My First Ocean
Fragments: A series of short memories that made me
The waves keep calling me. I do not stay away.
The waves keep calling me. Slowly and gently or violent and white-capped.
The waves keep calling me.
My first taste of sand and salt came when I was eleven.
That summer, a newly separated father, a recently broken family, made me afraid to leave our new house, two-thousand miles away from the only city I had ever known.
I was a child of the Midwest. Land-locked and loyal to the lakes and rivers filled with fresh water, algae-slick rocks, and minnows. My horizon was stitched tight by trees, not torn open by sea and sky.
What did I know of the sea? It was a vast endless cold abyss that splintered ships, washed people onto deserted islands, and contained the scariest most ferocious monster on earth (besides the crocodile) that lurked and waited for its next victim.
Jaws.
And Jaws had friends, other great white sharks, hammerheads, and moray eels, all the featured creatures on that week’s episode of Wild Kingdom.
“Are there sharks in the lake,” I asked my dad.
“Mmm.... only small ones,” he would answer with a devilish grin.
“Do they bite.”
“Only a little.”
“Only if you swim slow,” my older brother would chime in.
“They might nibble a toe,” my dad continued. “But you can spare a toe or two.”
I quivered and imagined never ever being able to spend another summer with my friends by the lake. My mom ended the joke.
“Don’t tell her those things,” she said softly. “Baby, there are no sharks in the lake. Sharks live in salt water, far away, in the ocean. And there aren’t only just sharks, you know. There are seals and starfish and whales that sing. And dolphins. Dolphins scare sharks away. A dolphin would protect you.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Really,” she whispered.
“But dolphins don’t protect big babies,” my brother bellowed out as he jumped up from the couch and pretended to suck his thumb and cry.
Months later, the dolphins felt as far away as she did.
The new city pressed in around me. San Francisco, steep and strange, with fingers of fog creeping over rooftops, covering secrets. While my dad was at work, my brother and I stayed inside and watched music videos on MTV. I ventured out to the corner store to buy candy. It was summer, I hadn’t started school, so there were no school friends yet. My best bet would be the neighborhood. I had walked the block. Occasionally I sat on the front stoop of our house, waiting for other kids to stroll by, but they never came. No one seemed to play ball in the street or run along the sidewalks or ride bikes, not like our old neighborhood, not like where our old house was and where our mom still lived. No ice cream trucks came either.
My dad arrived home early one Friday and burst into the den.
“Turn the TV off, get your butts up, we’re going out!” he exclaimed. He was holding a bottle of champagne, sipping straight from it as he hurried out the front door. We followed, uncertain but eager for anything that might break up the monotony.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“Get in the car, you’ll see,” my dad answered.
I started slipping on my sneakers.
“You don’t need shoes where we’re going!”
He was already in the driver’s seat, the engine humming as I slid into the backseat of our brown station wagon. My brother had called shotgun. My dad sped down Balboa Boulevard, heading West towards the setting sun. The station wagon would fly off the ground a bit every time we cleared a hill.
“What are we doing, dad?” my brother asked as he white-knuckled the door and his seat.
“It’s a beautiful day and I’m showing you why.”
He started humming and continued to take swigs from the champagne bottle. I worried we would get in trouble. He was driving fast. He was drinking in the car. And he wasn’t wearing any shoes. It was weird to think of his big, bare feet touching the pedals. There had to be a law against it.
The wagon cleared once last small hill and then the sun came into view. Brilliant burst, wash of white, blocking the view for several seconds until my eyes adjusted and I saw we were at the beach.
“End of the road,” he said, voice bright and breaking at the same time. “Welcome to Ocean Beach.”
We all got out of the car and walked onto the sand, feet sinking into the cold softness, towards the shoreline. The sun was mid-horizon, still bright as copper, but the wind was fierce and the grey veil was moving in. Hazy was always lurking.
“Back in the ‘60s, we could build bonfires and drink wine. They don’t let you do that anymore. The hippies fucked it up.”
My brother and I both shivered as we followed him. He started humming again, sipping from his bottle, and doing a dance that was embarrassing to watch. I wanted to hide in shame but there wasn’t a person in sight. We had the vast beach to ourselves.
“Breathe in that air,” my dad yelled out. “Feel how clean it is, right down to your veins.”
We shivered some more.
“Listen to that roar,” he continued. “That exquisite sound of force and fury. It’s high tide.”
The waves were large, murky and dark, finished off with frothy tips as they churned against the sand bed. Dozens of little sandpipers would race back and forth, not allowing the water to touch their tiny pencil-drawn feet as they dug for sand crabs. Gulls in groups, some with bright white feathers, others grey, braced against the wind as it rippled through their feathers. Broken mussel and clam shells along with multi-colored stones were scattered along the shore.
On this day, I found my first sand dollar. It was the size of a half-dollar, smaller than some, but completely intact and imprinted with one perfect petal.
“We’ll bleach it when we get home,” my dad said. “It’ll be really white.”
I explored the beach, gathering rocks. On days when the tide was low, I would find undamaged shells and sanded down glass fragments, blue glass being the rarest, that I would collect and keep in recycled peanut butter jars. On this day, we trembled as we watched the sun set and raced back to the station wagon.
“We’ll stop home first for some shoes and some jackets and then we’re going for pizza,” my dad declared.
Going for pizza meant we’d be drinking pitchers of root beer and eating Antipasto salad and wolfing down piping hot, gooey cheese with mushrooms and olives and sausage and marinara sauce, and tons of fresh garlic. We were a hand-tossed, thin crust pizza family.
My fingers and toes and the tip of my nose tingled as we warmed up on the drive home. My hair was filmy and stiff, the skin on my cheeks was slightly crusty and my lips tasted of salt. I was aflutter.
That night, my belly full and my heart still achy, I fell asleep with the ocean roaring behind my eyelids.
The waves keep calling me. I do not stay away.
The waves keep calling me. Slowly and gently or violent and white-capped. The waves keep calling me.
And I answer.
I’m coming.