Beachcombing at Miramar (11 page)

A few years ago, while traveling through the Scottish Highlands, I took an excursion boat through the Caledonian Canal into
Loch Ness. The sky was low and heavy mist blocked my view of the shore. I stood alone on the foredeck, looking across the
darkening waters. I could sense the monster of that far northern lake lurking below the surface, exerting a spell that held
me in place while the boat slowly circled the frigid body of water in which he dwelled. He did not appear.

Hours later, when the boat pulled into its berth, I was still standing in the same spot. I walked back to town along the banks
of the River Ness, resolved to return another day. The following morning I caught an early train to Aberdeen—but the need
to see the monster of Loch Ness remained in me. And now I find that the mythical creature is with me still as I walk the sands
of Miramar.

The penknife, the agate shooter, the baseball mitt, the gold coins, all have merged in my memory and are now one. All those
lost parts of my past life submerged, buried in the deep with the serpent of the lakes and seas. That is what draws me to
the edge of the ocean with rod and reel. I cast not for fish but for the leviathan.

Although I have never seen him, I know that the monster possesses no separate identity of his own. He is an aspect of me,
a part of my hidden nature, and I want to pull him up to the surface so I can look at him squarely and make myself whole.

A fine drizzle falls over Miramar, coating my hair. But there is a lightness to my step as I head for the shelter of my beach
house a mile away. I will not hurry; I will move so fast and no faster, even if it starts to pour. I feel as if I have shed
a burden that had been weighing me down for a long time.

The wind is high and the tide is in. I glance into the breakers; the urge to fish comes over me once more. I want to cast
my lure not for the mighty tug but for the nibble at the end of the line. If luck is with me, I might catch a perch or a cabezon.

I remember the nine-foot rod that was made perfectly to suit my purpose so many years ago. If I had it now, I could rig it
up and start to cast right away. Then I remember I left it on the other coast with my son Jeff.

When I reach the beach house, I make a longdistance call. Jeff answers. I ask if he still has the rod. “Of course I have it,
Pop,” he says. “I just used it the other day.” He tells me he took his five-year-old son, Trevor, to the same strip of beach
Bob and I fished from years before. He hooked a sea robin and Trevor reeled it in. “Now,” Jeff says, “he wants me to take
him back there every day.”

I walk out on my deck and watch the surf, curling high and crashing against the shore. The rain is now coming down hard, soaking
my skin, but I don’t care. I am aware only of how the past, present, and future are joined. From Grandpa Izzy to grandson
Trevor there are five generations, and we are fishermen all.

T
he wind comes up out of the southeast, damp and chill. By noon, an hour before the memorial service, the harbor is full.
The crowd gathers around the stone monument dedicated to commercial fishermen who have been lost at sea. Now there are four
more.They are strangers to me, but their names are indelibly imprinted on the tablet of my mind, as if they were members of
my family or my closest friends:

Who are these men—Pringle, Kovack, Fischer, Bronsema—and why should their deaths affect me so? I know nothing about them except
what I read in the newspaper or pick up in casual conversation on the pier. They were crab fishermen, I am told, good men,
family men, involved in the community.

They went out one morning in two vessels—Pringle and Kovack aboard the
Lisa
, Fischer and Bronsema aboard the
Best Girl
. The red flag was flying high over the harbor; most of the fishermen stayed in port. But these four went to sea. The wind
was gusting from the south; the swells were rolling from the north. They got caught in a vortex. Their heavy crab traps shifted
from side to side. The boats broke apart and sank.

A bagpiper plays at the far end of the pier, a plaintive sound, like the cry of a killdeer. The families, who left the harbor
earlier aboard a fleet of fishing boats, have been strewing flowers on the sea. Now, the private ceremony over, they are returning
home. The boats pass through the breakwater, enter the harbor, dock at their berths. The mourners disembark and follow the
bagpiper to the stone monument. They take their seats, surrounded by bouquets and floral wreaths. An anchor plaited with petals
hangs in front of them, beyond the monument, on a pale blue wall.

The crowd of a hundred or more stands behind them. I stand with them, looking for a familiar face. I don’t see anyone I know.
A priest appears, uses the monument as a pedestal. He gives a brief eulogy, then intones the names of the lost men. After
each name, a young girl strikes a ship’s bell, which resonates low and long across the pier.

A local poet sings a fisherman’s ballad. A woman who lost a husband and a son to the sea in separate accidents makes a plea
for faith in the Savior and everlasting life. Mothers and fathers, wives and daughters, sons and brothers, sisters and friends
rise and try to say what words cannot say about their grief. The service ends with “Amazing Grace.”

