Beachcombing at Miramar Page 3

  I feel my anger rising. It’s infuriating—this blind presumption of his that he knows what’s real and I don’t. I feel his presence—he is sitting across the table from me and I hear myself saying to his face what I failed to say on the phone.

  The real world, the real world, where is it, Leo, and what does it look like? Is it up in the mountain or down in the valley or across the sea? Is it urban or rural, a place of commerce or a place of art? Does it exist in the executive suite or on the factory floor? Will I find it under the rain-forest canopy or in a grocery store? Please tell me where I can find the real world, Leo, its longitude, its latitude, for I long to go there, settle there, make it my home.

  And what of this would-be speechmaker who knows exactly what he wants to say but lacks the words? What about him, Leo? Does he dwell in the real world or is he deluding himself ? If his world is real, how is it that he’s so speechless? He’s a speechless man eager to make a speech, but before he mounts the dais, puts on his glasses, and clears his throat, he must hire a ghost to supply his words.

  And who is that ghost, Leo? That ghost is me. I am the ghost who turns out words at a unit price—like so many parts rolling off an assembly line. I string those words together, and when I’m finished, the would-be speechmaker has my words, my thoughts, my sentiments, and so, whether he admits it or not, he has reduced himself to a ghost, too.

  In the real world, Leo, I would be giving the speech and he would be sitting in the audience, listening. Or he would have written his own speech and I would be sitting in the audience, listening. Or, if he had no words of his own, he would remain in his office, running his company, and I would remain in my beach house, sorting shells.

  But that’s not what happens, Leo. What happens is that speechwriter and speechmaker cross over into each other’s domain, they invade each other’s souls, and once they commit that trespass, they cease being themselves. They become apparitions, phantoms, mere shades of who they are.

  Where is the reality of that, Leo?

  The words pour like the waters of a swollen river racing downstream after a thaw. I lean back in my seat, considerably relieved, even though I have delivered an imaginary monologue to someone who isn’t there.

  Will Leo understand? Will he ever understand? I have to ask myself that question, but as soon as I ask it, I know the question is wrong. No, Leo will not understand. I could go on forever trying to explain how I feel, but he will not understand. I realize that now, and in the knowing, I find the tension melting away. The one question, the only question that matters, is whether I must go on asking the question.

  It’s not my mission in life, I tell myself, to make Leo understand.

  I pay my bill and wander into the sunlight, following a path between a steep rise of land and the sea. I pause beside a rocky ledge and glance over the waves. The tide is coming in and the swells are huge. I imagine them rising from canyon depths somewhere beyond the horizon and rolling endlessly, as they have been rolling for aeons, until they spend their pent-up energy crashing against the shore.

  The beach is isolated, but I’m not alone. A purple shore crab is here, skittering sideways, disappearing into a crevice, and the outcroppings are covered with limpets and barnacles. In the intertidal zone, imbedded in the mud, I see a congregation of sea anemones clustered together, forming a soggy mat. I touch one tentatively, tenderly, and it contracts its oval disk, flooding itself with water as it does. I kneel and dig around it with my hands, intending to lift it out, but it’s firmly rooted, and it keeps withdrawing, pulling away from my touch, growing smaller and sinking deeper in the sand.

  I am calm now, much calmer than before. I am under the influence of the sea and the abundant life that emerges from the sea, species evolving from species, each questing for its natural home.

  I think of my early ancestors following the moist edge of the glacier, learning to build fires, learning to sew, learning to cultivate the land. How is it that some became hunters, some gatherers, some fishers, some planters of seeds? Was this simple adaptation? Did some become farmers because the soil was there, or were they farmers from birth, searching for fertile soil to till? Did man shape the land, or did the land from which he sprang shape him? I suspect the latter is so, although I can offer no proof beyond what I sense in these reflective moments when I wander beside the sea.

  I feel as though I am an animal with a homing instinct, tending toward the one place on earth that is native to me. I have spent a lifetime moving toward a specific place—a place called Miramar. The journey has been long and arduous, but it is a journey that I had to undertake, for I know now that as long as I remained in a place that was wrong for me, I was not in the real world.

  I pass a salt pond where a marsh hawk dips and soars close to the cattails, searching for prey. A black phoebe flits from a bush and feeds on the wing, seizing invisible insects from the air. A snowy egret wades in the shoals, spearing fish, and a belted kingfisher hovers above the placid surface before he plunges and momentarily disappears. Far beyond the breakers a cormorant flies swiftly by, drawing a black thread across the sky.

  The birds live near one another; sometimes they mingle—like the quick-footed willets, plovers, and godwits probing the sand. But they never try to imitate or influence one another; each feeds, flies, and nests in its own distinctive way. And the wonder of it is that they all thrive.

  It occurs to me that perhaps the human race is like the birds—not a single species, but an order of species, each dwelling in its own habitat. Some of us nest in skyscrapers, some in farmhouses, some in igloos or grass huts, some in riverboats, and some in cottages beside the sea. I have my habitat and Leo has his, and the trouble between us occurs when one or the other of us forgets that we aren’t the same kind of bird.

