Half Moon Bay, Westport, WashingtonWeek of 9/11, 2008
Who of us is not obsessed with the weather? We live within weather as a fish lives in the sea, its infinite changeability defining our days and nights. Just try to start your day without checking to see what it’s doin’ out there beyond your window!
Seattle is a city famous for its weather - “rain, rain, rain” (Thus the title of this blog!) though if you check the stats you’ll learn we enjoy fewer wet days per year than pretty nearly anywhere but Reno. We cunning northwesterners carefully cultivate our drippy, dreary image to discourage Californian migration. With limited success I have noticed.
The weather report: I sit down to my daily journal and sure enough the first thing I jot is the state of current weather (a boring predictability I repeatedly vow to correct before I go mad). But I am not satisfied with our own local weather - no, I must have world weather. I watch swirling hurricanes grind across the Gulf of Mexico even though I have never seen that body of water. Yesterday my yard was bathed in golden late summer sun - a peachy perfect day, a perfect day for tidying up my tired vegetable beds - and were was I? In a darkened living room following CNN reports of Hurricane Ike in Texas! We all love exciting weather - especially when it is not ravaging our own neighborhood.
And now I must clamp my garden hat to my head and march myself out into the morning light. While I dig weeds you can catch up on this week’s episode of RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA, the adventures of Cora Jane Dooley:
(Continued from last week)
“On second thought,” I said to Alice. “I’m getting kind of hungry. Why don’t we tend to changing that alarm code and catch some lunch. My treat.”
“I should be getting back to the shop,” she said, hesitating. “But I suppose there is time for a bowl of chowder.”
“Alice, the archive in the basement - is it locked?”
“That it is. It is a walk-in safe. Tight as Fort Knox.”
“Well, that is comforting,” I said. “You know, on the off chance I am right about someone trying to get at Carl’s photos.”
Alice found the alarm system instruction booklet in a file cabinet and after a few bumbling attempts we got the code changed. I restrained her inclination to write the new code on the booklet cover. Besides being too obvious, I wondered how she would retrieve it fast enough from the file cabinet to keep the alarm from going off the next time she entered the building. After I pointed that out she wrote the number down on a small scrap of paper and tucked it into a side pocket of her purse, promising to memorize it by the following week. Well, it was a compromise.
The morning fog was mast high and lifting from the silent marina. It would be a clear, crisp November day. We walked down the sidewalk past the kite shop to Bev’s Burgers by the Bay. Today, on my day off, I would be a customer and I would try not to criticize the service.
The lunch special was oyster stew. With Cindy doing the cooking I was confident it was special indeed so Alice and I both ordered it. In the previous few weeks I had downed more seafood than in all my life up to that point, still it was such a treat to get fish fresh from the ocean after so many years living land locked in Idaho. Our stew was on our table in record time, hot and buttery and garnished with sprigs of lemon grass. Euphoria! Alice and I chatted through lunch about this and that - nothing touching on the tragedy at the museum. There was no telling who might overhear us. After we had finished I paid the tab, leaving a generous tip for Betty.
Alice drove us in silence back up the jetty to the gift shop where I retrieved my bike. I thought I’d check out that whale skeleton Alice had mentioned, walking the bike back to the museum since I’d eaten too much to pedal.
A skeleton says so very little about an animal, no more than a coat hanger says about a cashmere sweater. I stared at the jaw bones cantilevered over the steel display plaque. The jaw reminded me of an enormous pair of canning tongs. Everything whale-like had been removed. What was left were pale stone lumps, bumps, and shafts from which my mind refused to construct a living creature. Looking at this stiff and sterile armature, how could anyone begin to imagine a once majestic mammal leaping in a breathing sea?
As interesting as the exhibit was in a sort of macabre way, it saddened me that the whale had not died a natural death, its elements being absorbed back into the elements. It was as if Moby Dick had lost out to Captain Ahab’s dogged persistence, ending up as an opening act in Las Vegas. Some things are just not right. Even as a kid I hated zoos and those marine displays where they had dolphins jumping through hoops and eating salmon nibbles from their trainer’s mouth - it gave me the willies to see those beautiful innocent animals trapped and displayed like objects.
Captain Ahab’s unhinged single-mindedness inspired me to have another go at convincing Captain Mert that I was not the Westport version of Lizzie Borden. I hopped on my bike and set off for Float 9 without having the slightest notion whether he would be at the boat or not. Nor what I would say to the man if he managed to be there. Would he throw me into the bay? No idea. But I was optimistic. If Alice Burnbaum believed me, then why wouldn’t Mert if I spelled out what I had learned so far and what I suspected? Maybe there was something Carl had left with him - something he had not thought significant at the time. My notion was a lot more logical scenario than assuming an out of towner was the culprit. At least that seemed logical to me.
As it turned out I had no chance to plead my case. Angel Face was not in its accustomed berth. Considering how expensive petroleum was I figured it was improbable Mert had taken the boat out on a joy ride so where had he gone? Not that it was any of my business. What did I know - maybe Mert had taken someone’s ashes out for a sea scatter. In fact, it was always possible the Grays Harbor Medical Examiner had released Carl’s body for cremation, and even as I was standing on the float Mert was scattering his ashes on the outgoing tide. I wondered if some of Carl’s Coast Guard buddies would be there - or if he had buddies other than Mert. What did I actually know about the man? Would Mert perform a funeral service or just toss the remains off the stern as the sun went down? Was Mert at all religious? We had not talked about anything spiritual. I liked the idea that he was a bit of a pagan, with a deep abiding faith in the rhythms of nature - an aging New Age hippy.
