Driving Home, page 22
So watch the visitor standing in front of an illuminated real-estate agent’s window in a foreign town, searching surreptitiously for that other life that has somehow escaped her until now. Her face is a study as she scans the laconic poetry of hectares, kitchens, beds, and baths. She’s raising goats from a tumbledown farmhouse in Provence. She’s writing a screenplay in a rented apartment overlooking a Pacific beach in Venice, California. She’s opening a small fish restaurant, with living quarters above, on the not-as-yet-entirely-spoiled Greek island of Litotes. Traveling, the self goes soft and pliable. You can recast your life in shapes you wouldn’t dream of when you’re stuck at home.
The good traveler is an inveterate snoop, always ready to poke his nose into other people’s business and ask impertinent questions. How much did you have to pay for your ox? How long does it take to learn to play the nose flute? So how did you come to lose your other leg? The surreal dottiness of phrase books is a true reflection of the fact that when people go abroad they really do say the weirdest things. But you have to ask some odd questions when you’re trying out someone else’s life for size. At home, I’m a grump; it’s as much as I can do to pass the time of day with the mailman and the checkout clerk. On the road, I am a champion pesterer, milking people for the workaday details of what they do and how they do it, and always the underlying question is Am I cut out for this, could this life be mine? So, in imagination, I’ve been an agricultural-machinery salesman in the Middle East, a barge operator on the Rhine waterway system, a drug smuggler in the Florida Keys, a tuna fisherman in the Cape Verde Islands. I’ve grown olives in Tuscany and established a salmon farm in the Hebrides.
Worming your way into the skin of a true denizen, you begin to see the landscape itself as a real place and not just as the pretty backdrop to your own holiday. But it is a risky exercise. One day, you’ll find a life that seems to be a perfect fit—and you’ll be there for good. The world is littered with travelers who asked one question too many, got a satisfactory answer, and never went home again. It happened to me. For the last four years I’ve been living in a place that I went to visit for a month. But I got talking to a stranger.
Sunday Times, January 1994
The Waves
I LOVE TO WATCH WAVES. Away from a suitable ocean, I’ll happily stand by a puddle in the street on a windy day, gazing at air transferring its energy to water. The obsession goes back a long way: the earliest known Egyptian hieroglyph depicts a wave, and so does the first Neolithic decoration on the rim of a cooking pot. Of all natural symbols, the breaking wave is the most laden with suggestive meanings. For several thousand years, the waves have been talking power and sex and death to us: it’s hardly surprising that we watch and listen to them so raptly.
Nowhere do waves break with more reliable splendor than on the melancholy coast of Oregon, where the great Pacific wave trains come to a spectacular end on beaches of pulverized green sand. Everything about the place is sombre—the crumbling basalt cliffs, the dripping conifers, the slanting gray cathedral light. This is not the shallow, pretty, recreational sea of Newport, Cannes, or Brighton. Too moody and frigid for boating or swimming (except by those hardy fanatics who go in for cruel and unusual self-punishment), it radiates menace even on days of balmy sunshine. Its utterly unfriendly character is caught in the names along Route 101, the coastal highway: Cape Foulweather, Jumpoff Joe, Humbug Point, Seven Devils, Devils Elbow, Devil’s Punchbowl, Devil’s Kitchen.
The highway is dotted with “waysides” where mute couples in Winnebagos sit for hours on end, staring at the ribbed swells as they roll sedately out of the fog and then explode in a seethe of powdery white. The couples look like devotees crowding in to see a famous epiphany. They have the stillness, the inward expression, of people in the presence of a religious mystery, as if something obscure in themselves were being answered by the crash and boil of the surf.
On the day of the autumn equinox, hoping for high winds (there’s no meteorological basis for the “equinoctial gales” of maritime mythology, but the end of September does seem to bring an awful lot of stormy weather), I dragged my wife, Jean, and two-year-old daughter, Julia, down to Bandon, Oregon, for a wave-watching vacation. We camped out in a scabbed beach cottage, close enough to the high-water mark for its timbers to shudder when a big comber hit the sand. We arrived in darkness. I slid open the glass door at the back of the cottage and let in the hollow growling of the surf, breaking beyond a line of low dunes. Julia, usually fearless, shrank from the sound.
