Episode 55 | Niantic & Mystic, Connecticut
The sunrise was not epic. I want to be upfront about that. The clouds the night before had been doing something genuinely promising, and by morning they had rearranged themselves into something considerably less dramatic. I was out on the boardwalk anyway, microphone forgotten back in the room, wind hitting the recorder, talking to myself about the creative process before coffee.
It was that kind of morning.
The Struggle, Briefly
I’ve been wrestling with something as this season starts, and since I was apparently going to talk about it on the boardwalk at 6 a.m. regardless, I might as well put it on the page.
Before this trip I had ChatGPT build me a full multi-page script for each stop. Shot lists, narration notes, the whole thing. Two days in Mystic, two days in Newport. I was excited about it. Printed them all out, brought them along, felt organized for the first time in recent memory. Then I read one the night before I arrived and thought: this is cold. It’s a good road map, but it doesn’t sound like me.
So here’s where I landed, somewhere between the dog walkers and the god beams coming through the clouds: I want to be up for every sunrise for the next two weeks. That’s the goal. Whatever happens after that, happens. The AI scripts can be a reference. I’m not sticking to them. I never stick to anything anyway. The authentic version of this trip is the one where I’m standing on a boardwalk in Connecticut before coffee, talking into a recorder with no microphone, trying to figure out what I’m doing.
That’s the show.
Mystic Seaport Museum
I arrived in Mystic to find the entire route to Steamboat Wharf solid red on the map. Traffic. I parked where I could and walked, which is probably the correct approach to Mystic regardless.
The Seaport Museum is one of those places that earns its reputation. It’s an outdoor living museum along the Mystic River, and the scale of it caught me off guard. I had an AI-generated image of it in my head from the planning phase, and the real thing was better. It usually is.
The centerpiece is the Charles W. Morgan, America’s last surviving wooden whaling ship. Just sitting there at the dock, black-hulled, enormous, carrying a hundred and fifty years of ocean in its planking. There was a talk happening inside one of the whaleboats about harpoons and the mechanics of the industry. I listened for a while.
What held me longer was the LA Dunton, a 1921 fishing schooner currently being rebuilt by a team of volunteers who’ve been at it for a couple of years. I spent about forty-five minutes talking to one of them and never once got the camera out. This is a recurring theme. Something about approaching someone with a camera feels different from just talking to them, and I’m still figuring out how to close that gap.
The work they’re doing on that boat is extraordinary. Rebuilding something that old, plank by plank, with the same methods the original builders used. My museum ticket was good for seven days. I’ll probably go back.
The Cottage
The room wasn’t ready when I arrived so I wandered until it was, then walked in to find a private patio with a direct view of the water. Rocks, boats, the sound of the harbor doing its thing. I put the camera down and photographed the room before I put anything in it, which I always do in a space worth documenting. Then I made tea and sat on the patio and watched a lobsterman pull traps about a hundred yards offshore.
They have binoculars on the table. Useful detail.
I had a list of things I was supposed to do: Mystic Pizza, the aquarium, the art museum, more B-roll of the downtown. I looked at the list and looked at the water and made a decision. I’m sixty years old. I’m not producing a TV show. I’m documenting a year of my life, and right now my life is this patio and this view and a cup of tea and a lobsterman in the distance.
That is documentation enough.
John Anderson and the Band Geeks
That evening I drove to New London, to a restored theater built in the 1920s called the Garde Arts Center, to see John Anderson, formerly of Yes, performing with a group called the Band Geeks.
My first concert ever was Yes. Pittsburgh, Civic Arena, 1977 or ’78. I was thirteen or fourteen. My friends Mark Wagner and Stephen Spithaler took me. I remember it was in the round, which felt impossibly sophisticated at the time, and I remember that John Anderson had the most extraordinary voice I’d ever heard live. I also remember that someone jumped on the stage and tried to strangle him for reasons that were never explained to my satisfaction, and that the situation was resolved quickly and the show went on.
Forty-six years later, in a small Connecticut theater, John Anderson is eighty years old and sounds exactly the same. The Band Geeks are studio-tight, the kind of musicians who’ve played everything so many times it looks effortless, and the new material is genuinely great. I was screaming. My voice was gone by the time I got back to the car.
Some things hold up. Not everything, but some things.
Rhode Island next.
