Sky Diving On Long Island

Truman Capote Wrote In Cold Blood On Clarks Island, Duxbury, Ma.

Clarks Island in Duxbury Bay might be better known had Truman Capote not been Capote but, rather, Tom Cruise or Hanks. Capote wrote portions of In Cold Blood on Clarks Island in the 1960's. The book made him rich and his name far more widely known than that of the place where of, or where he wrote it. Had either of the Toms spent time there chances are the place would be nowhere as unassuming as it is.

You know Capote's book. A gruesome murder spree in the heartland. The prairie, cold and bleak. Two guys with guns and roped. They slaughter an entire family. Later the book gets made into a movie, but by then Capote already has been credited with creating a new literary genre: fact-based fiction. Soon others get on the bandwagon and write books similar. But by then Capote has become an unpredictable drunk who works through a few old notebooks at the end of his life to write his final book, a tell-all about the high life in New York. Jackie O and the Jaggers and AndyWarhol. He moved in those circles. He was that sort. But man could he write.

He had also by then fallen drunk off his chair when Dick Cavett interviewed him on public televsion. Then Normal Mailer: The Executioner's Song, Gary what's-his-name on death row, and later Mailer's books on Marilyn and Of a Fire on the Moon. East coast intellectuals thus then begain to produce books that examined the worst of who we are not by simple reporting but by placing into their novels characters of the American conscience: people so well known, so much formed by us, that they are as much us as we are.

And it all started here on Clarks. And now the book is old hat and Clarks has become a footnote: This is where Truman Capote wrote his first bestseller.

As for seakayakers and crime books. Just ask Yvonne Keyser, whom I kayak with when I can pry her out of the house before noon. She sort-of paddles and very much reads Anne Rule crime stories. By the drawer-full. You know the books' story lines: narratives float up out of the headlines every few months. Guy's wife or guy's wife and kids go gone. Press conference. Guy weeps. Would whoever has Dossy let her go! Something about the guy always seems wrong. He doesn't seem so much stoic as handsmome and emotionless and soon we begin to suspect what every cop already supposes: guy offed Dossy wife with a garrote or a .44, then rolled her into a rug he dumped in the county landfill. Or duct-taped into in a trash barrel under lock and key at the local U-Haul.

When you're bored in Duxbury Bay because there are no fish worth looking for, you think about this sort of stuff: the connections between the water you're on, the books you've read, the people you know and the writers you admire. Meanwhile maybe you also consider:

- that crime stores are the best reads on kayak camping trip. As with sitcoms, even if the names and faces change, the story arcs essentially repeat themselves. And as any kid with his teddy bear knows, the familiar is sopforic. Ever try to get a good night's sleep in a motel? It's not your house. Strange sounds. Weird odors. Crime books are familiar. Read one in your tent or motal and your sleeping troubles are gone. Chapter One: "Joanie Michelson was the kind of mother and woman everyone in her quiet suburban neighborhood admired. Loving and outgoing, she lived a beautiful her life with her husband, Herbert, and her two lovely young children.. But little did her neighbors know that beneath the happy exterior of domestic bliss lurked a monster. Herbert, .... " -

-- a page-and-a-half of this and you are snoring. The usual fracas of trying to fall sleep on a rocky cobble on the Maine Island Trail? Gone. The husband, in debt or with a mistress or addicted to cocaine, or all three or both, offs his wife for insurance. Four years later you're watching summer rerun TV, and there Herbert is, getting interviewed by some fancy-haircut reporter wearing a bespoke suit:

Reporter: "Did you do it? Did you kill her?"
Guilty Herbert: "No! I loved her! I love her still!"

By Dave Williams - Outdoors writer Dave Williams lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Sky Diving in Long Island

31 Aug 2008 at 9:40am

Next page: Sky Diving Orlando