“It’s a good noise. It’s the sea.”
“Sea?” Her voice was full of skeptical derision. The only sea Julia knew was the tame stuff of Puget Sound, where the waves barely tickle the miniature beaches on which they break. These Pacific waves had the raucous volume of a low-flying F-111. “Close door! Close door!” Julia said, her face crumpling in panic.
I stepped out onto the deck, sliding the door shut. Inside the cottage, Jean drowned out the scary ocean with the safe burble of the radio while I listened to the regular thump of the sea against the sand, punctuated at thirty-second intervals by the flat oboe note of the harbor foghorn a mile to the north.
The cliffs around us were a patchwork of lighted picture windows, each identical to the others—same standard lamp, same outward-facing director’s chairs, same telescope on a tripod aimed into the blue. As inland rooms look to the fireplace, these high-ceilinged living rooms seemed to be trying to warm themselves in front of the ocean. Where I could see activity in them, it was the cautious movements of the bad back, the replacement hip, the game knee. In the winter of life, the sea lulls and comforts. It has the look and sound of eternity without putting one through the troublesome formality of having to die for it.
The next morning, the foghorn was still mooing and the sky lay on the sea in wreaths and coils of smoke. We strolled through a low rain cloud to the beach, where eight distinct lines of breakers were pounding on one another’s heels. We led Julia to the edge of the “swash”—a broad glisten of water, thin as a sheet of Saran Wrap, that coated the sand for twenty yards or so ahead of the final, feeble breaker. The tide had begun to flood, and every few seconds the swash improved on its last effort by a matter of inches. Julia hid behind her mother’s knees and screeched, “Water coming! Water coming!”
The idea that the sea might just keep on coming has always been a source of anxiety. Eighteenth-century theologians liked to see the tideline as material evidence of God’s mercy: His divine finger had traced it in the sand when He commanded the waves to stop their advance, and by His Providence man was saved from being swallowed by the chaos of the ocean. The Salish Indians around Puget Sound believed the tideline was a kindness bestowed on them by the Changer, who, with the help of Raven, Supernatural Halibut, and other personages, had made the sea lay bare its clams for human consumption.
It’ll be a year or two before I can discuss theology with Julia. All she saw was the sea coming, a roaring monster on the loose, and, starting to squall, she tugged us back. “No talking! No sea! Go away! Go home!”
Bandon was already on short winter hours. The summer people had mostly gone, and CLOSED signs hung in the windows of half the restaurants, gift shops, and boutiques. Our footsteps echoed in the huddled grid of timber buildings that had once been a busy port. Until a few years ago, Bandon went to sea in a big way, shipping millions of board feet of lumber from the mills along the Coquille River and serving as home base to a fleet of fishing boats. But the Oregon forests were denuded now, the salmon and halibut fisheries very nearly exhausted, and Bandon like so many towns along this coast had to be content with merely looking at the sea from which it had once earned its living.
There was money to be made out of its sea view. Far from falling into decrepitude, the town was on a spree of new construction. Houses were going up all along the cliffs—strange architectural confections, part Spanish galleon, part Victorian bed-and-breakfast, part Florida condo, part log cabin. From every available nook and ledge they sprouted belvederes, crow’s nests, widow’s walks, and gazebos, so their owners could keep the Pacific under round-the-clock surveillance. With his eye clapped to his telescope and Old Glory flying from the foretop above his attic, the Bandon householder could spend his declining years brooding over the deep like Captain Ahab.
The gift shops were full of bright nautical junk with which to furnish the new houses: barometers to be tapped with a knowing forefinger; ship’s wheels for the wall; port and starboard steaming lights to go at each end of the mantelpiece. While the remains of its fishing fleet rotted on their moorings in the harbor basin, Bandon now went to sea in make-believe. So did Julia. At the children’s playground, she ignored the swings and slide and headed straight for a blue-and-white tugboat at anchor in a sea of woodchips. She waved us goodbye, clambered into the wheelhouse, and took off on long, solemn voyages of several minutes apiece, her face as intent as that of a novice skier on the coconut-matting slalom run. Whatever storms she braved among the woodchips seemed to embolden her in her encounters with the real thing. On the second day, she stood her ground, scowling frog-eyed at the waves. It was late afternoon, and the tide was on the ebb. She stared the sea down.
