Haespring

 On the wayward road out to the point there is a broad bridge that crosses the estuary.  A giant bird stands on a weather-worn wooden beam staring out across the mud and the muck.  Breathe in.  The ocean air has a complex scent. Intricate. 

Wind

As kids, or, shall I say, young adults, a six hour drive may once have been an impromptu affair, my sister once drove for three days straight to see a boy across the country, but we're nearing forty now so it takes preparation. We pack apple slices and make a big deal about potty breaks.  We easily tire of the tinny radio and our glaring devices.  We play that road trip game where you have to sing songs with lyrics in the second person as if the singer had intended to address themself in the mirror:  “Can't take my Eyes off of You”  “You make me feel like a natural woman” “If I ain't Got You”

The road to the point is curious because it's just desert in the absolute most primitive sense. A jornada. A lost road.  There are no other cars, until one appears right next to you instantly and overtakes you going 100 miles per hour and vanishes into the shimmering sands, but we don't measure velocity in these units here, the signs are all in KM.  So that's what those little lesser numbers are for on the speedometer.  The road veers into the sand for miles and then some hills arrive and one suspects that one has veered far from the map, away from the sea entirely, but suddenly there it is, a great blue ocean, rising in a high arc somehow tremulous above the land, above the horizon, if that's even possible.  

We stayed at a cousin's house there, a second mortgage affair of theirs. Having planned the route meticulously knowing we wouldn't have wifi or sat-nav out of the country, we turned confidently left off the main road, took two turns and were immediately lost.  Luckily some of us retained from scouts a good sense of cardinal direction and waypoints. The development had grown organically between the city and the estuary, which had been cordoned from development by a preserve.  Within the expatriate housing some semblances of organic organization was devised and we were there by sundown.

Expecting a flimsy box we were immediately impressed with the sturdy dignity of the place. We marveled at polished wood and stone staircase, the hand-hewn old growth rafters, her generously stocked pantry, the oven-mitts in the drawer.  The whole house was filled with the kind of cozy familiar appurtenances of home that caused one to puzzle at our cursory relations to our own everyday things. The cousin's only request was that we water the plants and make time during out stay to go to the contemporary art museum, if we could.

The first night we cooked veggie burgers on the grill and felt like it was the fourth of July, serving Mexican corn on the cob on the two white wooden tables in the garden. It got cool quickly in the sea breeze – but the sky was a breathtakingly impossibly beautiful lingering slideshow so we sat and bundled and took lots of pictures and felt peaceful, both young and old feeling both older and younger, respectively and simultaneously, and some of us had more to drink than we needed, talking and laughing. 

Sand

Some towering tongue-tied truth has been sedulously gripping me like a secret to the heart these past few weeks or months, more or less.  I can just barely intuit what it is when I'm dreaming but in this big buxom bed I couldn't sleep.  The tequila has served to help alleviate some of the worser worry.  But repressing thoughts throughout the late winter months had begun disrupting my other refuge, work, and with the anomie of anxiety facing down on me I decided that I should quiet the noise in my mind and write some things down.  So I got up to journal.

My secrets used to be buried just beneath boundaries of ego, always on the brink of bursting and tied up beneath too many knots to escape, but lately they seem to reside elsewhere and make themselves known in mysterious ways, and at least with writing I can still exert some semblance of control over their release.  It's a task I like best early in the morning.  There's fewer chances of being observed, no one pausing to wonder why your breathing changes when you get into a good flow of words and ride it.  No one piecing together the puzzle that is your eyes flashing with recognition of some exciting emotional whatever.

As whispers of the coming sunrise made their glistening kisses upon the shrubbery outside the cousin's study window we all woke up.  For the first morning we cooked pancakes and eggs with bacon and freshly squeezed orange juice. Cooking on a strange stove is anxiety-inducing, because one does not know where to put one's hands and every little mess becomes a problem that needs to be solved right away.  Once the kids had eaten it was as if a veil was lifted from their eyes and the sea became visible and they bolted out the door in various states of undress racing to see who could put a toe into the ocean to first test it's temperature before any of the others.  We stayed where we were and had coffee and wiped the counters and reminisced in the way that is acceptable, looking forwards as an excuse for looking back.

“Remember when we went to that restaurant?”

“I must have erased it”

“I remember.  I wore that green dress.  Remember that green dress?”

“How could I forget?”

“We should go to that restaurant tomorrow.”

We left to join the others by locking up, a needless extravagance on a semi-private beach, and removing our rubber sandals to caress our toes in the warm mid-morning sands of the path between the dunes, then lumbering down to where the breakers were churning out one after another and the sounds of familiar of beach play could be heard over the wind and the waves once again.  

What does contentment mean, anyway?  It comes from the Latin, doesn't it?  To hold it all together.

On the second day we hired a charter out to see whales.  This required everyone wake up very very early and schlump into the car.  Just past the point there is a large harbor and soon we were aboard the ship, a big 90 footer with two large pontoons beneath us and a swaying man with an eye patch and a sleeveless Def Leppard shirt under his neon orange windbreaker topping off our watered-down drinks in bright brisk the morning air and announcing a sighting, they rose as if from a dream, lumberous and snoring. 

“How deep are we?”  

“Ninety-three feet”

Harbor

In the town there are shops with chinese trinkets and superglued-shell picture frames, magnets and hats, discount cigars and shot glasses.  I found a bookshop with a book about books, and was looking at pictures of celebrities bookshelves when they sent a kid to find me who said “come eat.” I enjoy looking at other people's bookshelves because they can be as revealing as maps, or those roadsigns like the kind on MASH, 1500 miles to San Francisco, 750 miles to Tokyo, only the directions are all intellectual.

