Saltwater in my Blood

(The view of the Weweantic River in Wareham, Massachusetts.)

As I traveled towards the middle of the country, I followed the highway in my Rand McNally Road Atlas, loving the big picture view of my trip.  When I opened the page to the map of the whole country, the town of Junction City, Kansas was literally in the fold of the map.  I traveled there to check out an RV that was on my husband’s wish list.   

Entering Kansas, Jim and I drove on a meandering road that went up and down over small hills with cornfields unraveling off into the distance.  We were visiting Horizon, a specialty RV manufacturer that only made custom mobile homes.  The company was near Junction City, Kansas.  After our tour of the plant and checking out a couple of used mobile homes, we went out to dinner in town.  It was a college town so there were several restaurants and bars, more than I would have expected.  But the whole time I was there, smack in the middle of the country, I had a claustrophobic feeling that the ocean was too far away.  I haven’t always lived near the ocean, but in the Gold country of California, I could get to the San Francisco Bay in a couple of hours. 

Staying in the middle of the country made me realize that I really needed to be closer to the ocean.  When you’ve grown up in a place like Cape Cod, it’s challenging to live without all those bays and beaches that line the New England coast.  Away from the ocean, I always did feel like a fish out of water which makes sense with a name like Fisher. 

My Father, Donald Fisher, grew up literally on the water with the high tide washing up under his house in Spile City in Onset, Massachusetts.  This ramshackle collection of homes was named for the piers that they perched on alongside Broad Cove, leading to Dummy Bridge.  Another curious name which described the dummy cars that once ran along that bridge.   

The seacoast village of Onset was part of Wareham which is considered the Gateway to Cape Cod.  Later, I found an old magazine called, The Compass which wrote about a stone marker that had been placed in 1739 on the border of West Wareham and Rochester, MA.  This stone rock engraved with the words, Cape Cod, marked the true beginning of Cape Cod where the soil turned sandy, and the scrub pine trees popped up, replacing the taller pines. Of course, this marker came along long before the Cape Cod Canal which was a man-made division for the Cape, and obviously not the original beginning of Cape Cod.   I wish I had found this magazine earlier when I was in college, and one of those “summer people” on Cape Cod told me that Wareham wasn’t part of Cape Cod.  Now, I could share this bit of history with her.   

My Mother, Doris Fisher, also came from Cape Cod, having grown up in West Wareham and Rochester as a young girl.  Her childhood home literally sat on the border of the two towns, where you could cross the street and be in Rochester, or cross back, and be in West Wareham.  Even though she had grown up that close to the ocean, she hadn’t spent a lot of time at the beach.  Her parents both had to work to make a living, and my Mom was left in charge of her siblings to make sure they did housework as well as homework.  Her childhood wasn’t a carefree time at the beach like my Dad who called his childhood in Onset like “living in one big playground.”  His life wasn’t idyllic either, having lost his Mom when he was not even two, and losing his own Dad in a sense since he wasn’t around a lot.  Lucky for my Dad, his grandparents raised him well even if they did give him a great deal of freedom as a boy.   

My Father, shared that love of the outdoors and the ocean with his three daughters.  And truth be told, I do believe I inherited saltwater in my blood.

That’s why, my dream is to spend the summer and fall on Cape Cod.  Living near the ocean once again would be like heaven for me. 

By Donna Fisher-Jackson, M.A. © 2016
Donna Fisher-Jackson, M.A., CHT is a Certified Hypnotherapist, Western Astrologer and Author who counsels clients through her business of Iris Holistic Counseling Services on the road at http://www.DonnaFisherJackson.com. She has published the self-help book, The Healing Path of the Romantic: Type Four of the Enneagram Personality Type System and a novel, Clara & Irving: A Love Story of Past Lives, based on the true story of a Romantic. Both books are available in a print and Kindle edition on Amazon.com.  Donna is currently working on a new book – a travel memoir of her life on the road.  ♥