Beachcombing at Miramar (12 page)

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.

T
he 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.

They were not always consistent in their public or their private lives. They could be devious, even calculating, when they
believed they needed to be. They were highly political, waiting for the favorable moment to speak, the propitious moment to
act. I accept all these traits as signs of their humanity. I admire these men because they were driven not by the winds of
ideology but by something deeper, something more profound. It was their compassion—not their creed, not their doctrine, not
their dogma—that changed the world.