Beachcombing at Miramar Read online

  Far down the beach, I come upon two men—one gray-haired and the other balding—throwing stones into the sea. They are walking slowly, talking as they walk, pausing every few steps to search for another stone. When they find one, they fling it sidearm across the shallow water, watching it sink or hop.

  As I watch them, I am overcome by an irresistible urge. I find a flat skimmer, worn smooth by the waves, and skip it across the calm surface of the sea. It hops three times. I am filled with delight; I haven’t lost the knack acquired so long ago.

  As soon as one stone sinks, I look for another, then another. I pick up a near-perfect stone, one as round and thin as a blade. It skips five times. I don’t know how many decades have gone by since I skipped a stone five times.

  I remember my oldest son, when he was only three or four, picking up stones and throwing them into a lake. I told him to stop; it didn’t do any good. Whenever I turned my back, he would pick up another stone and fling it into the water. Years later I walked with my grandsons beside that same lake and watched them throw stones, just as their father had. I didn’t try to interfere; by then I knew the futility of that. It is no more possible to keep boys from throwing stones than it is to keep dogs from barking or cats from arching their backs.

  I don’t know where the impulse comes from—if I do it because it’s instinctive or because it gives me so much joy. Didn’t St. Paul caution the Corinthians to abstain from the kind of behavior that engages me now? “When I was a child,” he wrote in his first epistle, “I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

  I once had a Sunday school teacher who preached those lines with all their gospel force. He had long before put away childish things and wanted the children under his tutelage to do the same. “When you grow up,” he said, “you will see through different eyes.” Now I am grown up; now it seems to me as if he misused the words of St. Paul. I don’t want to suppress the child in me; I want to preserve the child in me.

  The two men who had been throwing stones turn and trudge through the heavy sand. They pass over the dunes; for a while I can see their heads bobbing on the other side. I study the dunes, squinting, seeing for the first time the way they are shaped in the mind’s eye by subtle hues. I have passed this way many times, but I have never before seen so many shades of pink, rose, and ocher.

  Beyond the dunes, the houses appear crunched together and suspended in air like toy dwellings on a tiny stage. It could be a scene in a painting by Henry Miller. I came upon his art in a gallery down the coast at Big Sur. I was familiar with Miller as a writer, the ultimate expatriate and chronicler of bohemian life, a man of hard-bitten prose, which often lapsed into diatribe. But I did not know him as a watercolorist, an adult who saw the world as a child sees it, a fantastical world of bulbous noses, cockeyed hats, and floating houses—all painted with exuberance, as if he had put his vision to paper in one great flourish.

  One of my favorite Miller paintings is of Jerusalem—the Old City with its skyline of mosques and minarets in splashes of red and blue, green, gray, and copper. Everything in the painting is suggested; nothing explained. In its innocence it is like the work of a third grader, the kind one might see tacked to a classroom wall, except it is far superior because it has the passionate intensity, the spontaneity and skill of an artist who is still a boy.

  I bought a book of Miller’s reproductions and I often browse through it, absorbing his clowns, sailboats, villages, his portraits of friends and family members. What astonishes me most, apart from the wonder of his work, is the generous spirit that underlies it all. Some paintings he sold for a pittance; the bulk he gave away. A friend might say, Henry, I love that painting of a man with a bird, and Henry would reply, Here, it’s yours.

  For Miller to paint as he painted, to live as he lived, he had to be totally free of the paralyzing fear that seeps into the marrow of most men’s bones as they mature. “When I write, I work,” Miller says. “But when I paint, I play.” And therein lies the simple secret of his artistry. His paintings reveal a mind that was running free all the time. The title of a book of his paintings is Paint as You Like and Die Happy.

  At another moment in my life, I might have taken that statement as a dare, but now it strikes me as a moral imperative. I feel as if I have spent a large chunk of my life abiding by rules and regulations set forth by others; but now I am concerned about how I will feel as I lay dying about the life I have lived.

  I continue down the beach, humming softly, not thinking about the tune. The melody just seems to be there, in my head and on my lips, and I don’t know why. The lyrics rise from a distant memory.

  Why do I love you?

  Why do you love me?

  Why should there be two

  Happy as we?

  And I suddenly find myself singing aloud, singing at the very top of my voice. The music is by Jerome Kern, the words by Oscar Hammerstein, the song from Show Boat. I am no longer an adult walking the beach; I am a child in the perfumed bedroom of my buxom great-aunt, Leona Libby Lewis, who sang in vaudeville. She is well along in years, but her voice is still deep and resonant. She stops for a moment and looks at me, sitting on a stool beside her, overwhelmed.

  “Sing, Ricky, sing!” she orders.

  “I can’t sing,” I reply. I mean that I can’t sing in tune, which is what I have been told over and over again, until I am convinced that it is true.

  She is outraged. “Come over here,” she says. “Stand next to me.” She reaches out, puts her arms around me, draws me close. “Now sing,” she demands. “Sing with me!”

  I hear the power of her voice; it encompasses me. I open my mouth and push out the words, hoping they match the tune.

  “Louder,” she says.

  I push harder.

  “Sing the words! Sing the words! Don’t be afraid!”

