Free Long Way Down by Michael Sears Page B

didn’t see you as a fisherman.”
    “I grew up dirt-poor in Georgetown, South Carolina. You either fished or worked at the paper mill. Or went hungry.”
    The stables were just to our right. From this perspective I could see they were empty and needed work. The white paint was flaking badly in spots and the outdoor riding ring was partially covered with bare brown weeds. We kept walking.
    The house was both arrogant and pitiful. Arrogant in size and with all the Gold Coast love of over-ornamentation, but pitiful in that it failed so abysmally at conveying any sense of beauty or grandeur. The path we were on would lead us directly to the front door. I wasn’t interested in a house tour.
    Haley must have sensed my reluctance. “Almost there. We’ll take a right up here around the hedge.”
    I followed him and found myself in a low-walled garden in back of the house. The flower beds were all piled with mulch and only the brown stumps of rosebushes along the stone wall gave anyindication of what this area would look like in early summer. At the end of the garden was all of Long Island Sound.
    Water views and wealth are inextricably bound and will be so even after the oceans rise twenty-five feet and turn Manhattan into a twenty-first-century version of Venice. Virgil’s mother lived in a castle with a view of Newport Harbor. Every multimillionaire on Wall Street had to have a water view, if only at the summerhouse, and every lowly intern and trading assistant dreamed of getting there one day. But few had dreamed this big.
    Beyond the wall was a steep cliff of clay and rock, pushed here by the Wisconsin glacier of the last ice age that had scraped away everything in its path down to bedrock before being defeated by warming weather, gravity, or friction. The glacier melted and left the Sound.
    And from that garden, I felt like I could see all of it. Far to the west was Manhattan, the towers looking like sparkling crystals in the afternoon sun. A lighthouse, which must have been miles away, looked like a toy replica. Across the water I could see the hedge fund mansions in Greenwich, the soaring bastions of banking in Stamford, and in the distance, the towers of the power plant at Bridgeport. To the east, water stretched to the horizon, giving the illusion of infinity. It was impossible that such a view belonged to one family alone.
    “Is this the highest point on Long Island?”
    “No. Not even close. It’s not even the tallest point on the North Shore.”
    “Why isn’t this a national park?”
    “It may yet get there. But come over here. I want to show you my farm.”
    It was too odd to question. I followed him to a set of steps that led down to a rocky beach in a set of switchbacks along the cliff. Farbelow us, a rock jetty stuck out from the beach for sixty or seventy feet into the Sound. I made the mistake of looking straight down and felt my equilibrium shift. The ground was very far away and there was very little between me and it.
    “Right out there,” Haley said, pointing at the water a quarter mile or so offshore.
    I looked, but I didn’t know what I was looking for.
    “See that row of white dots on the water? There and there and there.”
    Then I did see them. “Okay. Sure.” I had no idea what they meant or why I was supposed to be impressed, but Haley was certainly excited by them.
    “Those are my pots. My lobster pots. That’s where I was this morning.”
    He went on about conch and black sea bass and winter flounder with as much enthusiasm as the Kid talking about muscle cars. I tried to maintain a pretense of interest. The wind coming across that cold water was going right through my camel’s hair overcoat. I was cold.
    “You go out on a boat in this weather and haul up lobster traps? For fun?” I gave up on all pretense.
    He laughed like a little kid. “It
is
fun.”
    “Do you catch anything?”
    He laughed again, this time ruefully. “Not much. I’m probably not very good at this. But when