Billingsgate Shoal

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Call me Doc.

I'm Charles Adams, a doctor who lives with his wife, Mary, and two almost-grown sons in Concord, Massachusetts. I'm an oral surgeon, a cross between a doctor and a dentist, who performs tooth extractions and general and cosmetic surgery of the lower face and jaw.

My most interesting recent operation was quick, spontaneous, and without benefit of surgeon's tools or anesthetic. I cut a human head in two, right down the middle. Deliberately. The operation was a success because the patient died.

Listen: I didn't ask for any of it. If anyone had told me that all the pain and killing would begin with my sneaking a look at a stranded fishing boat I would have called them nuts. It sure looked innocent enough. It was just sitting out there on the sand flats. It looked like a Winslow Homer watercolor…

Two and a half miles directly offshore from our cottage in Eastham, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, lies Billingsgate Shoal. It appears on nautical charts in a color between that of either land or sea. This is because Billingsgate is a sunken island and is visible only briefly, in all its soggy splendor, twice a day at tide's farthest ebb.

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