Beachcombing at Miramar Page 9

  A close friend of mine survived a serious heart attack a dozen years ago. After he recovered, I went to see him on his farm in central New York State. A small, vigorous man, he had always lived his life with a keen sense of adventure, never fearful, constantly willing to test, probe, try something new. He had been a high school history teacher for thirty years. When he retired, he bought sixty acres of prime grazing land and, as an experiment, began to breed beefalo, part bison, part cow. In his spare time he painted, played the slide trombone, ran for Congress (he lost by nine votes), and managed a medical clinic for the community.

  I was afraid the heart attack might have slowed him down, but, if anything, he seemed more alive after the illness than before. As soon as I arrived, he came bursting out his front door, a pail in each hand. He was wearing the same red peaked cap he always wore to shade his eyes, and his beard, now pure white, was just as bushy as before.

  We strolled together along the hedgerows, picking blackberries, eating a few, dropping most into our pails, pausing from time to time to take in the countryside, the silos, the barns, the farmhouses tucked among the rolling hills. We were chatting idly when he suddenly turned to me and said,“What do you think about death?”

  I stood with my pail dangling by my side, staring at him for a long time, not sure what to say. I was disconcerted by the question, startled that he raised it at a moment when I had blackberries, and only blackberries, on my mind. I had no desire to discuss death, his or mine, to be reminded that it was there, waiting for us. But he had come face-to-face with death; he knew it might strike him down at any minute, so he could not go on living his life as if it wasn’t there.

  Sensing my discomfort, he dropped the subject. We went on down the hedgerow, picking blackberries until our pails were full.

  But I wish my friend were with me now, in the aftermath of the memorial service for the fishermen, for I have reached a point in my life where I am prepared to answer the question I was so anxious to avoid on that day we picked blackberries on his farm. What do I think about death? I would tell him that it is the constant awareness of death that gives meaning to life. The moment we lose the sense of our own mortality, we succumb to a different kind of death, a death in life, which is a death far worse than the one we fear.

  I have a choice, the same choice that faces every man. I can live a frivolous life, trying to impress others with the house I live in, the clothes I wear, the car I drive. I can strive to be a success in the way of the world, seeking the admiration of others, reveling in their jealousy. I can seek domination over my family and fellow workers in a vain attempt to hide my own deficiencies. I can seek fame, which is the most elusive pursuit of all, for it has no substance and soon vanishes in air.

  I can indulge in endless prattle about my friends and neighbors, dissipating my life’s energy a little at a time. I can wallow in self-pity, refusing to accept responsibility for my own circumstances. I can manipulate others into taking care of me, which is the way of all petty tyrants. I can complain about boredom, as if it were up to those around me to inject excitement into my day.

  These are the patterns of the living dead, people who have forsaken life, who are willing to squander their most precious gift, because they refuse to face up to the reality of death. If they wanted to live, truly wanted to live, they would rise up in a resurrection of their own making and commit themselves to the life they have.

  “This is the true joy in life,” George Bernard Shaw wrote in the dedication to his play Man and Superman, “the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

  I have no way of knowing if the four fishermen were familiar with Shaw’s words. But I keep asking myself why they went to sea on that fateful morning instead of waiting for the wind to lighten and the swells to subside. They, along with the other crabbers, had been on strike for three weeks, seeking a higher price for their catch, and the word on the pier is that they were hard-pressed financially. But I am certain that neither they nor their families would have starved if they had bided their time one more day.

  I have to believe that it was not money that summoned these fishermen, but an urge, a calling, a passion far more profound. They were a force of nature. Having frittered away three weeks on land, they could no longer resist the mighty purpose of their lives.

  I leave the harbor and head home the back way, past the boat launch, past the rocky breakwater, down the sandy shore. The sea is calm. There is barely a ripple on the ocean, but I can hear the wind, and behind the wind I can hear the low blare of a foghorn. It blares again, then again and again. I know that it has been blowing at regular intervals through the morning, as it usually does, but I have only now let it creep into my consciousness.

  It occurs to me that the sound of the horn is like the far-off call of death. Occasionally I hear it, but most of the time I push it way down into the base of my being and go about my day as if it wasn’t there. But it is there, calling to me in the same way the sea called to those fishermen, and in time it will claim me as it claimed them.

  I wonder how much time is left to me. Another minute, another hour, another day? I may collapse before I reach my beach house and take my last breath right here on the sands of Miramar. I may have another lifetime ahead of me; I may live to be twice the age that I am now. I have no way of knowing, and it would not matter if I did. The only thing that matters is that I do not capitulate to fear.

  I realize now that I have a task that is greater than all the labors assigned to Hercules. It demands that I live in the richness of this moment because that is all I have or will ever know. It is only when I am fully conscious of the finite nature of my life that I begin to live. The instant I let go of that awareness, I submit to pettiness and drudgery, and the precious seconds slip away.

