I was trying to take a nap, but I couldn’t ignore the cursing I heard below our rented cottage on the Pamet River marsh. I got up, looked out the window, and saw a man falling forward into the low-tide mud. He was tall and beefy, maybe in his late 60s. He managed to get his boots unstuck, first one and then the other, and started crawling toward the shore.
A much older man, skinny and of average height, was a little farther offshore. His legs were stuck up to mid-calf, with just two or three inches of boot showing. He was barking at his companion: “Stay back. Don’t come this way. It’s worse.” A bait trap lay nearby on the mud flat.
I grabbed a hat and sunglasses and pulled on my water shoes just as our neighbors — Hilary, holding a shovel, and Cathy, holding a rake — came on the scene. I found two strong landscaping stakes in the garage and joined them.
I gave the stakes to the big man, who was upright now but still in bad mud. I asked Cathy to get two more stakes, which I took to the older man, stepping lightly on a narrow vein of firmer mud I recognized by its yellowish color.
Straining, the older man tried to lift up his left leg. Nothing doing. “Try the other,” I said. Same result.
I told him to put all his weight on the stakes while I pulled up on his left boot with both hands. He said something about “two new knees” and a pacemaker, so I tried to be careful.
As his foot came out of the mud, I helped him take a backward step and then went to work on the right foot, which didn’t come out as easily. I had to pull and pull. We repeated this ritual until he could turn, walk to the seawall, and climb up its five steps with my help. The other man had already left the marsh. Karen, my wife, was hosing the mud off him in front of the cottage.
I commented on the Red Sox T-shirt the older man was wearing, and he spoke of playing for the Eastham team in the old Cape Cod Baseball League in 1954. A North Truro resident, he batted .320 and hit 18 home runs, he said.
“Were my boyhood heroes, the Wilcox brothers, playing for Orleans then?” I asked, then started naming them: “Stan ‘the Man,’ Buzzie, and…”
My muddy new friend chimed in: “Barry.”
He told me about leaping in front of the fence in center field in Orleans to rob Stan of a home run. Stan was so angry he threw his bat into the crowd.
He pointed upriver about 30 yards. “I had a boat moored out there for years — the Apache,” he said.
“I remember it!” said I. “You’d give my father-in-law, Don McLaughlin, a striper sometimes, or a bluefish if that’s all you had. You’re Tom, right?”
I got Karen’s attention. “Karen, it’s Tom — the fisherman who used to have his boat out here!” Her face lit up.
Tom Holway and his friend Jack (we didn’t get his last name) are both from Eastham.
We reminisced and guffawed about the marsh “rescue.” A screen door banged, and Peggy Sovek, whose parents, Ernie and Bertie Gebelein, bought the Sladeville Cottages in the early 1960s, soon joined us.
“I played softball with your father up at Snow Field,” Tom said to Peggy. “And Don, too.”
“I played there with a Wellfleet team in 1974,” I added.
I thought Tom and Jack would be embarrassed by their folly, but if they were it didn’t show. Jack grinned in gratitude for our help, his eyes bright behind mud-splattered glasses.
Goodbyes were said, and the two men walked to their car along the sand road above the seawall. A few minutes later, we saw Tom walking across a sandbar looking for another place to anchor the bait trap.
The next day, Tom and Jack, along with Jack’s wife, Laura, parked outside our cottage. Tom, a spry 91, climbed out and showed us a framed photo of a handsome, muscular man holding what had to be a 36-inch striper.
“Your dad took this of me,” he said to Karen. Then he presented us with a large striped bass fillet.
Frank Gallant, a retired reporter and editor, grew up in Brewster and Orleans and now lives in Santa Cruz, Calif.
