Beachcombing at Miramar Read online

  Copyright

  Grateful acknowledgment is given to quote from the following:

  “Why Do I Love You,” written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II.

  Copyright © 1927 PolyGram International Publishing, Inc. Copyright Renewed. Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved.

  “This Dim and Ptolemaic Man,” from Selected Poems of John Peale Bishop by John Peale Bishop. Copyright © 1941 John Peale Bishop; copyright renewed © 1969 Margaret G. H. Bronson. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

  BEACHCOMBING AT MIRAMAR. Copyright © 1996 by Richard Bode. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2389-0

  A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1996 by Warner Books.

  First eBook Edition: May 2001

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  for julian bach

  who believed in me before I believed in myself

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter one: the child sees

  Chapter two: dollars in the sand

  Chapter three: a lonely stretch of beach

  Chapter four: the real world

  Chapter five: girl with a crab

  Chapter six: tug - of - war

  Chapter seven: stone with a hole in the center

  Chapter eight: the motions of the world

  Chapter nine: the raven and the radar

  Chapter ten: the stone skimmers

  Chapter eleven: the surf caster

  Chapter twelve: written in the sand

  Chapter thirteen: by - the - wind sailor

  Chapter fourteen: the sphinx of the seashore

  Chapter fifteen: woman fishing from a pier

  Chapter sixteen: the beachcomber of miramar

  Chapter seventeen: ebb tide

  It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.

  —HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  one

  the child sees

  I’ve been walking the sands of Miramar for a full year now, and during that time I’ve met many people who say they would like to become a beachcomber like me. They view it as the easiest job in the world. They think all it takes is the proper garb: white canvas pants rolled up to the knees, faded blue denim shirt, and straw hat to protect their face from the sun. A few actually go to a fancy store and pay a fancy price for garments they believe will change them into the sort of person they think they would like to be.

  I see them strolling the shore for a month, a week, a few days, their heads down, plucking stones and shells from the sand. They pause to chat with me, pulling a seawashed treasure from a deep pocket, as if they had found an amulet they lost a long time ago. But in due course they disappear, having returned, I suppose, to that other occupation they had been so desperate to leave behind.

  They seem not to know, when they wander to the edge of the sea, that a beachcomber’s life is a demanding one that calls for discipline and zeal. One must venture down to the beach every day without fail and splash ankle-deep in the white surf or walk barefoot on the hot sand. But it’s not the hiking; it’s the endless seeing that causes the psychic strain. It’s the richness of life in the tidal zone, the sea palm and bull kelp, the limpet shells and mole crabs. Someone not used to such abundance can grow weary quickly trying to gather it all in.

  In my wanderings on this stretch of beach, I’ve learned to pace myself so that I’m not overwhelmed. I don’t run, I don’t walk rapidly, I don’t attempt to raise my pulse rate; I’m not here to lose weight or exercise my lungs. I’m here to watch my shadow, sometimes short and sometimes long, depending on the position of the fleeting sun over my head.

  I’m not a collector, at least not in the conventional sense of the word. Like my forebears, I’m a huntergatherer, but not of objects, although I once brought back to my house above the dunes a worn Monterey pinecone and a smooth piece of driftwood on which someone had carved the words: “Life is but a dream.” I tacked the sculpted plaque to my front door where I confront those fateful words each time I come home.

  Nor am I a painter, although I wish I were, but I’m searching for those unexpected images that arise from nowhere to define the nature of my life and remind me who I am. My father was a painter, a real painter who worked in oils. When I was a boy, no more than six, he showed me how to draw human figures with ovals for head, torso, legs, and arms. But he died before the next lesson, and so I never progressed; I draw as a man exactly as I did as a boy.

  But the hunger lingers in me, so I must content myself with what I can do. Long ago I gave up the idea of putting pigment on canvas and began to paint the day itself, the air I breathe, which I discovered I could do. I can take the life that swirls about me, bend and distort it to give it perspective, place it in a mental frame and carry it with me wherever I go. I can’t say if it’s easier or harder than drawing on a sketch pad, but I have no choice; I’m driven to this place, this habitat, this beach at Miramar, as surely as if I were a tern or a gull.

  I have come to gather scenes—quiet scenes, turbulent scenes—that remain etched forever in my memory. In my own small way I am waiting for what I love, waiting for love itself, watching carefully, awake to every possibility, for I have no idea what will appear when I least expect it.

  Here, at my feet, foam from the surf collects with the seaweed and blows across the beach in the gentle breeze like a serpent’s beard. I gather the fluff in the cup of my hand and gaze into a globule of air, reflecting a world within a world. I burst the bubble with my finger, and the world I saw a moment ago explodes. But I behold it still in my mind’s eye, a vivid image of what once was, and so it’s as real to me now as it was before.