  I look for signs of life; I see them everywhere. High on the bluff above me sits an exotic dwelling hand-built by the photographer who lives there. I stop to admire it, as I have done so many times before. Sometimes it looks like a Norwegian stave church, sometimes like a Shinto shrine, and sometimes like a lapstrake ship plowing through the waves. The bare-breasted figure of a woman, carved in wood, straddles the roof, her arms outstretched, reaching toward the sky.

  Farther along I come upon a boy and a girl building what looks like a seaside resort in the sand. They run back and forth to the water’s edge, pulling out sea palm and planting the stalks around the perimeter of their structure, with the weedy clumps at the top so that they resemble tropical trees swaying in the breeze.

  Beyond the children a bronzed and bedraggled sculptor, bare to the waist, his black hair curling down his neck, is building a driftwood monument to himself out of debris that has floated ashore. He makes use of everything he finds. In the center of his lopsided shelter, a kind of lean-to, sits a stuffed, waterlogged doll in a rope swing. I can hear the sculptor muttering as he works. “Why not! Why not!” he says as he hangs a discarded wading boot with a yellow toe from a rusty nail.

  Still farther along the beach, I come upon a mound with a depression in the middle. Two rings surround the mound—an inner one of sea-fig leaves; an outer one of tiny, glistening shells.

  There are scribblings, too, still intact in the intertidal zone. Here in the damp sand is an interrupted game of ticktacktoe. X could win, or O could win, but I don’t know whose move it was.

  Nearby there is a message: Happy birthday, Daddy! in a childish scrawl. Farther down the beach, another message: Lindsay, are you all right!

  And still farther along: Pamela was here! Amelia was here! Claudia was here! Three affirmations, one below the other, encompassed by a heart.

  And farther along still, the unsigned testament:

  I am here!

  I stop and kneel, and below it I write:


  I am here, too!

  The tide is rising. In a little while the waves will wash my mark away. But right now I am overcome by a need to assert my presence so the world will know I passed this way.

  thirteen

  by - the - wind sailor

  The sky darkens and the wind blows at gale force, driving the sea against the land. When the storm lets up, it leaves the beach littered with transparent blue jellyfish. I see them tumbling in the breakers, floating up the sand, settling by the thousands along the high-water line. They wash ashore for days.

  These little jellyfish are called by-the-wind sailors. They have a triangular sail and no rudder, so they can’t steer. Unable to set a course of their own, they are blown across the wide Pacific, sometimes this way, sometimes that way, depending on the direction of the wind.

  I scoop some up in a clam shell and carry them back to my beach house deck, where I space them out along the top railing and study them for a long time. No bigger than my thumb, they look like tiny plastic toys mass-produced from a common mold. I look across the sea, but I still see them plainly, as if I had painted them on the canvas of my mind. They are sailing aimlessly in great flotillas, going with the breeze.

  My thoughts drift to a scorching summer afternoon in the Pocono Mountains. I am with a friend from college days, a man with the most awesome intellect of anyone I have ever known. We are sitting side by side on the edge of a pear-shaped pool outside his hillside home. Every now and then we slip into the water to cool off. Between dips we talk about our mutual desire to separate from our wives.

  We attended each other’s weddings so many years ago, and each of us believed at the time that our marriages would last forever. Now, more than a quarter century later, we are telling each other that our marriages are faltering, and neither of us knows what to do.

  Our conversation is intimate; for a while it feels as if we may be helping each other find the courage we need to act. We talk all through the long afternoon. Exhausted at last, we lapse into silence.

  My friend sits with his head bowed, running his stubby fingers through his wavy white hair. He has a bulging forehead, as if there isn’t sufficient space inside his skull to hold his brains. I wait patiently for words of wisdom, words that will give me hope. Suddenly he raises his arms in resignation. “But don’t you see,” he says, “people like you and me don’t get divorced.”

  In the months that followed, I ended my marriage. He remained trapped in his, sinking deeper into anger and despair, caught in the current of social convention, afraid of breaking his vow, afraid of what others might say. For all his brilliance, he could not figure out how to break away. A year after our poolside conversation, he suffered a serious stroke. He lingered awhile, then died.

  My thoughts drift further back. I am twelve, in the home of my guardian aunt and uncle, when the doorbell rings. My aunt answers; a neighbor is complaining about gravel that has been dumped in our driveway and has spilled over onto his yard. My aunt is flustered. She reacts as if something dreadful has happened, and that she is to blame.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I will have—” She stops in midsentence, as if she is poised at the edge of a precipice. I wait in the background, wondering what she is about to say. She starts again. “I will have … the boy … clean it up.” The neighbor seems satisfied with that. He turns and walks away.

  I go to the garage and grab a shovel. It’s not much of a job. In twenty minutes, I have the gravel heaped up where it’s supposed to be. But with each shovelful, I hear my aunt’s words: “I will have the boy clean it up.” The boy is me.