I pulled up my flight of fancy and hopped off. Was I so bored with my retired state that I had taken to inventing dramas and the fabricating intentions of a man I hardly knew? Apparently. The only thing to do was stop and disconnect. I wheeled out to Half Moon Bay, sat on a smooth silver drift wood log and watched the surfers for the rest of the afternoon.
There were half a dozen brave young idiots in black wet suits, pushing their bright boards into waves still high and wild from uncertain winter weather. Mostly they just paddled out and flowed back without ever getting up on their boards. Once in a while one of them got lucky enough to catch a small curl, struggle up to a wobbly stand for half a heart beat, then collapse in the shallows in spittle foam. They had spent too much money on their boards not to try for that one uncertain ride that may or may not come along.
I started to see my own situation in the valiant and futile striving cycle they were showing me - push out, wait for the right moment, pull yourself up, pray you get a long ride, and then even if you do not, push out once again - because the next wave might be the perfect wave, the one you have waited for all your life, the one that will carry you clean and high all the way to the spin drift. It is always out there somewhere. You know it must be there, building under the glassy surface of the swell. It is only a matter of being in the right position when you feel its subtle lift, solid like the slick back of a whale under you. And when it at long last arrives to carry you forth, it makes all the empty journeys out toward the horizon worth the effort.
Every surfer knows this truth. It is why, in the birth place of the sport, surfers are accounted shaman of a sort - crazy wizards, wise mad men, an expression of God as berserker. Before I joined the Army, in the early days of my misspent youth I lived for a while in Northern California where I fell in hopeless love with a long haired lunatic who lived to surf. I never learned the skill myself. My sense of balance was not up to the challenge, but for a while - not more than a few sweaty summers - I worshiped at his salty shrine, watching him ride his huge board under the California sun until my nose peeled and my hair was a mat of bleached straw.
I can’t for the life of me remember the guy’s name. Maybe in my last earthly days, when people say you recall the distant past better than what you had for breakfast, I will summon his name and repeat it to myself like a mantra - maybe by then I’ll understand what I was doing sitting on that baking beach watching someone else have all the fun. Or perhaps not. Ah well, I am sure my surfer god has long since dried off, gotten married any number of times, and developed arthritis in both knees. It is quite possible, I thought, that his grandson is one of the intrepid boys plunging into the welling waves of Half Moon Bay. Hope. I guess it is all about hope - and stamina.
Brian! That was his name. How could I ever have forgotten that - like Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. We used to kid him about that, that he made it up to be cool and his real name was something like Rodney or Floyd. In my mind I was Annette Funicello or Gidget, playing beach blanket bingo and chasing after my surfer man. It was all bright sunny days and starry nights - we would be young and tan forever - there would always be another wave. We could laugh and love and chase each other up and down the white sand, roll in the warm surf and drink as much cheap beer as we had pocket change for. We told each other lies and looked into each other’s eyes. The endless summer - that was what it was called.
The ugliness came much later. That summer was before AIDS, before humans scarred the surface of the moon with rough foot prints, before the Viet Nam War turned one generation against another, before our summer-bright leaders were butchered in the burning streets. A faulty memory, under certain circumstances, could be seen as a deep blessing.
It was another life ago. I hardly recognize the girl I was then. I read somewhere that at the end of seven years a person has changed out every single cell of her body - there is not one cell left of the organism you were seven years before. Could that be the origin of the magic in the number seven? But how could the ancients have known that? Makes you think. One thing I know is I have been so many people in my sixty something years it is a wonder I can remember my own name, much less someone else's from the nineteen-sixties.
Especially since my name has changed a number of times since then. No wonder women have more identity issues than men. I really believe that. A man usually dies with the same name he was given at birth - which must provide him a strong sense of continuity that women rarely enjoy. If a man questions who he is it is not because he is wearing someone else's name. Women however, until fairly recently, were identified with whoever owned them at the time. And ownership was exactly what marriage was about from its inception in the dark past to present day. A couple of goats changed hands and a young woman is relabeled like a can of peaches. She is assigned a name - a toe tag to drag along through life. Instead of someone’s daughter, she is suddenly someone’s wife and must learn all over again who she is - and if the marriage is at some point terminated she is set adrift upon the world, nameless.
And so here I am right now - Cora Jane Dooley, sitting on a log on a silky cool beach watching young men push their boards out toward the sunset, my creaky bones aching from sitting so long on that hard log, my fingers numb in linty pockets, and my stomach reminding me that lunch was a distant memory. Only a little while longer, I told it.
The sun proceeded toward the horizon in its orderly, predictable way. Soon the bank of low clouds flowing in from the west ignited into purple and salmon splashes out across the sky. Yes, that was what I was waiting for. One by one the boys splashed out of the water, dragging their tethered boards. They were a procession of ungainly birds squeaking and dripping toward the parking lot, where they stripped off their rubber suits, stowed their boards in their glistening gray SUVs and drove off looking for the perfect pepperoni pizza.
I righted my rusty bike and rode a last wave of strength home to Blue Moon Bay Mobile Manor.
TO BE CONTINUED .....
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