  Where the dunes part, a couple emerges, pushing a three-wheeled buggy that holds a child. They pause in the middle of the beach to do their warm-ups, bending knees, stretching hamstrings. When ready, they push the buggy onto the wet, compacted sand and jog toward me. Heads down, eyes forward, they gain speed. They are serious runners; glancing neither to left nor right, they run in unison: left leg, right leg, left leg, right. A raven rises over the dunes; a sea lion surfaces in the breakers. They are unaware. But the child in the buggy swings his head back and forth from land to sea, from sea to land. The child sees.

  two

  dollars in the sand

  There are two ways to beachcomb, and both appeal to me. One is to scan the horizon, gazing over the breakers or down the misty shore until indistinct shapes reveal themselves for what they are. The other is to stroll head down, searching for treasures buried in the sun-bleached sand. I never know which impulse—to scan or to search—will sway me until I wander down to the edge of the sea.

  This morning I find myself in a searching mood, so I amble aimlessly, tending southward, gazing intently at the circle of sand about my feet. I’m not sure how decisions as subtle as these are made, or if they’re made at all. Like a migrating bird, I move by instinct, my behavior governed by forces beyond myself: the brightness of the sun, the angle of the wind, the running of the tide. The elements mix their magic in my mind and my legs respond.

  The outgoing tide has exposed a broad swath of wet sand. The sanderl
ings are here, feeding on the flats, their needle bills probing for tiny mollusks and burrowing worms. Their legs are barely as long as my longest finger, yet they strut at twice my speed. Were I to move at their pace, I would be miles down the shore by now.

  The roaring breakers chase them up the beach; they chase the retreating surf down the beach. I marvel at how precisely attuned they are to play their tireless game of tag with the surging sea. They seem to know intuitively how fast a wave will wash across the sand. They run just rapidly enough to keep ahead of the foaming water as it rushes in—and follow it as it rolls back out.

  I feel a kinship with these birds, as if we are bound by a common purpose, despite the outward differences in the way we behave. Their pace appears so frantic; mine so leisurely.They’re probing for food; I’m searching for the bounty washed in by the waves. Who is to say that my quest is less crucial than theirs, or theirs more vital than mine?

  When I arrived at Miramar, I wasn’t nearly as rich as I am today. All I had was my van, my clothes, my typewriter, my record player, my unabridged dictionary, and a few favorite books. After years of accumulation, I had an irresistible urge to simplify, to pare my possessions down to bare essentials, to tread as lightly, as freely as possible over the face of the land.

  I also had a check, which, if converted to cash, might have filled a shoe box with twenty-dollar bills. That was a residue, my fractional share of the substantial store of assets I had divided with my wife of thirty years under the terms of our divorce. I had earned the money, but I didn’t need it. She hadn’t earned the money, but she did need it. From those contrary stances, approaches to life as much as bargaining positions, we forged an agreement. She acquired financial security; I purchased my freedom, which was more precious to me than breath itself.

  My friends and counselors were dismayed. “Don’t be so hasty!” they said. “The day will come when you’ll wish you had the money you gave to her.”

  They meant well, as friends so often do, but I felt then, and I’m certain now, that their advice was founded on the mistaken assumption that money is a solid, which, once relinquished, can never be regained. But money isn’t a solid; it’s a fluid, like water. The cupful I spill over one side of the ship, I scoop up again on the other side.

  I left my marriage exactly as I entered it three decades earlier. I had no mortgage, no credit-card balances, no bank loans. What I did have, somewhere in the middle of my mind, was a gyroscope, pointing me in a direction, telling me where I had to go. I set out, driving through snow-covered cornfields and prairie, crossing the Continental Divide, going from one coast to the other in quest of a place that felt like home.

  And now I am here, walking the beach, watching the fist-sized shorebirds as they feed. They have no cache, no hoard, no store; like me, they live by their wits, taking what they want from the sea.

  How is it, I ask myself, that I have so little money, yet I live so well?

  I know the answer even before the question has filtered through my brain. It lies, in part, in what I have shed, the material encumbrances of life that once weighed me down, and, in part, in the useful objects I discover—the bric-a-brac, the artifacts, the relics, the castaway bits and pieces of civilization—as I comb the sand. A glass bottle with a narrow neck serves as a vase, and a stiff canvas sail—a remnant from a schooner dashed against the offshore rocks—makes an awing over my sunbaked deck.

  What mystifies me most is the way the sea anticipates my needs. Once I stumbled upon a teak chest that some wealthy yachtsman probably ripped from his cabin and tossed overboard as he sailed by. I don’t believe he intended it for me, but the sea, in its infinite wisdom, knew my stereo was sitting on the floor. I dragged it to my beach house, washed it off, dried it out, and now it anchors a corner of my living room. My turntable rests on top, my records on the sturdy shelves below, and every morning at breakfast I have a concerto with my scrambled eggs.

  A vast kelp bed lies a hundred yards off the beach; the sea grass breaks loose and collects in clumps along the shore. Sand fleas hop about the tangled mass, which I skirt for fear these scavengers will leap into my rolled-up pants and feast on me. I veer closer to the water’s edge; the surf splashes over my legs as high as my thighs, and as it draws away, I see a chalk white disk in the sand.

