Harolding in Beverly

And leaves underfeet

Few essays live as rent-free in my mind as “Harolding in Vancouver,” by Douglas Coupland. Coupland is a writer and artist who is best known for Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which came out in 1991, and which gave my birth cohort its name. It seems that Douglas Coupland doesn’t especially like being the voice of a generation, reportedly saying in 2006 "I was just doing what I do and people sort of stuck that on to me. It's not like I spend my days thinking that way." Which is, obviously, the most Generation X thing he could have possibly said.

“Harolding,” as a term of art, might not have had the thornlike tenacity to stick in the lexicon as much as “Gen X” or “McJob” did, but it’s the Coupland coinage that I think about the most. It derives from the 1971 film Harold and Maude, directed by Hal Ashby, about a teenage boy who enjoys hanging out in graveyards before he falls in love with an elderly Holocaust survivor played by Ruth Gordon (you’d recognize her has the meddlesome elderly Satanist in Rosemary’s Baby). I could turn this entry into a meditation on how bizarre Hollywood in the 1970s was, but instead I’m going to make it about graveyards.

But can you blame me? Look at this:

(Beverly Central Cemetery, yesterday afternoon)

Beverly Central Cemetery is still an active burial ground on the North Shore, despite having a section like this, full of 18th and early 19th Century slate headstones, some tipping, some snapped into, many being gradually consumed by tree roots. In the fall the trees flame to life, and yesterday as I roamed about the leaves crunched under my feet.

I wasn’t alone. Scattered in amongst the thousands of sleeping Beverlyites, I passed first a young woman with a drawing pad, leaning against a tree. The Central Cemetery isn’t so far from Montserrat, so she was probably a student, sketching, maybe for class. Or maybe not. Maybe she was Harolding, like me.

Inside a narrow garden room defined by tightly-leaved ancient evergreen shrubs, I came across two people apparently living in the doorway of a crypt. They stopped their conversation as I passed, imagining I couldn’t see them, as we all pretend we can’t see into each other’s windows when the lights are on.

Eventually, I found what I was nominally looking for.

Here is the real Hannah Masury, buried with her second husband and his first wife. The woman who went around the Horn, and crisscrossed the Pacific in a clipper for two years, stopping in Russia and Polynesia and Hong Kong. Who lost her husband and seized control of the ship and stayed on the helm for days at a stretch armed with a pistol against 400 mutineers.

A True Account, the pirate story in which I use her name, comes out in paperback in one short month. Sometimes I think I should have written her real story instead.

So what’s next?

On Friday October 25 (this coming Friday) I will be part of an online panel about women in piracy, hosted by the Toronto Public Library. It’s free, but registration is required.

On Saturday November 16 I’ll have The Penguin Book of Pirates at Books by the Banks in Cincinnati.

Then it’s paperback day for A True Account!

I was wearing a sailing hat when I visited Hannah, for some regatta that involved going back and forth in endless windward/leeward circles. But headed ultimately for the same destination.