{"id":64404,"date":"2024-06-14T02:08:38","date_gmt":"2024-06-14T02:08:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/?p=64404"},"modified":"2024-06-14T11:15:58","modified_gmt":"2024-06-14T11:15:58","slug":"return-to-the-boat-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2024\/06\/14\/return-to-the-boat-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Return to the Boat House"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week on ‘Picture Postals’, two new pictures of the boat house<\/a> on the Seekonk. This was near to Lovecraft’s then home (from his roof “One can see the glint of the Seekonk through the foliage of Blackstone Park”) in Providence. The boat house is the most likely point at which the young teenage Lovecraft would have hired a rowing-boat for an afternoon. Yes, Lovecraft in a boat! He would at times land on the river’s Twin Islands, which are not on all maps but are on some. <\/p>\n

I used to row considerably on the Seekonk … Often I would land on one or both of the Twin Islands \u2014 for islands (associated with remote secrets, pirate treasure, and all that) always fascinated me.” \u2014 Lovecraft in a letter to Rimel, April 1934.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This newly found-on-eBay view shows the Boat Club side-on, and is a view of it I’ve not seen before. Regrettably I can’t get the picture at a larger size.<\/p>\n

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And here is a very tiny view from the year of Lovecraft’s death, in which we see the jetty from the water as if Lovecraft were rowing away from it.<\/p>\n

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Compare with the first appearance of “Dagon” with a similar rowing-boat…<\/p>\n

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It is possible sails were provided with the rowing-boats in Lovecraft’s time, as the Seekonk could be a dangerous river. <\/p>\n

Another newly-found image of the boat house is this engraving, possibly done ‘on the spot’ by the look of it, showing the approach to the building along the Blackstone Park shoreline road in winter. The artist is Robert H. Nisbet, who taught at RISD in Providence.<\/p>\n

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And here we see the same approach in winter with photographic detail, which being somewhat elevated shows the tidal nature of the river. <\/p>\n

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The Seekonk’s occasional flood-surge was liable to spill over the road, as seen here, and Lovecraft tells us the water was still “salty” that close to the sea. Indeed at one point in the letters he states that the Seekonk was really a bay or inlet, rather than a river at that point. He had nightmares about the draining of the Seekonk here (“the river-bed was fully exposed \u2014 only the deep channel filled with water like a serpentine stream of death flowing through a pestilential plain in Tartarus”).<\/p>\n

Just a little on and around the corner was and still is York Pond, where in summer Lovecraft liked to sit and write on the wooded bluff above the pond.<\/p>\n

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This week on ‘Picture Postals’, two new pictures of the boat house on the Seekonk. This was near to Lovecraft’s …<\/p>\n

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