The Bandon waves were exceptionally mature and powerful. They had probably begun about two months before they reached Oregon, as wind wrinkles in the surface tension of the sea off the coast of Japan. A tiny differential in pressure between the windward and leeward sides of the wrinkle is enough to create an embryo wave, which then builds steadily in the westerly airstream over the Pacific. Properly speaking, a wave is not a configuration of the water but a pulse of energy that travels through the water, just as it travels through a cornfield in a breeze, passing from one set of stalks to the next. The stalks rise and fall but don’t move with the wave—nor does the water. The orchestrated wave that makes the circuit of a football stadium works in just the same way.
In deep ocean water, a wave train, once started, jogs effortlessly along: it will keep on going long after the wind stops. I imagine my young Japanese waves following the general drift of the weather toward the Gulf of Alaska, where they’re absorbed into one of the nearly continuous storm systems there, plumped up by a gale or two, and sent down to Oregon by a hard nor’wester. By the time they reach Bandon, they have a fetch of more than four thousand miles, which is huge—nearly twice the fetch of the North Atlantic waves whose thunderous arrival on the Cornish coast I used to watch when I was a child.
Long before they come ashore, waves begin to feel the drag of the sea bottom. This friction causes them to steepen and makes the intervals between them grow shorter. At Bandon, on a day of greasy calm, these shallow-water waves, making their final run for the coast, showed as bars of violet shadow a hundred yards apart.
To keep its shape, a wave needs water at least one and a third times as deep as it is high. The moment a ten-foot swell finds itself in less than thirteen feet of water, it’s in trouble. There’s insufficient water ahead to fill out the bulging sine curve of the wave front, and what should be convex is suddenly yawningly concave. The wave top thins into a translucent crest, rears upward, and the whole wave folds in on itself—water crashing into air, compressing it, exploding. The energy that began with the air is returned to the air, in surf as dense with trapped bubbles as egg whites in a kitchen mixer. The line of breakers on the beach is a fantastic dissipation of long-accumulated power. It is the fall of kings.
So at Bandon it was with the reverence due to doomed great ones that we watched the waves collapse: saw the diffused sunlight shine apple green through their refining crests; saw the moustache of foam spread suddenly wide across their lips, and then the break—the drum-roll climax, the boiling surf, the bronchial wheeze and gargle of spent water on flat sand. By the third day, braver now and newly educated in basic oceanography, Julia was saying, “Waves—big waves! Going crash!” In her new rubber boots she stomped in the waves’ gleaming aftermath and chased the sanderlings, who sprinted on stiff legs across the swash, pecking among the broken sand dollars and thumbnail mole crabs.
A breaking wave has the force of a ball hammer. In a 1953 study of the impact of waves on harbor pilings in Monterey, it was shown that a three-foot breaker—a baby—hit the pilings with a force of 226 pounds to the square foot. A Pacific storm wave will shake a whole coast like an earthquake.
Our beach was littered with signs of the wanton strength of the waves: bleached gray trunks of Douglas firs—escapees from the timber mills—flung about above the high-tide line like so many matchsticks; rotting tangles of bull kelp, torn from the seafloor; even the sand, ground as fine as face powder. For anything to live in the constant bludgeoning of the surf, it had to be armor-plated, or have fantastic powers of adhesion to the rock, or be able to burrow deep into the sand for shelter.
There were tide pools in the jagged spurs of basalt that ran out from the cliffs, and here I introduced Julia to the ultimate submarine tough guys. “Creature … running,” she said of a low-slung crab in sandy camouflage as it scuttled across the floor of the pool. I showed her how to feed a ballpoint pen to a malachite-green anemone. Its tentacles hesitantly closed around the cap, and Julia felt its queer, vibrant, otherworldly handclasp. “Creature … sucking!”
The tide-pool animals were magnificently alien, far beyond the reach of bunny-rabbit and dickybird whimsy, and Julia investigated them with unsmiling gravity, like a diplomat engaged in difficult negotiations with a possible enemy. She peered. She gently prodded. She rocked on her haunches, full of thought. The only report she was able to render back to her mother was the one word. “Creatures.”
