Sandman redux sample 2

3

November 2010

I return to the beach to unwind after a funeral. A childhood friend has lost his father, and I’m relieved to say my goodbyes to the families I’ve spent the past few days with and take some time to myself. I have listened to others for two straight days and now I will listen to my beach, to myself, and uncoil.

As I sit for a while in my car, I am struck again by memories of my childhood. Perhaps this is the way of it. Perhaps I must play the first few chapters of the story of my life before I am allowed to view the rest, or to put it all away for a while. The beach is like that. It dictates pace as well as content.

This place has always felt like my private sanctuary at this time of year. I can rant, pace, spar, twirl, scream, and go through any and all kinds of maneuvers—in short, be myself here.

No matter what time of year, I feel compelled to remove my shoes when I get up on the sand. There is something so satisfying about walking on beach sand in your bare feet… especially (and perhaps surprisingly) cold sand. It’s a sensation that every human should experience.

So, even though it’s November, I slowly and methodically remove my shoes and socks and place them neatly by the short stack of stairs that lead up from the parking area to the stretch of sand that leads to the water. I walk back and forth, working my toes into the sand, surveying the beach in both directions for anything out of the ordinary that might have drifted ashore.

Rarely do I find kindred spirits. Sometimes I find a “treasure.” No, I don’t mean money or jewelry. One must be willing to patiently comb the beach with a metal detector like some pop culture archaeologist (aka retired person with loads of time on their hands) in order to find that kind of treasure. I mean the treasure that comes in the shape of a perfectly and miraculously unscathed scallop or clam shell, or a smooth, worn stone, or a piece of wood that had been shaped and carved by the sea into something indescribably beautiful. The ocean is an artist. I can still remember a few of the trinkets I have pulled from that beach over the years.

Most notably, and coincidentally the plainest artifact I possess, is a two-inch oval of smooth, white stone. I carry it with me on these excursions to the beach, and today I pluck it from my coat pocket and am immediately pulled into a wave of thoughts and imaginings about how it came to me, its origin, its path, its story. How long had it been a plaything of the ocean, tossed about and flung against rock, ocean bottom, and mile after mile of sand? Where had it begun? Where had it been? I also still have a foot-long piece of driftwood I rescued from the sea when I was eleven. Everyone who sees it thinks it looks like a small dolphin. To me it looks like something alien. These are the kinds of things you keep in your study and occasionally pick up and handle. They are surprisingly powerful in that they can transport you to another time and another place with a touch.

I put my treasure back in my pocket. As the sound of the waves surreptitiously works on my subconscious mind—relaxing my body and soothing my frantic thought patterns—I begin to put words together in interesting patterns and rhythms, to formulate cohesive lines of verse. I’m drifting back to my teen years for a moment now.

Poetry and the beach always seemed like such a natural fit to me. I began writing poetry in my head, and later transcribing it onto paper, when I was a teenager. When I could put the world out of my thoughts for a while—which the sounds of the surf and wind and gulls helped me to do—my mind would work pretty much on its own, seeing and interpreting and deconstructing the world in its own unique way. I just had to get out of the way. The words that arranged and re-arranged inside my head were important to me, yet they could also be as fleeting and as easily cast off as a winter coat when you come in from the cold.

I don’t think I ever really grasped the significance of anything I did at the beach. It never occurred to me that I was doing something creative or healthy or therapeutic. In my mind it all seemed like just another part of my being. It was as simple as that. When I went to the beach I calmed down, I emptied myself, I wrote poetry, I filled myself, I assessed my world, I learned to accept myself, I emptied myself, and so on. And it certainly never occurred to me that one day taking a trip to the beach would be much more difficult, that it would not be an everyday occurrence. It never occurred to me that life would twist and turn as I grew older and pull me further and further away from the beach… inland… to the suburbs.

This, as common sense dictates, makes one yearn all the more for the thing one cannot have. I find myself thinking about the beach all the time. Not in terms of waves or sand or sky, but in terms of the connective memories evoked by thoughts of waves, sand, sky, and the like. I picture dunes and I think of high school senior week. I picture a marsh and I think of riding by on my bike and witnessing an osprey plucking a helpless fish from the shallows and swooping away. I picture rough surf and high winds and I think of that cowboy hat. It’s a sensitive high-wire act. It’s a lesson in plumbing the depths of the mind. It’s a ride through acres and hectares of thought and experience and life lived. The beach connects me to my past and grounds me like nothing else on earth.

