A Match to the Heart (19 page)

Along the road, yuccas sent up their long-stalked flowers—creamy white candles, and on my walks at night, if there was no moon they brightened my trail. But when the full moon came around again it shone a tapering path on seawater that led from El Capitan to Point Conception: a candle lit in the land of the dead.

chapter 28

The mustard held sway on the hills. At the beach, Sam lay in elliptical slices of shade cut out of dark air by returning swallows. In the curve of the coastline, a mother whale and her calf—California grays-fed and rested thirty yards from shore. After they left I walked up the hill through yellow alleys, under monumental bouquets that opened out into green parks, then tightened into black sage jungles with pom-poms of purple flowers skewered on long stalks, which, farther up, gave way to scattered oak trees.

Back on the beach, fourteen vultures were pecking holes in the side of a dead seal and they flew up as I approached, welding together in the sky like a single black cape. Was this the hood that would flop over my head and send me down underwater? A vulture's sense of smell, not sight, directs it to prey. I hoped I was not giving off a wrong signal.

It wasn't death that came to my door that afternoon but Sam in great distress. I had heard an odd noise in the house but ignored it. Then he appeared, jerking in convulsions. I flew to him as his eyes rolled back and he fell over on his side.

On ranches I'd helped resuscitate calves with mouth-to-mouth respiration; I clamped my hand across Sam's muzzle and leaned down to breathe into his mouth when his eyes opened and he gave me a puzzled look, that said: “What the hell are you doing now?”

Gathering him in my arms, I laid him on the seat of the pickup and careened down the winding road to the vet. By the time we arrived he was looking quite well. Subdued but bright-eyed, he must have wondered what the rush was all about. The vet checked him for poison, bowel obstruction, fever, and infection but he passed all those tests. I told her we'd both been struck by lightning and that many lightning survivors later suffered from epileptic seizures. She concurred. “That's how he's behaving. He'll be tired now but he won't remember the incident. He'll be fine.”

That night he lay with his head on my lap during dinner at a friend's beach house. A cool breeze lapped the front porch as we drank wine and ate steak. Sam didn't want any steak, he only wanted to sleep. The sound of the ocean and the flat-handed leaves of a sycamore tree lulled him, would heal him. Since being struck by lightning he had become hypervigilant: even the sound of popcorn popping in the microwave sent him cowering to another room. I thought of the woman on the beach who thought he looked like a god.... He wasn't a god that night, only a mortal whose body had been ravished by Zeus. The seizure was eidetic—a physiological reenactment of electricity's chant echoing in cranial chambers. Later, a friend called and said, “I was just thumbing through a Japanese dictionary and saw that the radical for
god
is the same as the one for
lightning.”

In one last storm, the moon was overtaken by clouds, as if its filaments had been crushed, and lightning's stun gun brought the sea into view—momentary, spasmodic bursts of white. The wall that stood in front of a hotel was torn away and the unfinished living room of a house being built filled with breaking waves.

A friend who had gone surfing said, “It started raining and the sky and water turned white and I saw someone stand up on his board in the lightning and there was white light all around him. He looked like an X-ray riding the last wave.” The Chumash, many of whom lived at the water's edge and paddled their thirty-foot canoes across the channel, said of lightning: “Beware, that is an element from the hand of a power that caused us to see the world.”

chapter 29

A wave is a disturbance on the surface of a body of water, a kind of derangement. Waves are born when wind drags itself across calm water and the friction pinches it up into ripples and wavelets, which later become waves. Wind, the ever-present gardener, thins out the smaller, weaker ripples by pressing them into whitecaps and in a saga of bathrhythmic natural selection leaves the larger wavelets to grow. As these swells move out from the winds that raised them, they take on a voyager's shape: less steep and wind-resistant, their crests become rounded, and they travel in sets, or “trains,” of similar period and height for hundreds, even thousands, of miles.

