CW137
From Distant Fastness (2026):
“The Earth Is In The Bath” The Earth is in the bath It’s swimming in the bath It bumps against a boat The tugboat in its path This life is filled with laughter This life is filled with pain And when it gets too cold Unplug the drain Portsmouth Harbor choppy Choppy in the gloom The Disney prison there Where Nicholson must take you This life is filled with prison They’re making so much more And when it’s not enough They start a war The Earth is in the bath It’s bouncing on a wave that’s very bad It’s riding round a whirlpool Its residents are raving mad This life is filled with laughter This life is filled with pain And when it gets too hot We’ll go even more insane The Earth is in the bath
“Portsmouth Harbor choppy / Choppy in the gloom / The Disney prison there / Where Nicholson must take you”:
I grew up near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and I lived in Portsmouth proper in my early 30s.
I don’t have a good mental picture for how that whole area is puzzled together—I never do for anywhere—but I can tell you it’s by the Atlantic Ocean and lots of fingers of salt water go in there to other towns and stuff. You can be at a beach at the actual ocean, but you can also be on a bridge driving across water—far below, right up by the road—all sorts of different ways. I’m not sure if all of that water is tidal, but some of it is.
It’s really beautiful. The air is salty. In the hot summer the whole temperature drops as you get closer to the ocean. Great birds unfold themselves from reeds and soar against the sunset.
But I also grew up taking it all for granted, and I lack (obviously) even a basic vocabulary to really describe it. I could use the internet to make myself sound less like an idiot, but this is more honest.
If you’re driving around the Portsmouth area, which I used to do a lot, you’re crossing into Rye and New Castle—New Castle, at least, I think is an actual island. On these types of drives suddenly the old Portsmouth Naval Prison will loom into view. It’s freaky. It might be on another island.
It was closed by the time I was around, but I don’t know exactly when. (Why don’t I just look it up? Because: I’m nostalgic for the world I grew up in where you would just hear stuff and remember it and wouldn’t even consider going to the trouble to look it up somehow. Were we dumber then, or are we dumber now with the internet? I don’t know. But I do know the lines I’m annotating here were written from the old place, just from the stories still inside me from before all this.)
It was a Navy prison, but it was run, famously without mercy, by Marines.
It looked like a castle sort of, and bore some resemblance to the Disney castle, the castle in the logo or whatever. The castle with fireworks exploding around it before a movie. The castle they actually built (more than once?) at the Disney places I’ve never been to.
In fact, a story circulated that Walt Disney had actually based the Disney castle on the prison. There was some biographical reason I can’t remember that Walt would have seen the prison and that maybe that could have been true. Was it: he was in the Navy and was briefly imprisoned there for some minor infraction? I’m probably making that up, but something like that.
But whatever the local legend was, whatever the supposed way Walt saw the prison and based his castle on it—imagine him approaching it by ship, wearing those Navy clothes out on the deck by the rail, and sketching its details in pencil into a little old-fashioned notebook, even penciling fireworks into the sky around it—we also knew it wasn’t true. Something about the story was false or impossible. It was a fantasy. But when you saw the prison, you could see it.
(I associate the abandoned prison with the abandoned old hotel—cue The Shining music—the Wentworth by the Sea. As teenagers we’d drive up to it at night. Enormous, broken windows, waves lashing rocks in the background. (I’m pretty sure that was New Castle.) They rebuilt it later (I think) after many years of neglect.)
Sometime in my late 20s a friend recommended the 70s Jack Nicholson movie The Last Detail. In that movie, Jack and this other guy are in the Navy and have to transport this young kid in his late teens, also in the Navy, to… the Portsmouth Naval Prison. The kid was a kleptomaniac and had stolen from the wrong person—the wife of a high-up I think (lots about class in this movie)—and was being punished especially harshly, like a ten-year sentence or something.
Jack and this other guy have to take the kid in handcuffs (at first), all of them in uniform, on trains and buses all the way across the country to Portsmouth. (The actual Portsmouth Naval Prison—a permission thing?—does not appear in the movie.)
They feel bad for the kid and, in various ways, initiate him into their adult world before he has to be imprisoned in this place I grew up near.
There’s a lot going on in that movie. I’ve seen it a handful of times, and I’ll see it again.
(When they’re in a city, New York I think, the kid wanders up to a room of people chanting and learns the Nam Myoho Renge Kyo chant. The depiction of the hippies—and their clash with the working-class Navy guys—is pretty dark, and the chant, which the kid clings to as his fate approaches (along bleak, snowy highways north of Boston), feels empty, like a promise people of privilege made to him that cannot be kept. Yet this is the chant I use as my meditation mantra now, since 2022. The negative The Last Detail association has long burned off. (I think of Wayne Shorter instead, if anything.))
I’m reading Aidan Levy’s 2022 (also) Sonny Rollins biography (RIP Sonny 💕). Sonny’s father was in the Navy. When Sonny was a young teenager, some awful, totally racist stuff happened and they sent his dad to… the Portsmouth Naval Prison. I already had this post planned when I read that the other night. It sent a chill through me. Like the empty sockets of that Disney prison suddenly jutting up at a weird angle across brackish water, pink in the sky and gold last light flashing off the wavelets.