Claimed by the Sea in Cape Cod

Nicole LaCorte
Jul 28, 2017 · 5 min read

“I used to take your dad up here as a kid, you know,” my grandmother said. I did know. We all knew; this was the same story she had told us twelve times over. Yet we continued to listen (and would listen the many more times hence) as we attempted to seat ourselves around one table, eating bagels and croissants and scrambled eggs.

My family and I were in Cape Cod, the sandy, bayside peninsula that my father had visited annually when he was a child. This was no doubt the reason why we, in the summer of 2012, had gone to Cape Cod ourselves. My sister, only three years older than my brothers and I, had just graduated from college, and my grandma was nearing her eighty-first birthday, so there seemed to be no better time than then to travel northeast and back to the days of my predecessors’ youth. Most of our living family had accompanied us to this worn line of cabins (that probably looked much nicer forty years earlier), save my aunt and grandfather who have been long passed and thus missed this kind-of reunion. My dad’s brother, on the other hand, was alive and well, as were his wife and young children. But they didn’t come, much too busy they were with their own summer vacations and obligatory deadlines. Nobody really mentioned it, though sometimes my brother and I would slip a small comment that was often followed by silence and a quasi-judicious glare.

I had first discovered the song by French for Rabbits a few weeks before this quaint trip: “Claimed by the Sea,” written and performed by New Zealanders Brooke Singer and John Fitzgerald, a duo mastering in self-proclaimed dream-pop and mystical folk. My finding of the song was so random and inconsequential that I can’t even remember where it happened — a coffee shop? Tumblr? A page on Bandcamp or SoundCloud? Wherever their music initially met my ears didn’t matter, because I subsequently took it away from that place and kept it with me. I liked it. It was nice.

That was basically the extent of my feelings towards the song, at first. Nice. Soft. Calm. I listened to it as I fell asleep on some nights, or with solitary drives on crisp summer mornings. But the meaning of the song, the intention of it, never presented itself to me as obviously as it did when I took it along with me to the eastern Massachusetts town. “Claimed by the Sea” is such a song that can fit into the genre of hazy, seaside town: serene, ambient, slow with downtempo and acoustic guitar.

But I didn’t give it that much thought on my first morning there. I had woken up to a vacant bedroom and the fluid sound of passing cars outside the open window, its drapes an indescribable pattern of browns and burgundies that matched the bed’s comforter. The combination of that and the ship’s wheel lamp that was fixated to the wall, futilely trying to give off a nautical vibe, was incredibly outdated and on the cusp of uncomfortable, explaining why my sister and I slept over the covers that previous night. (“I can’t believe we actually fell asleep like that,” my sister laughed, days later, after all of our bags were packed to leave.)

It was a chilly morning, and the salty fog took to my unkempt hair the moment I stepped outside. The sky was a dull but clean shade of slate and, without much thought, I stopped to take a look at the bay below it. The beach was just outside the row of cabins, accessible through several small flights of wooden steps. It wasn’t very wide — only a few yards between boardwalk and shoreline — and was compiled of sand and dark, earth-toned rocks. And then I began to hear the song, organically, without it being played. Like the waves, it came in slow and then all at once. It was in my ear. “This is no longer my house, / It’s been claimed by the sea.”

The song sets the scene of a home after a hurricane, after an unforeseen high tide, after it has been left abandoned to rot and mold and drown. But I felt it here, on this boardwalk and before the Cape Cod Bay, as though it were not only a home she was referring to but a body, a family, a soul.

My thoughts were distracted by the sight of a white giant, solemnly swimming towards the shore. I leaned over the wooden railing, the song momentarily paused in my mind. The swan was approaching hastily, gracefully towards the beach. I watched as a small crowd began to surround it with curiosity. The swan, yellowed at the neck, was patient as he stood around them, as though anticipating the treats they were about to give him. He gobbled up the pieces thrown towards the ground with earnestness every time, and waited with unblinking eyes until he was fed more. There were moments when he almost attempted to eat from their palms until the prospect of what could really happen at the hands of humans must have frightened him.

I remembered something my brother, who’s the kind to be full of quirky facts, had told me once: “Did you know,” he began, “that swans stay with their partners for life? If their partner dies, they die, too, of a broken heart. And they’ll still die if they go too long without ever finding one.”

The song played on — “Claimed by the sea, / And it was always going to be” — and I watched as the swan ate until the family ran out of bread, and I watched him after the family began to head back to their own cabins, and I watched him swim back out into the cold bay, alone, and wondered if he was still hungry.

This was to be the last of those juvenescent family vacations, right before the allure of them faded out like ships against the horizon. But those few days later, right before we locked our cabin doors for the last time and returned the keys, I visited that beach off the boardwalk. The song was still in my head; “Claimed by the Sea,” like Cape Cod itself, manages to haunt you in a way that is beautiful, and carry you with the lull of its sound.

I sat among the rocks and looked out, and there I saw the swan again, no longer alone but with a seagull floating nearby, the two of them still and staring at one another.

What a love story.


This personal essay was originally written in March of 2014.

Nicole LaCorte

Written by

vague yet poignant, like a dream | fiction and non-

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