Most of us are so earthbound, so terracentric, we think of the continent as the centerpiece around whose edges oceans lap. But to a set of waves journeying across the Pacific, the sea is the central body into which the lithosphere rudely bumps. The life of a wave ends at the edge of the continent where water becomes shallow. As they approach the shore, their length suddenly decreases, and to compensate, the waves slow down and steepen. The shallow bottom refracts waves: they are bent, not by a twist of wind but by the shape of the ocean floor. For a moment the wave is a mirror image of underwater contours, then, as it moves into critically shallow water, its back is broken and the long-distance runner falls.

The gravitational influences of sun and moon drive the tides. A full moon pulls the waters into a bulge; and spring tides, when sun and moon are aligned with the earth, bring on the big waves; and big waves bring surfers. In spring the surf came up, and the report on the marine weather station brought surfers in droves. They migrated from Rincón to “Hammonds,” to “Edwards,” to El Cap, to Jalama, running down twisting paths to the beach with their boards.

If human beings are fire watchers they are also wave watchers: eight-to-ten-foot waves had been predicted. After the tide passed its negative low point, it came back in with a storm-driven fury. Migrating godwits and plovers waited out the bluster on beach rocks, but the surfers ran to meet the waves that had journeyed so far for their pleasure.

Slathering sand on their boards for better grip they leapt on and paddled into walls of water, grabbing their boards and rolling under the foam. Positioned far out, they waited, paddling, sometimes gaining, sometimes losing a swell that rolled under them, until finally they were propelled forward as if the whole ocean were just that one wave.

 
 
A wave is speed plus time equaling distance that has taken a particular shape. Surfers are destiny's warp, turning in the gyre, twisting time backward, paddling against current, wind and tide, then with it, turning back into the wave's curl. Surfers are acrobats of time.

Between sets of waves there is a gap, like the one between living and dying. The waves are time and surfers ride time's back. Then they glide over the gap, erasing limbo, but before reaching shore, they reverse their direction, as if turning back a clock, and meet waves head-on, where white water pushes down on their necks, releases them into a lull until the next set of waves.

 
 
To fall is to rise.... Random pressure fluctuations in the turbulent lower atmosphere create perturbations on the water and, in turn, these disturb air flow: all one current. Underwater we can't find where anything begins or ends, and up on top between sets of waves, surfers rise and fall, sliding around in the amniotic bardo of water that mirrors ground but is in no way solid.

A ringing phone woke me.

“Do you want to go to the islands?” Jim and Hillary asked.

“When?”

“In half an hour, and bring the lunch.” Their boat is a twenty-five-foot Radon, designed and built in Santa Barbara for urchin and abalone divers. A small forward berth, hung with wet suits and flippers, opened onto a wheelhouse, with a broad deck behind where the air compressor is mounted on the stern and lengths of hose were coiled—air for the divers. Against the winch on top of the cabin, two surfboards were wedged, pointing toward the open water of the channel.

By eight-thirty we had passed the breakwater and glided in fog past bell buoys and channel markers. There was a northwesterly wind at twelve knots and a three-foot swell—choppy but not gut-wrenching. “See those little white clouds coming over the tops of the mountains?” Jim said, pointing over his shoulder. “We call those catpaws, or the fingers of death, because they mean twenty-knot winds in the outer waters.”

We passed large groups of shearwaters resting mid-migration, and seals hooked their flippers to rafts of kelp and slept until we roared by. Halfway out we could see neither mainland nor islands. The sky was gray and the water was inkwellgreen. We crossed a current line—one side was wrinkled and dark, the other, metallic and blue. Then the limestone cliffs of the western end of Santa Cruz loomed above us and the sky cleared.

What had been a three-foot northwesterly swell was now much larger, maybe eight or nine feet, and we slid down green slopes of unbroken waves into troughs that were all chop at the bottom because the current was going the other way. This was the infamous “Potato Patch” that had downed ships and boats much grander than ours. We were like a bar of soap bobbing, slamming down so hard we had to hang on to keep from hitting our heads. In the stern, Hillary's two dogs stood splay-footed, their bear-cub ears flattened, their black hair wet with spray.

Twenty-six miles out, between two islands, where the water was too deep to anchor, Jim tied the boat to a clump of seaweed—a kelp tie—the way we tied horses to sagebrush in country where there were no trees. Squadrons of pelicans and seagulls sat on each end of the beach and the backsides of breaking waves were aquamarine and turquoise.

