Cold, thick overcast, strong SW wind coming in across the sea: smells like snow.
I intend to be alone as I walk down the pathway between dunes to Popham Beach, just east of Cape Small, Maine. My left knee has hurt during the past month, but it’s better today. I am wearing my heavy boots and comfortable jeans. The tide is low, just now, and I want to get down onto the wide expanse of wet sand and stride along in the gathering darkness, letting the weight of my left boot exercise my knee. Otherwise I am bundled in my 2nd heaviest jacket, ski cap and gloves. I have not predicted the need for my heaviest jacket, or for my rabbit-fur bomber hat, my scarf, and mittens instead of gloves.
There is very little light. Peripheral vision works best. I steer my course to the beach by keeping the wind steadily on my right cheek. The sand surface at the top of the beach is dry and rough. There are occasional baulks of driftwood over which to trip. I trudge forward, not striding yet, pre-poised for balance in the event that a questing foot might strike a log. What light there is reflects off the curl of breakers as they smash far away. Retirement is the reverse of striving, and it is not easy to put myself into reverse.
When the tide is very low at Popham, it is possible, this year, to walk out across acres of flat, wet sand all the way to Fox Island, a high bump of seamed granite standing fifty feet above the bar which connects the island to the mainland. You can do this, this year, almost without wetting your feet. Each year, the shape of Popham Beach is changed by the powerful effects of tide flow, prevailing wind, welling of fresh water from the marsh behind the beach, and the angle of the crashing seas. Some years, even at lowest tide, you must wade through a stream across the bar that is a foot deep, and swiftly flowing from west to east. Not this year; change is all around me.
I make my way down through the dry sand to the wet. The waves crash fifty yards away, making their sullen roar. I angle down across the fifty yards and turn my course toward Fox Island, guided by the crescent of the breakers. I am lower now, and the height behind me of the dry part of the beach shields me from some of the wind. I unzip the top half of my jacket and pick up my speed to a purposeful stride, swinging my left boot with vigor. My knee is stiff but it enjoys the stretch. Long way to go, in the dark, to the island.
What are we willing to give up? That is the question my wife and I ask ourselves.
I am nearing the island. I know that when I reach the island, I will first encounter points of granite which thrust out into the beach, leaving sand avenues into the island between its granite projections. I imagine myself making my way up a particular one of those sand avenues to where I must either climb the granite or turn back. Climb? How’s the knee?
One year ago, last winter, one month after retirement and three days before Christmas, I climbed that granite on a cold night such as this, all alone on the beach, but then the sky was utterly clear and spangled by stars. The Milky Way, bright as diamonds, seemed, too, to share my joy at the end of corporate conference calls.
That night, last year, I sang from a ledge on Fox Island; I can’t sing. But I sang. No one was around to complain. You should have heard me do Silent Night, again and again. I sang with such lusty enthusiasm that maybe (though probably not) it was melodious. This year, deafer than ever, even if my knee let me climb, I probably would not sing. But if I sat there on a ledge of Fox Island, as the world dropped entirely into black, I might settle on something else we were willing to give up. We had already given up most channels on cable TV; that was a start!
What I liked was the early to bed, the reading of good books just because I felt like it, the warmth of my wife, and the no nights away. What I liked was crafting these posts, and the books I’m finishing with my agent, and the thinking during daylight—on a weekday!—in theological terms. What I liked was requiring only a little money and not a lot. What I liked was our children and our grandchildren and having the time deeply to concern ourselves about their dreams, too. What I liked was that we had done it, during thirty years, that we had kept at it, and that we had not given up.
I reached the sand avenue into the island and then the granite ledges. My knee was good, and my hips felt loose, as though this evening were thirty years before. I climbed. I reached the saddle of the island, where the wind blew strong. It was past evening, almost night. Black around me; totally alone.
What? What was that? A flicker out of the corner of my eye, in the sky.
There it was again. Concentrating my sight, it came into view and then disappeared. When in view, it became a vast, curved, circumflex whipping back and forth in the sky. It must be…it was! It was a vast para-sail kite riding in the nighttime sky, a huge, C-shaped thing slicing the dark.
And if this sail were there, then some man must be there, too, controlling it in the dark by invisible lines.
Concentrating, I saw him then, vague against the shadowy beach. Now and then he was even up off the beach, four feet off the sand, being pulled along by the force of the wind in his sail. His arms were wide apart, steering himself with lines I could not see. He’d lower himself downwards until his heels, on straight legs, would touch the sand, and he would ski on his heels across twenty yards of beach and then thrust himself once more into the sky.
So…in fact, on this dark beach, there were two men, after all, one the contemplater and one the athlete. I had been an athlete such as he many years before, and maybe he would become a contemplater later, when his knees could no longer ski the sand by the force of the wind.
For what was he willing to strive during the next thirty years; what were my wife and I willing to give up?
When I descended finally from the granite of the island and set off back across the sand, my double had rolled up his kite and gone away. I really was alone on the beach now. My knee was beginning to stiffen back up.
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