the smell of ocean salt and that was exactly as it should be. I looked out across the waves to the horizon and thought about how it stretched all the way to England. Of course, it didn’t, I was looking towards the southeast, not England, but I wanted to feel how I felt when I looked at it on a map. The ocean looked like I expected, a little scarier since it was winter and it was cold and choppy, but I didn’t feel any closer to England.

A few miles straight out across the water was a large round rock rising above the surface with a much smaller rock on its left and an even smaller one on its left. To me, it always looked like the back of an elephant with the top of its skull and the curve of its trunk breaking the surface. This was Egg Rock and it always seemed to dominate the horizon. I never knew if it was named for its shape or because it was inhabited by seagulls; it was said to be thoroughly covered with bird shit and that seemed likely. There were always swarms of seagulls flying over King’s Beach, calling in their screeching voices, dropping shellfish, dive-bombing, and fighting over dead things on the beach. I never found them appealing, though it seemed most people did. The only time I thought they were graceful was when they would glide with open wings against the sky, the rest of the time they were more obnoxious than Blue Jays. Perhaps they simply made me ill at ease because they weren’t intimidated like birds were supposed to be. If they wanted something, they would hop or fly as close to me as they needed to and never seemed to care.

We were to learn that Fisherman’s Beach was the preferred bathing beach in those days and King’s Beach wasn’t cleaned regularly. That was a plus for us, who were eager to see as many sea creatures as we could, dead of alive. We had all poured over our copies of The Seashore and could identify more items than we were likely to see, but Michael was the authority. He read more and could remember more, and we had learned in the fields back in Ann Arbor that we saw more when we followed his lead. Michael wanted to see some tide pools, so we headed for the rocks. The rocks had patches of snow on them and climbing was a bit hazardous. Daniel slipped and went into the water up to his waist. Michael helped him back on to the rocks and I could see, from where I was perched on a rock, that Daniel was not only slightly mortified but he was scared as well. Both of them looked a little scared and I thought of how cold that water was and how awful it would be to have the waves throw him against the rocks. The ocean wasn’t entirely a friendly thing.

I don’t remember if we saw any tide pools the first day, but there were plenty along Black Will’s Cliff and whenever we visited the rocks we would usually check to see whatever the last high tide had left in them. We had read The Seashore, but on our first visits we had Michael as a tour guide and he was able to identify and remember the names of anything we had forgotten or never seen. It was a little surprising that Michael knew these shore animals better than any of the kids who had lived there all their lives, but I was used to that and, though I knew he was always reading books on nature, I don’t think I realized how much reading he must have actually done. Michael was fourteen then and about to start ninth grade at the high school, so he didn’t always come with us when we went to the rocks just for fun. When we didn’t have anything better to do, we would go climb around the rocks.

The route we took would depend on the tide; we would go as low as the water level allowed. This was mainly because it was easier climbing and more interesting to move along the lower levels where there were more flat sections, more tide pools, and more miniature beaches. But the main reason was that at the top there was only bald rock abutting against private yards and, though we didn’t balk against racing across someone’s yard, we didn’t like to do it. Sometimes property owners would yell at us and try to chase us off the rocks and we found this offensive. We could understand when we were on their property, but the rocks themselves were no-man’s land and nobody could claim them as their own. We didn’t actually know what the law was, but we knew what was right. This presented me with a moral predicament. I found it distasteful how the rich would selfishly blockade stretches of nature and try to keep it for themselves, even when they weren’t using it. The whole coastline was a demonstration of selfishness, with the greedy erecting fences so that others couldn’t even share the view. I knew this wasn’t the view of our country, the law, or most other people; but what really perplexed me was that I could imagine if I ever had a house along the shore, I would probably feel the same way and would want to protect it from others. It made me hope that I never possessed anything that other people coveted, the question of right and wrong became too confusing.

From the top of the rocks there was only one place to get to Humphrey Street without crossing someone’s yard, and that was from an observation stand that had been built for the nuns at St. John’s. There, the nuns could sit in the open under a roof and gaze out over the Atlantic and there was a walk that led back towards the church and school. Apparently a hurricane had passed through Swampscott a few years before and destroyed their old observation stand and this one was recently built.

The terrain changed as you moved around the rocks, it was a miniature coastline in itself with small beaches, chasms, and rock formations. There was one stretch of large boulders that was covered at high tide, but full of tide pools and exposed rocks covered with barnacles and seaweed at low tide. At times, we would have to wait for the waves to retreat before we could dash from one rock to another. At one point along the shore, there was a thin crevice in the wall of rock and above the waves was a rock ledge by a horizontal crack that was about two feet deep. We would stand on that ledge and smoke cigarettes and for a while kept a pack of Parliaments pushed back into the crack. We had given Phillip the thirty-five cents to buy the pack from a cigarette machine in the entranceway to the Hawthorne-by-the-Sea. We chose Phillip because he was young enough that any adult would naturally assume he was buying them for his parents.