We moved over a forest of kelp. “I want to dive here,” Hillary said, squeezing into her pink and black wet suit. Tall, loud-voiced from deafness, she's a veteran scuba diver who has been in the waters off the Great Barrier Reef, all around Mexico, in the Caribbean, and in the southern and northern Pacific; and perched amid the diving and surfing gear at their house is her Steinway on which she's happy to serenade any visitor with Chopin nocturnes.

Looking down at the swirling canopy of kelp was to look at the top of a great forest. What lived beneath was much more interesting than the skin of the sea. A kelp forest houses and hosts hundreds of marine animals. Norris topsnails eat its fronds; crabs and lobsters use it as a ladder, eating invertebrates on the way; abalone feed on drift kelp—fronds that have been discarded—and bottom fish and schooling fish live in its shelter.

Hillary stepped into fins, mouthed the regulator, and tumbled backwards into the sea. As she swam away from the boat, Jim fed out air hose, then stopped. “That's enough.... She'll never come back if I keep giving it to her,” he said gruffly, never taking his eyes off the water. “This is what my tender does all day, for hours and hours. He watches the hose, he watches for my bubbles.... You don't want a guy who's going to go to sleep on you when you're a hundred feet down with no air,” Jim said.

The swell was sloppy. We rocked and rolled. Jim tugged on the air line, signaling Hillary to come back. Finally water bubbled at the stern and her head popped up. “God... I was down in a canyon and it was filled with bat rays... hundreds of them... five feet across, flapping all around me.”

We motored to the lee side of the island. Jim eyed the surf as we went. “The waves out here are hollow tubes; they're scary and beautiful. We call the end section of these waves ‘the toilet bowl' and try to make it through to the end without getting flushed,” he said grinning.

The swell flattened and we dropped anchor near a beach. Jim pulled the surfboards off the cabin roof and threw them in the water. Hillary dove in, then Jim handed their two dogs, Skippy and Minke, to her and she placed them on one of the surfboards. Holding the board with one arm, she paddled alongside, and in the slack between sets of waves, the dogs rode to shore.

Jim was a pink arch arrowing into translucent water. Twenty feet down the bottom was visible—that's how clear it was. He emerged and saw me sitting on the rail in cutoffs and a T-shirt. “Well?” he asked.

“I left my string bikini in Wyoming,” I said. I hadn't been in the ocean for thirty years but I wanted to go in; I wanted to blast the gray cocoon in which I had been suspended when my heart had stopped. “It won't hurt you,” Jim said, laughing. I jumped. This wasn't a turbulent hell realm into which I was leaping, but the real sea with its china-blue elixir cushioning me.

Opening my eyes underwater, I was swimming in sparks. The shell of my body lifted off and was destroyed as cool water flowed in over new skin. Like a frog, I did the breast stroke, plowing despair aside. Pale blue poured in with bright light, as if, coincident with the theory of relativity, mass was exerting an influence on particles of light even though those particles were massless.

Earlier I had thought about a small Tantric scepter—a vajra—sent to me by a friend in Nepal. Small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, its five prongs stand for aggression, pride, passion, jealousy, and ignorance. Old friends. It's said that the sharp edges of the prongs are like razor blades: a reminder that we will cut ourselves if we live without awareness, precision, and basic sanity.

Vajra is associated with blue and with water, and people with vajra-like personalities are keen-minded and open to the multifacetedness of any experience—a diamond-like quality of mind that operates with unconditional clarity.

Bending my legs at the knee, I kicked out straight: the vajra spun, churning out diamonds until my head broke the surface of water. Up top, huge swells undulated, lifting and dropping, then slowed, steepened, and broke as waves. They frightened me. I bided my time for the lull, then, between sets, swam for shore.

On the deserted beach we cast off our clothes and rolled in hot sand because the breeze was cool. With the two surfboards we made shade for the black-haired dogs. Hillary took their collars off so they could be naked too. Soon we were hot and began to swim back to the boat for drinking water. My timing was off and the undertow too strong and a wave caught me. I looked around just as its crest dropped down on top of my head. As Jim would say, I was getting flushed.