  Farther up the beach, I see a woman and a boy hanging on to a dog by its collar. As I get closer, I can see it’s a black Labrador. Below them a man is standing knee-deep in the water, frantically waving his arms at the surf. He’s shouting, “Here doggy, doggy! Here doggy, doggy! Come here!”

  He turns, pointing into the surf, and bellows at a man standing high on the dunes, “Is that your dog?”

  The man doesn’t respond.

  As I approach, he turns to me.

  “Is that your dog?” he yells.

  A sleek black head bobs up in the breakers, looks at us, and disappears below the surface again.

  “If we don’t get him out of there,” the man shouts, “he’s going to drown!”

  “That’s not a dog,” I say.

  The man stares at me.

  “Of course it’s a dog.”

  “No,” I say, “it’s a sea lion. And you can call him all you want to, but he’s not coming ashore.”

  five

  girl with a crab

  I sleep long and late, and when I awake, the sun is halfway up the sky. I step onto my deck and stretch, and as I do, I feel the ease of my life sifting through my bones. The ocean is calm today, as calm as the Pacific can be. There is only a faint offshore breeze, as if sea and land have entered into a temporary truce.

  I take to the water’s edge, intending to walk, but my body has a will of its own and it wants to run. After a mile I feel beads of sweat collecting on my brow. I want to stop, but my body won’t let me—it revels in its surging freedom, and it wants to keep on going toward that ever-receding point where the sea merges with the shore. My legs tire before my breath gives out. When I reach a public beach, I slow down.

  The children are there, playing in the sand, splashing in the water, immune to the cold. I stop to watch them, amused by the abandon that comes to them so naturally. Suddenly a small girl bolts from her playmates and races up to me, chattering away.

  She is no more than six or seven, and she is carrying a pail filled with seawater. She holds it up so I can see inside. She is exuberant as only a child can be, and she can barely contain herself as she tells her tale to me, a stranger on the beach.

  “I found
a crab,” she says, “and the crab is mine. He’ll always be my crab until he dies. When he dies, I’ll find another crab, and he’ll be mine, too, until he dies.”

  I kneel on the sand beside her and watch the crab as he tries to claw his way out of the pail.

  “He’s beautiful,” I say. “But maybe he misses his home on the ocean floor.”

  “Oh no,” she says, “he belongs to me! He’s my crab and he’ll always be my crab!”

  She grabs the pail and races down the beach. I watch her. She sets the pail on the sand and joins her friends, who are dashing in and out of the surf.

  I continue on my way, walking slowly. After a while I settle on the sand, leaning against a log that has washed in from the sea. I began my jaunt in a joyful mood, but now a disquieting memory, long repressed, rises from my childhood.

  I remember playing on a sandy beach when I was a boy, no older than the girl with the crab. I was with my parents and a few of their friends when suddenly one of the men decided to hold me down on my back. He kept me in that position easily, with one hand placed firmly on my chest while I tried in vain to wriggle away. I remember he was laughing, and so were the other adults, as if it were funny, and it wasn’t until I burst out in tears, screaming, that he finally let me up. Now, a half century later, I still recall the incident and the way that man restrained me, as if he had a perfect right.

  On another occasion, I remember my parents putting me in the backseat of the family car, saying we were going to my grandparents’ house. I believed them, for we had made that trip together many times. On the way they stopped in front of a gray building and led me inside, where I was summarily snatched away by a nurse and stuck in a crib with high bars. I had no warning, no idea why I was there, and I stood in the crib, kicking and crying, desperate to escape. Eventually an orderly came, strapped me on a gurney, and wheeled me to an operating room to have my tonsils removed.

  I have never quite forgiven my mother or my father for that deception, even though both are long dead. They made a decision to take the easy way out, the way that was easy for them. But would they have behaved in that insensitive way if they saw me, not as a child over whom they had absolute power, but as a person—a thinking, feeling individual who had the same qualms, the same anxieties, the same need for reassurance as they?

  I wonder now, as I sit here on this beach, if that is why the girl with the crab affected me so. Of all the evils perpetrated by man, the one that frightens me most is the possibility of being trapped, of being snatched off the street, of being kidnapped, taken hostage, and held against my will. What deed is more cowardly than capturing living beings through cunning or brute strength and confining them in a hostile place for years, perhaps for life?

  I saw a snow leopard in a zoo once, and I shall never forget the sight. The curators of the exhibit had created an environment that came as close as possible to the leopard’s rocky lair in the Himalayas. They had built a circular cage, perhaps a hundred feet across, and piled boulders against the iron bars to form a lookout and a den.

  They had attached a placard to the bars that described the leopard’s way of life on a high range halfway around the world. Spectators gathered around and stared at the animal, at his milky coat, his pale spots, his huge paws, and then moved on. But I stayed long after they left, watching the leopard pacing, endlessly pacing, inside his cage.

  The thought occurred to me that I owed a debt to those who had gone to so much trouble to display the snow leopard so that curious people like me might see what he looks like and how he behaves. But as I stood there I felt only the presumption of my fellowman, who had taken this animal from where he evolved, where he was meant to be, and imprisoned him in a city zoo.