  My aunt cooked for me, cleaned for me, put a roof over my head. She did all those things because I was the child of her dead sister, and she saw herself as duty-bound to take me into her home. She went through each day doing her duty to me, demanding my gratitude in return. She never found out that a relationship based on duty is no relationship at all. What she thought about love, affection, consideration, and concern, I cannot say; she never mentioned them. Her sense of duty so overwhelmed her, so deadened her sensibilities, that she could not refer to me as my nephew, my boy—could not claim me as her own.

  My friend and my aunt were different in virtually every way. Yet they had this one trait in common—they could not alter their course. They worked hard to give the impression that they were steadfast, that they were people who lived up to their obligations. There was a period in my life when I saw them that way. But now they seem to me like rudderless by-the-wind sailors, exercising no control over the direction of their lives.

  I go to a bookshelf in my beach house, take down a field guide to the Pacific Coat, and look up by-the-wind sailor. It describes a flat, oval skeleton with gas-filled pockets, a large-mouthed feeding tube surrounded by rows of reproductive bodies, and numerous blue tentacles around the rim. I take down another guide and come upon the following definition, written by a marine biologist: “They are variously regarded as colonies of medusa-like individuals called persons.…”

  The sudden appearance of the word persons, with all its human connotations, startles me. I put the guides back on the shelf and return to the edge of the ocean. The persons are still tumbling in the breakers, washing up the beach. I settle on the sand and close my eyes. The warmth of the sun seeps into my bones; my mind floats free. I imagine convoys of pale blue shapes drifting across a rimless sea. As they blow with the wind, they are transfigured into people I have known—people who looked as if they knew exactly where they were going.

  I did not realize this when I was younger, but I do now. Those individuals who seem most resolute, who seem so sure of themselves, are often the ones who have lost their way. They rush about, expending enormous amounts of energy presenting a picture of themselves to the world, a picture they want us to believe; but after a while the picture wears thin and we see through to the frightened soul inside.

  We come upon them everywhere, masters of self-deception, deceiving others even as they deceive themselves. Most are ordinary people; they live in the house across the street or work in the office down the hall. Because they convey an aura of self-assurance, an air of certainty, some rise to exalted positions.

  They rule from the executive suite; they exhort from the pulpit; they strut around the football field. Here are the robber barons who build their fortunes on watered stock and junk bonds. Here are the bombastic preachers who prey on the blind faith of their followers. Here are the honored athletes who batter women.

  For a while they lead us astray. They loom as heroes, as gods; we invest them with magical powers to make up for the defects we see in ourselves. Then one day we find out that for all our frailties, for all our faults, for all our flaws, they are the weak and we are the strong.

  Here on the sands of Miramar, so far from the fields where people vie for wealth and power, there is one thing I can afford to admit to myself that I never could before. I am confused; I do not have an answer to every question that comes my way.

  In the past, I viewed this lack of certainty in myself as a sign of weakness. I yearned for an absolute truth, an ideology, something that would cover every contingency in my life, tell me what to think and how to behave. Searching, I read great poets and philosophers—Lao-tzu, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Whitman, Shaw. I gathered them in with all their inconsistencies, paradoxes, and disharmonies. I discovered that each had a piece of the truth for me, and that in moments of need I could pick and choose. “Do I contradict myself?” Walt Whitman wrote. “Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).”

  Now I see that to be confused is to be strong. Confusion forces me to assess my situation, to move with care, to evaluate my progress and correct my course as I go along. There is no dogma, no ideology, no absolute truth for me to fall back on. It took me the better part of a lifetime to come to terms with that. But once I did, it set me free to explore the world and find out for myself what I believe.

  I come upon men and women suffering from
dogma sickness all the time. The symptoms are there, in the tone of their voice, the purse of their lips, the furrow of their brow. I would like to tell them how liberated, how exhilarated they would feel if only they could find the courage to let go. But I know that no matter what I say they will go on clinging to their creed with all their might because they are too afraid to face the randomness of life and make decisions on their own.

  Only the weak believe they possess answers to all the questions; only the weak mount the public stage swelled with swagger, filled with cant. Only the weak tell others what to think and how to act, based on their ideology. Only the weak aspire to be demagogues.

  Hitler claimed he had the absolute truth. So did Mussolini, so did Stalin. They were the terrors of my youth, men with the blood of millions on their hands. To kill, to murder, to slaughter—that was as nothing to these despots because they held to an absolute truth, which, in their distorted view, sanctified their deeds.

  In the United States, we have been lucky; in our moments of peril, when it sometimes seemed as if the nation might not survive, genuine leaders have emerged as if from the soil with a true sense of wit and proportion. I think of those who were great: Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt. They were not ideologues, not conservatives or liberals, not captalists or socialists, not hawks or doves. They were pragmatic men seeking commonsense solutions to the pressing problems of their day: tyranny, slavery, the preservation of the union, the Great Depression, worldwide war.