In the town there is cheap food and drink. At 1:30 in the afternoon I found my friends seated at the bar wearing wet rubbery grins and that kind of smug anticipation that comes from putting twenty bucks worth of songs on the jukebox.  Around them were mountains of plates, bowls, half-eaten, and many glasses and bottles.  Their laughter was toxic and leaden.  When the right song came on they danced and she grabbed me.  One could open oneself to the promise of this encounter but it wasn't right.  She was like dancing with a sack of grain. Underwater.  She backed me into a corner as if it wasn't broad daylight and suggested we do things that are best described without talking about.  I suggested, that maybe I'd better double back and take another look at those sandals I liked one more time.  There was a mist of rum about her as she floated off.  

I herded the kids together and took them back to our pad for the rest of the day.  You see, it's lent, so I've been sober.  But if you squint hard enough and you can feel the Saturday tequila bleeding from the cab that brought the rest of the party back into the astringent arms of a lily white dawn. A big sterile moon still up in the sky, probably humming a little song to herself.  I left them on the couch to wake as they were ready. 

Water

A note was left announcing that I could be found in town and would be back shortly.  What I didn't say was that I would be going to church.  It's nearing Easter, I feel the pull.   There's a cathedral in the town by the boardwalk, a heap of heavy straight stones that inside was impervious to weather.  The narthex was dark and smelling of incense and disinfectant, but there was an old old woman just inside the door, her face flickering in candlelight, illuminated in prayer.  But prayers in a different language.  This may not matter to God, but to a monoglot like it's it's incantory and strange, familiar enough if only by it's shape within the contours of the Mass.  Mass is Mass, and I still retain a muslce memory of the motions necessary to participate in the process.  I dipped a finger in the font there at the door, and contemplated the notion of  holy water as I slipped silently into a seat in the very back in time to hear the sermon.  Listening to it was like looking at yourself in a photograph from your youth and remembering who took the picture and what they were wearing.  The man three pews forward had his greased hair clasped back with pins.  A little girl and her sister, or mother, wore cobalt blue that reminded me of a tablecloth.  The saints on the walls and pillars looked past us, as if we were hummingbirds wings to them, and I had the sensation of seeing the congregants and myself all as if in a scene from a movie, as extras, the main action elsewhere.  In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.  Outside the sun flared trumpets of heat and light to remind us that it was at 11AM, and the seagulls sang contrapuntals with the church bells, and the sidewalk was decorated with a row of seated ragwearers with outstretched hands, patiently and faithfully entrusting us to have deeply embraced the notion of Christian charity.

Shells

One thing I do is stride ponderously up and down the beach looking for sea-shells.  The last morning this was what I rose before dawn to do.  It is not a rational activity, but I do it whenever I am staying by a beach, just as when I am in the mountains I go out of my way in a dedicated search for small coloured stones to line the pocket.  On the beach, one keeps a keen eye out for a kind of stunning pearlescence, which is often pointless because frequently those “rare” shiny finds lose all their lustre later when they dry out.  Still, I trod on,eyes peeled, indulging in a habitual quest, mayhaps a rite of passage.  

Habits are like flies.

I heard a sound on the beach and jumped, it was just an outboard motor heading out.  A few minutes later another, then another still. FIshing time.

I remember the old religion in moments such as this, feeling a presence, hearing a sound on the beach and I remember the old mystic truth, that an inner voice is merely one in a loud cacophany of spirits inhabiting everywhere, and sometimes places out far away you can hear the others the best.  Lonely spirits.  Howling djinns. We tell ourselves that modernity has distanced us from them but really we're not that far away.  Turn off your wifi, your bluetooth, your notifications.  Sleep out under the stars and you'll feel fragile fingers of light from each distant star touch you faintly through the unfathomable reaches to say hi, hey, to tell you their sadness and their truth.

Walking out along the delta of the estuary at receding tide one marvels at the wet blue earth.  I always find myself wondering how far out it will go before it stops, just as, hours later, I find myself wondering how high the tide this time will climb.  The earth breaths it's restless exhalations, then drinks in again and drowns.  Tiny rivulets no bigger than a toenail, tiny mud volcanos the size of a pinky.  I see the cascading patterns in the sand, up and down, up and down, and think of those broad mountain ranges in Nevada with valleys in between, the same thing as this but on a geologic timescale.  The shells are curious remainders, their colours undoubtedly imbued from whatever chemical was most at hand while being calcified.  In a way, you could say that they are nothing more than fishy smelling colorful little pieces of shit, and you wouldn't be all wrong.  The land the sea don't seem to be equal partners in a dance at the beach.  The sea is winning, it always does. Little ragged weeds and blotchy corpses cling to the rocks for a while until they are eventually reclaimed, back into the earth's bloodstream, a pulse of waves.

Back in time for breakfast, coffee, with no one specifically waiting for me but everyone happy to see me.  Our big blended vacation family.  I lay my treasures on the table and the kids marvel at them and then soon forget, distracted by shiner objects still.

Tide

Heading home, in the rearview mirror, our teeth all look whiter and brighter, but its just our suntanned skins providing added contrast.  The giant bird is still there on his beam.  Watching, waiting. I wave. We'll all be back at work on Monday and they won't have even noticed we've been gone.