So when I return home after a trip like this I am usually overwhelmed with collected memories, some sad and some glad, exciting and mundane, carefree and careworn. I succumb to fits of melancholy. In fact, I dive into them, hoping to wrench from the cobwebs of my suburbanized mind the colorful, hopeful, all-encompassing past—the history that insists on remaining hidden while I live my suburban dream life.

When I visit the home of my youth, I lower my head, furrow my brow, and take it all in. It’s a conscious decision to relive a part of my life. I give in to sorrow and open up to joy. I swallow my youth and spit out only the detritus. Figuring out what that is… that’s the real work. So far, minimal spitting. I think that what happens many times when we try to do this sort of work is we swallow more than we intend. We swallow it and it resurfaces later, at the most unexpected times.

4

A Spy – Summer of 1969

Riding or walking to the beach presents another set of memories. It always seemed to take longer to get there than it did to return. I guess that’s why the trip to the beach was full of anticipation and straining to concentrate. The roads were narrow, winding, and the tar was cracked and aged and crumbling in some places—that special brand of tar that looks and feels like it has been the base component of roads for centuries. I picture the ancient Romans rolling their chariots and wagons over these surfaces millennia ago.

It’s rough, pocked, and has jagged edges. Its blackness has long since worn to a dull gray. It has given way to roots from roadside trees, bulging up like giant worms crawling just beneath the surface. Even the white line in the center of the road (if there ever was one) tends to be faded or grayed. The drivers on these roads need no lines; they simply divide the road in half and (hopefully) stay on their respective sides… and try not to hit kids on choppers.

Scrub pines line all the roads, some large, some not so large, all gnarly. They are interspersed with the occasional towering oak... or not so towering oak. In fall, acorns and pine cones crunch or spin away under my tires. The cacophony of leaves interacting with my tires and with each other is a subtle undercurrent to the click-clack from the baseball cards poked in my spokes.

The slate gray sky backdrop enables me to see every detail of my world. There is no glare. As I round the corner onto Scroll Street, I can see the entire layout of the marsh. It’s the only part of the only road that offers a dominant view of the snug little inlet marsh that stretches a quarter mile to the edge of the parking area of the beach beyond. Its long, thick, mostly straight main channel is like a tree trunk with dozens of streamlets, or branches, wandering off in all directions, stretching inexorably toward the Atlantic.

There are a wide variety of birds that patrol the area; there is good feeding here. Gulls, terns, hawks, the occasional osprey. I found out pretty early on that if you wanted ospreys you had to build a habitat for them. Some communities make it a point to provide space for a bird like that. But here, at and near my beach, this is a natural bird lover’s paradise. It is a young boy’s personal zoo. I would sometimes come here to sit and think (I had found a nifty little hideaway out of sight pretty early on—boys on excursions into nature have a way of doing that); however, I usually opted for the waves and their company at the beach proper.

This marsh is a quiet place. It lacks the white noise and perpetual motion of the shoreline. I discovered that I think more clearly in a pervasive din than in peaceful solitude. So the thoughts that dominated my mind when I rested here were larger, more life consuming, than the poetry and calls to action and strategies I conjured at the beach. Each place has its purpose, I guess. Each environment offers a stimulus, or lack of stimulus, suited to a type of personality or mood.

I could see that the circling gulls had fed; they didn’t squawk quite so much. They had undoubtedly gorged themselves on the abundant shellfish here; they circled incessantly, somehow reluctant to return to the colony that helped shape the personality of the shoreline. These gulls were content to scope the area again and again, focusing on pestering the other birds that attempted to feed. Perhaps this was a defensive strategy designed to inhibit other species from frequenting their favorite dining area. I sure as hell didn’t know, nor did I really care; I simply enjoyed their airplay and dogfights as they circled one another and vied for space in the sky above and around me.

I was just hoping I didn’t get pooped on.

One thing about the beach I have always found fascinating is that, if you spend enough time there, the days tend to melt into one another; the months and years do likewise. I have memories from my teen years that are less vivid than the cowboy hat incident; I also have memories from my thirties that are as clean and clear as though they happened yesterday. Like everyone else’s, my memories tend to be amalgams: multiple incidents fusing into one, or many people melting together to become one character. Perhaps it’s the mind’s way of performing a disc defragmentation, consolidating storage space, or releasing the info in the buffer to make room for more.

