The Anchor House

Park Slope has a bevy of creative types with eccentric houses. The Pink House is infamous and currently under attack by the neighborhood watch for its blatant nonconformity. To the owner I say "fuck 'em". Do what you want with your property! I love your house, and so do many Slopers. As long as I've lived here, I still see new things that are old every day, and old things that are new to me. It is such a blessing to be around evidence of grand lives lived grandly everywhere one looks. 

I've seen much of America and the deserts of culture that are so many strip mall wastelands or hastily built cul-de-sacs filled with the same stuccoed McMansions, already crumbling after a few years on their shaky foundations. I've lived out west in places with completely abandoned, deserted suburbs because the housing construction bubble burst overnight to the ruination of many. Builders foreclosed without ever finishing these developments. It's strange and unsettling to see such newness already being eaten away by the elements, like a movie or t.v. set about the end of the world. 

All that time, money, and energy invested into cracking foundations that are slowly sinking into the swampy land that someone finally discovered made for a poor investment. It left me with a lifetime appreciation for great architecture like those in my town. I know it when I see it, I know the history involved, the life lived in our homes, and I know the sadness attached to buildings that never realized such purpose.

My partner for those western years worked as a master electrician, and he often told me the sad stories of the false American Dream—huge houses empty of furniture under foreclosure, with a fancy BMW car in the garage that stood mute as he cut the lines of their power for nonpayment, a set piece artificially designed to give the appearance of wealth by the inhabitants hopped up on meds as their phony dreams crumbled around them while they desperately propped up mythic ideas of themselves and their supposed prosperity at cocktail parties. All for show. What a fucking waste.

Luckily for me, I have an actual history, as it has been my pleasure to write about for you, my dear readers, here on this site. As the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library underwent much needed refreshing after a hundred or so years, I took the spring and summertime to walk to the main branch, savoring the different walks and the character each one had. One day I would go through Prospect Park, another day down a block that seemed old and new at the same time, and always I was grateful.

One day I found a house I never saw before, that spoke to me from the past in a deep and profound way. I was walking back from the Central Library down a block that looked like classic Park Slope, a row of typically scenic and historic brownstone Brooklyn. In the distance I saw a large shape I couldn't quite make out and it was large at that, too. What is that?! Plunked down in someones' front garden was a huge, old anchor and not just any anchor but that of a sea captain, and not just any sea captain, but Le Capitaine.

Every male ancestor up to my father has been a seaman of sorts, either military or trade. The opening vignette for the movie version of The Perfect Storm shows just such a seaport town with a plague that gives homage to men lost at sea, and sure enough a Doucette is listed on it. The maritime province Nova Scotia has cemeteries filled with the names of our ancestors, and one tiny town named Doucetteville. Long after The Expulsion and the systemic degradation of The Acadians throughout our time here in The New World, I learned well from my father the symbols of our ancestors and those who bear our line. Such are the signs we look for in times when it is less fortunate to be who we are.

Everywhere on this house the inhabitant wanted to tell the story of who he was to someone who walked past and could decipher the signs. There's a fleur-de-lis and here is a trident! The first time I walked past it I knew it was a special place, but with neighbors miling about and workmen on the block, and my own crushing deadlines, I did not have time to take a good look. For the rest of the summer, I made a game of choosing a different block to walk past on my way home from the library until one day there it was, a few weeks before my local branch would be back in operation and my long walks to the main library would be over. Like everything that flows in my life, I found it again just when I needed to. An older man walked slowly past me with a cane and as a tourist asked him for directions, I waited my turn to engage him in conversation in the lingua franca of New York to assure him that I was no mere gawker.

He grew up a couple of blocks away and this was indeed the house of a captain. We talked about the wonderful artisans of our neighborhood who craft such details, not for the sake of showing off, though their talents are incredible, but to tell the story of who they are to anyone walking past in the future who can read them. What a worthy life these craftsmen lead, painstakingly making such works for us to behold in the future, like the time capsules they are. The man asked me if I was a Bourbon (a Québécois who considers themselves purely French, i.e. a "white" person whose ancestors never went "native") which bespoke of his knowledge about the area and the people who inhabit it. I said more slowly than I felt, "No. I..I'm...Acadian." The words felt so strange coming out of my mouth! I realized that here in front of this house was the first time I had ever said to a stranger those very words and through the special magic of this place built by a common ancestor, I felt emboldened to do so.

As so often happens to me, the time between now and then stretches, blurs, and thins. I felt very close to this man. It's an incredible gift from a French Canadian sea captain long dead, knowing that we are the rare and the few, knowing that few people would feel the import of such architectual details beyond the symbolic and the decorative. It was at once hidden and in plain site and I knew the man who had supervised such a construction had to be an educated genius, too. The anchor is huge, and the rest of the building stands in marked contrast to those around it which, though they are beautiful and subtly individual, make much less of a statement about their former owners than this house of Le Capitaine. Everywhere are touches of whimsy, humor, and pride. The tridents formed into the ironwork, the fleur de lis standing guard proudly above the front door, the small conch tucked neatly into the anchors' support.

It was done with such love and confidence and charm and wit! I felt less alone as people on the sidewalk streamed by me or around me, looking at my pictures over my shoulder or walking straight towards me, in that peculiar way that passes for confrontational to people who are not native to this area, in a show of false confidence, but for me here was a symbol of my person-hood in the form of a house. People search all their lives for the cure to their restlessness, but when I moved home from Colorado, I made a vow to myself and my family that I would no longer leave. I would plant myself here and grow roots that connected me back to the tree that already grew. And now here it is for you to see, too.

May you find what you are searching for, and some of the peace that I have found. May all your journeys and footsteps lead you back home. Blessings to you.