You Are neither Here nor There

Seamus Heaney's "Postscript" and the Drive to Virginia's Eastern Shore

Who dares read Heaney aloud, especially in an American accent? “Postscript” in his voice:¹

“Postscript” by Seamus Heaney

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

When you drive from Central Virginia to the Eastern Shore, you travel East, East, East, the foothills steadily lowering and then leveling out to relatively flat peanut country. The low, lush, emerald-green leaves of tobacco plants wave in densely packed rows as you pass by. The waterways appear, cutting narrow paths along the sides of the road, and then the first major inlet that you cross on a bridge that you think, for the moment, is quite long and high.

But you are not there yet: more low, flat fields; the culverts along the way and the brackish shift in the air are the only hints you are not in the midlands anymore. Then another inlet, bigger with large boats and industrial buildings chugging smoke and you sense in your bones that you have almost arrived, are almost at the shore—but the inland slow-down of Virginia Beach’s clogged roads puts a pause on your excitement.

You stop for gas. You follow a pack of cars moving in the same direction slowly, and then you are on the cusp of another bridge, and there it is: the bay, stretching as far as the eye can see. From this vantage, you are actually looking beyond the southernmost tip of the Eastern Shore: your eyes are lighting on the Atlantic Ocean.

The thought gives you shivers. The enormous rolling waves give you shivers. The pelicans diving from high above your vehicle to snatch fish in a flash far down below give you shivers. You are unaware of grinning. “You are neither here nor there,” Seamus Heaney says. You are “a hurry through which known and strange things pass.”

You know you are there when the bridge-tunnel you have been traversing for eighteen miles (closing your eyes during the two tunnel segments and imagining anything other than the mass of water roiling above you) pitches up to a sudden, high rise of bridge, curving into the sky, and then descends toward untouched sand and sand-borne shrub, becoming the road that crosses Fisherman Island. You inhale the uninhabited island’s air through the open car window and make sure your eyes don’t miss a thing. You wish you could set foot on the sinking, boggy ground or skate the surface of the island’s sky-refracted waterways, while at the same time affirming that this nature place isn’t for people.

Now you have crossed to the southernmost tip of the peninsula, and Route 13 takes you straight past the rest stop and the welcome center, the wildlife refuge museum and the rundown antique store and several low-slung hotels until the traffic light at the area’s one grocery store points its paradoxical way inland toward the water, to the inside edge of land and bay.

I love, as I’ve said before, high and close hills, the sheer crags of cut black granite that the roads run through in any mountain town. What is it, then, about the marshlands? The swamp, the creeks, the lowland inlets between the Atlantic Ocean and the solid peninsular ground, the shrubby, mired islands where only long-legged birds can stand, where the rockfish and flounder make their home and the cownose rays swim in schools, the oystercatcher and the great blue heron and the zen-balanced white ibis and the inch-long fiddler crabs scurrying to escape them, the marsh periwinkles² that cling to wavering stalks of grass as though their constantly perilous home-grabbing effort is no big deal, none at all in the wide, unpredictable world.

This place is no place, and it is the very place I want to be all year long. I return again.

Unsplash: Joshua J. Cotten

Other Eastern Shore Posts:

Certain Tides originally published with The Equals Record (2013) and The Curator (2014)

Washed Clean the final chapter of my essay-style memoir, At Home with Books (2025)

Shrimp in My Toes, Terns in My Hair a post from three weeks ago about liminal spaces

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1. This is another lovely reading, companioned by video of the Flaggy Shore, County Clare:

2. I talked about marsh periwinkles in this 2014 essay. I would love to rewrite this piece to say that Mary Oliver—per herself—did not have a terrible childhood, full as it was with nature and aloneness and self-revelation. Also, I’d handle the word “sin” differently, or not at all; I don’t think the same about it as I used to. Also, I’d like to write an analysis of how a bunch of my old essays are actually about living neurodivergent while not knowing it: An Astonishing Work — Art House America