Anyway, one amalgam that is particularly meaningful to me involves the snack bar. This wooden structure was (and still is) the centerpiece of the beach. It stands on the equivalent of about a third-of-an-acre of land at the entrance to the beach road. The building itself is gray and weathered, with white trim (quintessential Cape Cod look and feel); it is square and nondescript. Its distinguishing feature is the wrap-around deck that leads to the men’s and women’s dressing rooms and bathrooms on either end. In the center, at the top of five very wide stairs, is the series of openings from which the workers inside take and fill your orders for assorted beach fare: burgers and dogs, french fries, drinks and ice creams, and (a seasonal favorite) clam rolls.

The feature that most struck me then, and still does today, is the wide set of stairs at the front center of the building. Plain wooden plank stairs. Each board is perhaps 25 or 30 feet long. That is a wide set of stairs. It may have been multiple boards placed end-to-end to make each stair, but what child remembers things like that?

Practically everyone going in or coming out of the women’s or men’s facilities, or buying beach food, uses the stairs. What a place to hide and watch the world.

Since the building is at the beach—and essentially built on the most shifting of surfaces, sand—it sits atop pilings driven deep into the ground.  Therefore, it is for all practical purposes built on stilts. This may be common to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where hurricane driven water encroaches on property on a regular basis, but on the Cape it was a little less common. It seems to have been restricted to beach buildings, like the snack bar, or pier structures. So, to a kid with a healthy imagination, the thing that really sticks out is the fact that the entire underbelly is exposed—especially a kid raised on “The Rifleman,” “Rat Patrol,” and “Mission Impossible.” One look and I heard the whisper “come crawl under me… you can see everything from down here… and the enemy cannot see you!” I heeded the call from about the age of five and was repeatedly found under there, scoping out enemy activity, learning little life lessons, and generally scouting the area. By the time I was seven or so, if my Mom was getting ready to leave the beach and couldn’t immediately locate me, she knew exactly where I’d be: under that snack bar.

This was the 60s, and it was common practice for parents to temporarily lose their kids. On the Cape there didn’t seem to be the ever-present fear of truly losing your child; it was more of a misplacing, a momentary lapse of direct knowledge of where said child might be; he must be around here somewhere; goddamnit, I told that kid to stick close; if he’s under that stupid snack shack again; what the hell does he do under there anyway? The world had not yet devolved into what it is today: a place in which one must keep an eye on one’s offspring every second of every day, for fear that they will be horrifically plucked up and permanently swept away.

Not only was my perch under the snack bar a unique vantage point for viewing the beach world, but it was also a great place to pick up tidbits of some very odd conversations—fathers complaining to daughters about hanging around with the local boys who trolled the beach, or mothers scolding little boys for going off without telling them where they were going. But to me the most interesting snippets of conversation came from the kids when there were no parents around to hear them. That’s when I got a truly unabashed view of the world, from a kid’s perspective. No holds barred. No censorship. In short, what I heard were the unusual spates of truth from kids who learned at a very early age when and where—and how much—to lie to grown-ups.

My sisters treated me fine for the most part, but they filtered everything. They had to. They had responsibilities to my parents. They couldn’t be held accountable for their little brother hearing or saying or doing anything outside the family norm. They would be blamed.

But when I had the opportunity to hear kids say what was on their minds without fear of reprisal, it was exhilarating. It was eye opening. It was an awakening. I was learning. And isn’t that what our parents always told us was important? To “learn something” from what we see or do. My friends and I didn’t talk like the kids I listened to from under the snack bar. We talked about sports, TV shows, how stupid this brother or that sister was, or how this parent or that grandparent or every teacher wasn’t going to let us do THIS or lectured endlessly about THAT.

But mostly we talked about superheroes and mean teachers and goofing around: that inane, innocuous, nebulous banter that kids who are completely comfortable with one another—and know the most minute details about each other’s lives—would share on a daily basis. Things like “I saw a frog with one red eye yesterday down at Rinky Dink.” Or “There’s no way Mighty Mouse can take Superman.” Or “Mrs. Zorgoni poked me in the chest last Tuesday. Hard. When we were lined up to leave at the bell and the bell rang, I started to leave—since I was in the front of the line—and she poked me in the chest with two fingers. Hard. Like this.” Not much more.