  I sing louder, and louder still.

  Can you see the why or wherefore

  I should be the one you care for …

  The melody rises and swirls around the room, filling the empty spaces, rattling the chandelier. “Who says you can’t sing?” Aunt Leona cries. “Don’t ever say that you can’t sing!”

  The music remained long after my aunt Leona let me go, but the fear returned and I seldom sang again. In later years, whenever I tried, the people around me—my wife, my children—would look at me askance and belittle my efforts. A family rule was set down: Daddy is not allowed to sing at the dinner table. Intended, I suppose, at least partially as a joke, it had a deadening effect all the same. What I really wanted was for them to lift their voices and sing with me.

  If you sing with me, I wanted to say, I can follow your lead and sing in tune.

  But I didn’t ask; I was too afraid. I listened to the music I loved. I sang in my head, inside my being. I heard the chords deep down in my soul. But I didn’t sing aloud. The fear came between me and the melody, and I repressed my song.

  Until now.

  The beach is deserted—but even if it were filled with people, I doubt I would be deterred. I hear my voice carrying over the breakers, as if Aunt Leona were urging me on.

  I’m a lucky boy,

  You are lucky, too,

  All our dreams of joy

  Seem to come true.…

  The song is a duet. I am singing to a woman, and she is singing to me. Our voices blend and part and blend again. All at once the day is filled with possibility. I believe that if I sing in this way, without fear, I can hit the notes exactly right and make her materialize. I have no idea who the woman is, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is this sudden sense of lightness, of liberation, born of song.

  We yearn so for this lightness in our everyday lives and rarely find it because of the fear, instilled by others, that we will miss a note, skip a beat, sing offkey. Rather than belt it out, we squelch our song. I have seen the results of that repression, seen how it sears the spirit and withers the flesh,
making us old before our time.

  A while back I visited a relative, who in my childhood memory is spiritedly playing the piano. She showed me around her house, stopping at the entryway to the living room. The couch and chairs were wrapped in thick, clear plastic covers. It was as though the room were a period piece in a museum, cordoned off by an invisible braided rope.

  Impulsively, I crossed the imaginary barrier, and as I did, I felt the tension in the air. I sensed at once that I had violated a strict house rule, but I wanted to look at the piano—a stately, well-waxed spinet she had inherited from her mother—standing in a corner. I tried to lift the cover clamped down over the keyboard, but it was locked or stuck fast, like the lid of a trunk that hadn’t been pried open in years.

  She was watching me closely, her face drawn, her bare arms crisscrossed over her chest, her shoulders hunched, her fingers digging into her skin, as if she were hugging herself to ward off a chill.

  “Do you still play?” I asked.

  “Oh no,” she replied. “I haven’t touched it in years.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  She stood in silence for a long time, then said, “I would give it to my daughter, but she’s so careless with things.”

  A bitter wind swept through the house. I ended the visit as quickly as I could. I boarded a plane; on the long flight home, at forty thousand feet above sea level, her words kept whirring through my head.

  Sometime afterward, I attended a concert by the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in a small city in central Michigan. Before he began to play, he held up his Stradivarius so the audience could see the gash on the face of his instrument. He explained in the most charming and childish manner how the gash was there when he acquired it, how it had been inflicted by a previous owner in an accident a century earlier, and how it gave the cello its distinctive tone and character. Then he put bow to strings. A hush fell over the audience as the sweet, vibrant sound of the scarred cello filled the room.

  Afterward, at a reception in the boardroom of the corporation that had sponsored the concert, Rostropovich sat in a comfortable chair while his longhaired dachshund squirmed on his lap and crawled up his sleeve. A public-relations man popped his head through the door. “Do you want a newspaper for that dog?” he asked. “What for?” the cellist replied. “He can’t read.”

  Rostropovich had played that same theme on a grander scale in his native land, protesting against a repressive regime. He had championed the works of Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev when Soviet authorities held them in disfavor. He had not only written an open letter supporting the right of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn “to write the truth as he sees it” but sheltered the outspoken author and his family in a cottage on his country estate. Solzhenitsyn was living there in 1970 when he won the Nobel Prize for literature. These acts cost Rostropovich his citizenship, cast him into exile, and nearly destroyed his career. But he did them—that is the point.

  Once, I was sitting in the office of a man I was interviewing for a business article. His suit jacket was draped over the back of his chair. He was leaning forward, talking enthusiastically about his job, when suddenly his secretary burst into the room.

  “He’s back. Mr. ______ is back,” she said. “He’s coming through the door!”

  The man blanched. He jumped up and put on his jacket. Small beads of sweat cropped up on his forehead; fear crept into his eyes. He stared at me, obviously hoping I would put on my jacket, too. The conversation continued, but the mood had changed. He sat stiffly. I had to extract information from him a bit at a time. Later, I found out that the man’s boss had laid down a rule that all employees were to wear suit jackets while they worked, no excuses, no exceptions, no exemptions.

  As I walk the sands of Miramar, I find it easy to pass judgment on events that happened long ago. But I can’t help wondering how I would respond if I were caught in that man’s trap today. Would I make a fuss? Would I fight back, maybe threaten to quit? Or would I submit to the indignity of my boss’s edict and go to work day after day, complying with his miserable rule.