  The deplorable consequence is that when I go to the zoo, I don’t see a snow leopard at all. I don’t see his elegance, his stealth, his subtle strength as he moves for miles across the glacial snows of his mountain home. What I see is a displaced creature destined to live out his life in an alien world.

  This is a condition of life, one we can’t deny no matter how we try to persuade ourselves that the truth is otherwise. There is no choice, no middle ground, no compromise. Once we possess another creature, we alter forever the inherent nature of that creature.

  I look over the breakers to the place where the horizon falls away. Do I have dominion over the waves and over the fish of the sea? I look over my head at the soaring gulls. Do I have dominion over the sky and over the fowl of the air? All my life, all my experience tells me I am not in control—that any attempt on my part to exercise control over every living thing is a sacrilege and doomed to fail.

  As children we think we own a crab. As adults we think we own our husbands, our wives, our sons, our daughters. But the only life we own, truly own, is our own.

  When my children were first learning to walk, I remember picking them up and holding them close because that is what I had an irresistible impulse to do. Sometimes they wanted the comfort that closeness provides. But usually they quickly twisted around in my arms and lunged forward, indicating they didn’t want to be held; they wanted to be put back on the ground so they could go on exploring the world on their own.

  Slowly I learned to tell the difference between the hugs that were for them and the hugs that were for me. When I held them against their will, I wasn’t expressing my affection for them; I was exercising my power over them, under the guise of love. There are the hugs that smother us and the hugs that liberate us. My job as a father wasn’t to possess them, but to set them free.

  I say that easily, as if I had been a model father who never tried to dictate the direction of his children’s lives. But I can’t make that claim. I wanted my oldest son to go to college. He balked, became a carpenter, and went on to build beautiful houses and a life of his own. My youngest daughter was facile with figures, so I urged her to study accounting. She became a conservation biologist; she spends her summers in a tent in the High Sierra, studying the connection between plants and birds.

  I might argue that I acted out of love when I urged my children to live out my vision of their destiny. But I know now that I wasn’t acting out of love; I was acting out of a sense of ownership, of dominion, which blinded me. It’s a wise father who knows his children, and I can say that I didn’t always know mine. If I had seen them clearly, I would have done more to encourage them to become the men and women they were born to be.

  I have four children, and I am proud of them all, of what they have achieved despite my parental tendency to put my priorities ahead of theirs. I offered my advice; in their innate wisdom, they didn’t heed it. If they had, it would have altered their nature, and that would have erected a barrier of resentment between us as impassable as the bars of a cage.

  In midlife, when I found myself a bachelor again, I was drawn to a woman who had many endearing traits. I was attracted by the way she bounced around the tennis court, by the zestful way she moved, the spirited way she talked. In the beginning, it was a pleasure to be with her. She liked to sing; she liked to dance. But after a while, her arms around me felt less like an embrace than a stranglehold.

  She had been through many relationships, all disastrous, including marriage to a man who had abandoned her. When we met, she was still reeling from that trauma. What she needed, what she wanted more than anything else was a man she could call her own, a husband whose presence she could count on every morning, every night. What I needed, what I wanted more than anything else at that moment of my life was time to be alone, time to adjust, time to devote myself to the work I wanted to do.

  She began to refer to me as “my man” and couldn’t understand why I objected to that term. One evening, at a small dinner party in her home, as I headed toward the kitchen, I heard her talking to her closest friend. She mentioned my name, then added, “the universe provides.” As soon as she uttered those words, I felt the oppressive power of her love, and I knew we had to part. In time she found another man, one who was right for h
er, and I found a cottage by the sea.

  I once saw a motto worked in needlepoint, neatly framed and conspicuously hung on a kitchen wall. It read: “Where love rules, there is no will to power.” I am surprised that after all these years those words come back to me so plainly. I see them again, as if they were indelibly imprinted on my brain, and for the first time I understand what they mean.

  I believe in compassion; I believe in sharing; I believe in mates, partners, and friends helping each other on their sad and merry way through life. But I don’t believe in dominion, in the right of one being to possess another, no matter what form that possession takes.

  I believe our long human yearning for political liberty is rooted in our unquenchable desire to become the essential individuals we were meant to be. “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, and we are stirred by his words without always knowing all they imply. We associate his battle cry with our aversion for czars, dictators, emperors, and kings who want to tell us what we can think and where we can go.

  What we often fail to recognize is that remote rulers, no matter how despotic, generally exert less power over our lives than the ordinary people do, the people we live and work with every day. The latter are present, always present, with their own agendas and their own demands, which can oppress us unless we find the will within ourselves to resist.

  A lovely woman comes into view. She is wearing a white polo shirt, jean shorts, and a yellow sweatshirt tied about her waist by the sleeves. With a start, I realize that she is not a part of my reverie, but here, now, with me on the beach.

  The wind has shifted, and I didn’t notice. The mist is blowing in from the sea. I rise and walk to the water’s edge. As the woman draws alongside, she stops and comments on the sudden change in the air. We stand on the sand, chatting idly, and then she continues on her way. I watch her as she goes, watch the sway of her yellow shirt, and wonder if I have let an opportunity slip by.