By the way, “Rinky Dink” was the small pond/swamp/aggrandized sinkhole at the end of the dead end road on which my family lived. It was a fun place for ice skating in the winter (if you don’t mind the occasional spear of marsh grass sticking up through the ice and sending you sprawling) and exploring in the summer (if you’d rather be ferreting around in the muck than frolicking at the beach). It had frogs, turtles, long-necked and -legged birds, strange varieties of undergrowth, and hedges of thick brush around its edges (excellent for hiding). It rested in a flat bowl twenty or thirty feet below street level, which basically meant it was below sea level. It was a wet place. When you reached the end of my road and looked down into it, you could see the entire pond and take in most of the surrounding growth. It was mysterious while being completely mundane. It offered everything a kid could want for year-round intrigue and adventure, that is, when he or she took a break from the wonders of the beach.

But more on Rinky Dink later…

The kids’ conversations I picked up from beneath the snack bar were completely different from the conversations I had with my friends—one hundred and eighty degrees different. It proved to be an eye to the world for me, a hidden microphone in the locker room of life. I was learning something about the world “off Cape,” you know, where the rest of the world existed. They would say things like “Sally’s boobs are way bigger this summer. She can’t even hide them any more in that bathing suit.” Or “Gail is such a bitch” (this was the first time I had heard the word bitch, other than in the description of a female dog—very exciting). “All she does is sit on her fat ass [ditto for the word ass] all day and expect everyone to wait on her hand and foot.” And my favorite: “Kyle touched my ass yesterday at the Salt Water Taffy. He tried to cop a feel with his elbow after that. I thought I was gonna puke! Who does he think he is? He knows I like David!”

It was fascinating! A whole new world in which other people moaned and complained and, yes, bitched about family and friends.

Once, as I settled in beneath the snack bar with an elaborate plastic telescope I’d received the previous Christmas, looking to scope out some righteous babes sunbathing on the nearby beach, I overheard something that changed my perspective on females forever. (Let’s make one thing clear here: although I say I was “scoping out some righteous babes,” I was not; in my head I was, because that was what I had heard older guys did; but I was mostly spying on whatever caught my eye.)

That said, I distinctly remember a tall blond, perhaps fourteen, sitting on the top step slurping an orange popsicle—I knew this because beneath her in the sand was a growing orange puddle of slush. She was racing against time and the power of the sun and talking to a short, pig-tailed redhead with glasses and braces. The redhead had finished her soda and continued to suck loudly through the straw, trying to catch that last drop of liquid from the melting ice—over and over (and over) again.

The blond, Maddy, began, “So, I asked my mother what was going on with Megan [her little sister, I surmised], and she told me to mind my own business.” She looked at Tess, the redhead, with an indignant, then disgusted face. “Sorry, Mom, I thought my little sister was my business. Honestly.” Heavy, exasperated sigh, rolling eyes; you get the picture.

“And so what do you think is going on? Is Megan okay?” Tess seemed genuinely sweet and interested.

“I couldn’t get a thing from my Mom, I can tell you that. So, like, last Saturday when I, like, went into the bathroom I found out for myself. Megan got her period!”

“You’re kidding!?!” Tess was simultaneously overjoyed and astonished.

Quite frankly, I didn’t get what all the fuss was about. I had three sisters, and they all had their periods… and at the same time! What was the big deal? They answered that for me with the next exchange.

“Now she can get pregnant, dumbie! Don’t you see what this means? I’m gonna to have to watch her like a hawk for the rest of my life!” My sisters had never mentioned this crucial little fact in their tiresome conversations about periods.

“What a drag!” said Tess, rather dutifully. “Sucks being, like, an older sister. I suppose you’re going to have to, like, explain everything to her…”

Maddy, dramatic, nearly crying: “Yes, I suppose so. My responsibilities never end. I can’t believe, like, God is doing this to me! Like I don’t have enough to worry about with tenth grade coming up! Geez!”

And on it went. A parade of tears, fears, wonder, and misplaced rage. Absolutely mesmerizing and enlightening.