At twenty-three months, Julia was a good deal better attuned than I was to the destructive violence of the surf zone. The beach itself, with its smashed seashells, randomly hurled rocks, and clumps of seaweed yanked out by the roots, looked as if a child of Julia’s age had recently passed by. On the dunes, she ran about tearing out fistfuls of marram grass and flinging them onto the sand. When Jean and I built sandcastles for her, with carefully crafted moats and battlements, she took aim with her boot and joyfully blasted them to bits. In the cottage, it took her five minutes or less to reduce our orderly, maid-serviced rental world to a storm-tossed rubble.
By the fifth day of the vacation, she was perfectly at home with the waves. She graduated from the lacquerlike swash to the boiling-milk edge of the surf, where the sea filled her boots and she yelled at the breakers, cheering them on with her fists like a demented football fan. There is a passage somewhere in Freud that argues that most of us have no memory of being younger than three because until that age we are possessed by such gales of lust, rage, and dizzy elation that it would be intolerable to recall them. Julia seemed to have found in the waves something grandly commensurate with her own oceanic inner turbulence.
“Wa-ay-ves,” she said back in the cottage, listening to the rumble of the surf at night. She drew the word out luxuriously and made it rise and fall like the waves themselves.
In Dickens’s Dombey and Son, little Paul Dombey, lying terminally ill in a Brighton boardinghouse, listens to the rolling waves outside his window and asks his older sister, “The sea, Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?” To him, of course, the talk of the waves is of his own coming death. To Matthew Arnold, in his “Dover Beach,” the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the ebb tide over the pebbles spoke of the receding tide of Christian faith as it exposed the hard, cold, secular, materialist new world of Victorian England. People hear in the waves what they bring to the waves, and if, like Julia, you bring to them an inexhaustible animal vitality and a delight in bangs and crashes for bangs’ and crashes’ sake, they’ll talk to you of life as surely as they talked of death to Paul Dombey. The zigzag pattern around the rim of the Neolithic pot, the crest of each wave poised for its downfall, is a universal symbol because it unites the extremities of human experience in a single continuous line. That’s why we went to Bandon.
Vogue, February 1995
Walden-on-Sea
IN APRIL 1895, when he sailed from Boston in a tubby homemade sloop on a solo voyage around the world, Joshua Slocum was fifty-one and on the run from his Furies. He was then barely on speaking terms with his second wife (“[My father] and Hettie did not pull on the same rope,” said Slocum’s youngest son, Garfield). He was at the bitter—and litigious—end of his seagoing career. His one published book, Voyage of the Liberdade (1890), had attracted little notice and almost no sales. If he had hoped to follow Dana and Melville into the ranks of seamen-turned-authors, he began from a position of huge disadvantage. His father had removed him from school when he was ten. His spelling and punctuation were stuck in the third grade. Later on, his letters to publishers would speak, unpromisingly, of “litterary production,” of his mind being “deffinately fixed” on his “voyoage.”*
Like Conrad (who was thirteen years his junior), Slocum was pigheaded in his attachment to sail at a time when the shipping industry was converting to screw-driven steamers. As a result, he captained a succession of elderly craft carrying second-rate cargoes and manned by third-rate crews. Two ships under his command ran aground on shoals and became total losses. In 1883, he was convicted in New York on a charge of cruel and false imprisonment of a crew member, whom Slocum kept in irons in a lazarette on a voyage from South Africa to the United States. In 1884, his beloved first wife, Virginia, died suddenly aboard the Aquidneck at Buenos Aires. She was thirty-four. In 1887, in Antonina, Brazil, Slocum shot dead one crew member and injured another; he was detained, tried for murder, and acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide. Four months later, he grounded the Aquidneck on a sandbar and for the next six years he engaged in a quixotic lawsuit against the Brazilian government, claiming $50,000 in damages for his lost ship. He returned from this misadventure, with his sons and his new wife, in an eccentric sailing craft named the Liberdade, built largely from the wreckage of the Aquidneck. The experience wasn’t a happy one for the second Mrs. Slocum. When Slocum invited her to join him on further cruises, she is reputed to have answered stonily, “I’ve had a v’yage, Joshua.”