  It’s a sand dollar. I lay it flat in my palm and study its distinctive engraving: five petals, which remind me that this isn’t a living creature, but a skeleton. The petals are fossil imprints of its breathing tubes. But the flower is so exquisitely etched on its convex surface that it might be the lithotint of a master artist, a symphony on stone.

  I uncover a second and third, gleaming in the sand, each smaller than the one before. In descending order, they seem to me like a fifty-cent piece and a quarter—although my local bank places no value on them in its current rate of exchange. I spread all three across my open hand and study them one at a time. On the smallest I detect traces of lavender-gray spines that flowed in the ocean current like a field of grass in the wind when it was still alive.

  My toes are numb from the cold water, so I move up the beach to dry them in the warm sand. The upper shore is littered with beach drift and tide wrack, splintered logs washed down from the redwood forests, broken stalks of seaweed and the brittle, whitened bones of birds. I pause to inspect a piece of cork, and as I do, I see four soaked dollar bills lying by my feet. There’s no doubt about their denomination, for I can plainly make out the dour face of George Washington staring up at me. I pick them up, rub them between my fingers, hold them up to the noonday sun. In the upper-left-hand corner I read the words: THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE.

  I look up and down the beach, deserted both ways. Maybe the money belongs to a surfer, but there’s no sign of a human head bobbing in the waves. I have a choice. I can leave the bills on the beach, knowing the tide will claim them before their rightful owner passes this way again, or I can pocket them—and that’s what I decide to do. I have the feeling these saturated notes are no different from the bottle, the canvas sail, the teak chest, or any of the other gifts that drift in from the sea.

  I climb the sloping beach and flop back against a dune. I close my eyes and try to decipher the coincidence of these different kinds of dollars in such proximity along the shore. When I look for sand dollars, I discover real dollars; when I look for real dollars, I never find them, and I go by the sand dollars without ever knowing that they’re there. Suddenly I realize something about myself I didn’t know before. All my life I’ve been tending toward this common meeting ground of the sacred and the profane, the savage and the divine.

  I might have been a millionaire; I mean that literally. Ages ago, long before I came to Miramar, I was employed by a New York public-relations agency, which has since grown to one of the largest in the world. That firm had a highly seductive profit-sharing plan, one calculated to keep its workers from taking flight, and I was part of it.

  Each year the firm set aside a percentage of my salary in my name. If I remained in the plan for ten years, I would be fully vested; that is, all the monies set aside in my name would actually belong to me. If I quit the company after ten years, I would be comfortable. If I quit after twenty years, I would be rich. If I quit after thirty years, I would have gathered unto myself sufficient wealth to care for myself, my children, and my children’s children for generations to come.

  When I joined the firm, the financial vice president told me this was the way I could build an estate. He didn’t ask me if I wanted to build an estate. He assumed I did, and at that early juncture of my life I assumed I did, too. But the cubicle they assigned me had sealed windows and the duct over my laminated desk emitted fetid air. I had to sign in every morning and sign out every night.

  Every day promptly at noon I would leave the office and spend my lunch hour wandering the city streets, taking in the sights and sounds. Some days I would stroll through United Nations Plaza, lean against the railing above the
East River, and watch the boats cruise by. Other days I would stroll to Rockefeller Center, sit in a pew in St. Thomas Church, or visit the Central Park menagerie.

  After a while I began to stretch my one-hour jaunts to two. I would walk to the ferry slip at the Battery, or up Riverside Drive, near the Hudson, as far as the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial, or across town to the turmoil at Times Square. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was beachcombing on Forty-second Street, Columbus Circle, and the Avenue of the Americas, preparing myself for my true profession.

  My boss said nothing, for I was a good worker and I made up for these extended lunch hours in other ways. One year I won an award of one thousand dollars for the most creative project in the agency. But I derived no satisfaction from it because I saw no value in what I had done. The real dollars were present, but the sand dollars were absent, and, to me, the one without the other was like a wedding without a bride.

  I left after six years, forsaking the money in the profit-sharing trust. Some of the people I worked with a quarter of a century ago are there still. That is one of life’s mysteries. Why is it that some will stay and some will go? I bumped into one of my former colleagues in a SoHo bistro shortly before I left for Miramar, and he remembered my departure very well.

  “I always saw that as an act of tremendous courage,” he said.

  I believe he meant it, too. But he was wrong, although I didn’t tell him so. I can no more say I acted with courage when I quit that job than I can say a man who is suffocating acts with courage when he tries to breathe.

  I didn’t go directly to Miramar. I had other places to go, other lives to lead. I had mortgage payments to meet and a wife and four lively children to feed. I became a self-employed freelance writer, producing articles for magazines and speeches for corporate executives. I wasn’t paid by the hours I put in, but by the work I produced. When a paycheck came in the mail, I knew exactly what it was for. I could hold the manuscript in my hand; I could read my words on the printed page.