  It astounds me when I think of the courage it takes to live, to behave as we want to behave, to be who we want to be. The world is filled with those who would keep us from singing the songs we want to sing, painting the pictures we want to paint, skimming the stones we want to skim. Some are bosses, some are officials of oppressive regimes—and some are our mothers, fathers, teachers, husbands, or wives, who, for whatever their reasons, try to stifle the life force that makes us who we are. But we have this choice: We can empower them or we can empower ourselves.

  A few of us seem to know this intuitively from an early age; the rest of us have to learn it through harsh experience. The deep, driving hunger of the soul is there; it will not go away—and we pay an awesome price each time we push it down into the pit of our being. Little by little the colors fade and the sound of music goes out of our lives.

  I find myself sitting on a huge boulder by the side of the sea. I don’t remember arriving here, but I do know that I automatically park myself on the flat surface of this rock whenever I pass by. As I lean back, words spill out of me into the morning air.

  ’ Twas on the shores that round our coast

  From Deal to Ramsgate span,

  That I found alone, on a piece of stone,

  An elderly naval man.…

  I first came upon “The Yarn of the Nancy Bell” by the lyricist W. S. Gilbert in the fifth grade, and I was so taken by its swinging rhythm that I committed it to memory—and never forgot it. Through the years it would pop up at odd moments, as it does now, as if to remind me of the music of words:

  His hair was weedy, his beard was long,

  And weedy and long was he;

  And I heard this wight on the shore recite,

  In a singular minor key: …

  I have no doubt that the elderly naval man and I are one and the same, and that we have been brought to this place by a force beyond ourselves to tell stragglers and passersby the tale we have to tell:

  O, I am a cook and a captain bold,

  And the mate of the Nancy brig,

  And a bo’sun tight, and a midshipmite,

  And the crew of the captain’s gig.

  I am reciting loudly and gesticulating wildly, unaware that a woman and a small girl are approaching me from behind. When I see them, I stop. The girl, no more than three, looks up into my face.

  “Are you being silly?” she asks.

  I have now reached a point in my life where I regard silliness as a virtue, perhaps the first sign of sanity.

  “Yes, I am being silly,” I say.

  She laughs the contagious laugh of a child. I have that laugh in me. It bubbles up and I laugh, too.

  eleven

  the surf caster

  The wind has shifted to the south and a light mist is blowing in from the sea. There is a desolation to the beach, a sense of desertion, as if the human population has fled to a higher ground in fear of a pending catastrophe. I feel it myself, feel the foreboding, but I don’t know where it comes from or what it is.

  Down the beach, through the drizzle, I see a solitary fisherman. He is wearing a sou’wester, a yellow slicker, and hip boots pulled up over his jeans. The sight of him evokes a buried image from my past, for I was once a surf fisherman myself, and I stop to chat with him.

  He tells me he has already landed nine perch, and he is determined to catch one more before the tide turns. His rig is simple: a slim bamboo rod and a light spinning reel. He casts his sandworm into the breakers, reels in slowly, and suddenly jolts the rod up over his shoulder.

  “Got one!” he says.

  His rod bends almost to the breaking point; his reel is too light to cope with the fish—if, indeed, that is what is at the other end. It isn’t struggling like a bat ray or a striped bass; it seems to be lying under the water, perhaps trapped behind a rock, listless as a cod or a mass of kelp.

  The surf caster sticks h
is rod in a sand spike and begins to pull in the monofilament line, hand over hand, a little at a time. I stare intently at the point where the line enters the sea, hoping that what ultimately emerges is more exciting than a clump of seaweed. Gradually it becomes clear that he has snagged a line, one lost by another angler, who has long since disappeared. His own line comes out first; there is a perch on the hook and a red crab clinging to the wire leader. He switches to the snagged line, dragging hook and sinker up the beach. What we see astounds us both. There is a second perch firmly on the hook, and a mottled cabezon, with spiny fin and gaping mouth, looking for all the world like a prehistoric creature, has seized the smaller prey above the tail and is trying to devour it.

  The surf caster kneels on the sand and stares at his haul with disbelief. With a single cast he has caught three fish and a crab. The crab lets go of the leader, and he lets it crawl back into the ocean. But the two perch and the cabezon he keeps.

  “I’m sixty-five,” he says to me. “I’ve been fishing the surf for fifty years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. Last year I had a heart attack.” He thumps his chest. “Too much corned beef and cabbage, steaks and eggs. Now I eat fish, which I catch myself.”

  Warmed by his exuberance, I continue down the beach. Offshore, a brown pelican plunges headfirst into the ocean. Closer in, a Caspian tern zigzags above the swells. Still closer in, a scoter dives at the last second under the crest of a wave. They are surf fishers all, taking what they need to survive from the sea.

  Once, when I worked in Manhattan, I went into Abercrombie & Fitch, the exclusive outfitter to sportsmen, then located on Madison Avenue. On an upper floor, I found the store’s fishing expert. “I’m interested in surf fishing,” I said. “What do you recommend?”