I stroll about the harbor, studying the ships. Somewhere along one of these floating piers there are two empty berths. Where
are the
Lisa
and the
Best Girl
now? Where are the men who owned and sailed them, and where are their mates? I am struck by the disparity in their lives.
One man dies at thirty-four; another lives to be more than twice his age.

My thoughts go back a half century to my mother’s death. I remember the wan face of a woman in a casket, a woman who barely
looked like my mother, and I remember how the room in the funeral parlor reeked of perfume. I took a rose from my mother’s
bier; afterward I placed it between the pages of a Bible. Years later I came upon the pressed flower in the Book of Psalms.
I held the stem between my fingers, twisting it slowly, remembering my mother, the kind of woman she was.

When I was little, she taught me how to push saliva under my upper lip and give a Bronx cheer. She touched my toe, my knee,
my chest, my head and called me “Toe-knee Chest-nut.” She put me on the back of a bike and pedaled up and down the streets
of Manhattan Beach, where she grew up, waving and smiling at all the people she knew. Those are the signs of her days, the
legacy she left me with.

I threw away the withered rose; it could not bear the weight of all that memory. What I treasured was the image of my mother
alive. Now I want to pass that image on, pass it on to my children, pass it on to my children’s children, for memory is what
I have of the mother who bore me.

But the tragedy of life is that in the inevitable course of history my mother will be forgotten, just as I will be forgotten,
just as the four fishermen will be forgotten. For who will take the pains to remember all those who came before me after I
am gone? The tragic part of death is not that I die, but that in dying I take with me the last vestige of those who survive
in my remembrance of things past.

When I am gone, what will my survivors say? Will they remember my minor deeds, the ones I cherish most? Will they remember
that once I sailed a sloop, once I edited a small-town newspaper, once I taught my daughter to read? And what will happen
when my survivors die? What will happen to their memory of me?

I once lived in a hilltop house above a cemetery dating back to the 1800s. From time to time I would climb over a low stone
wall and wander through the graveyard, examining the weathered and timeworn inscriptions on the headstones of the six people
buried there. I would try to piece together the relationship among them, try to figure out what happened to them when they
were alive, but the epitaphs were so eroded by the winds of a century that I could barely make out their names.

Who were these strangers who had their final resting place in my front yard? Does anyone remember them now—remember their
births, their marriages, the sounds of their voices, the way they walked? They dwelled for a while along the river of life,
did their dance, sowed their seeds, and now all that remains of them are bare granite headstones at the bottom of a hill.

They are but six among the untold millions since the dawn of humankind who have come and gone, leaving no trace, no fossil
memory of their passage. Kings, emperors, czars, presidents—we have accounts of them in our history books. We know about the
bard who wrote
Hamlet
, the musician who composed the
Eroica
, the mathematician who computed the gravitational pull of heavenly bodies. We know their names; we know their works. But,
for all their fame, we know little about the sensate life they lived in the flesh day by day—about their hopes for themselves,
their ambitions for their children, the daily deeds in which they took the most pride. And of the great mass of ordinary people,
we know nothing at all.

A close friend of mine survived a serious heart attack a dozen years ago. After he recovered, I went to see him on his farm
in central New York State. A small, vigorous man, he had always lived his life with a keen sense of adventure, never fearful,
constantly willing to test, probe, try something new. He had been a high school history teacher for thirty years. When he
retired, he bought sixty acres of prime grazing land and, as an experiment, began to breed beefalo, part bison, part cow.
In his spare time he painted, played the slide trombone, ran for Congress (he lost by nine votes), and managed a medical clinic
for the community.

I was afraid the heart attack might have slowed him down, but, if anything, he seemed more alive after the illness than before.
As soon as I arrived, he came bursting out his front door, a pail in each hand. He was wearing the same red peaked cap he
always wore to shade his eyes, and his beard, now pure white, was just as bushy as before.

We strolled together along the hedgerows, picking blackberries, eating a few, dropping most into our pails, pausing from time
to time to take in the countryside, the silos, the barns, the farmhouses tucked among the rolling hills. We were chatting
idly when he suddenly turned to me and said,“What do you think about death?”

I stood with my pail dangling by my side, staring at him for a long time, not sure what to say. I was disconcerted by the
question, startled that he raised it at a moment when I had blackberries, and only blackberries, on my mind. I had no desire
to discuss death, his or mine, to be reminded that it was there, waiting for us. But he had come face-to-face with death;
he knew it might strike him down at any minute, so he could not go on living his life as if it wasn’t there.

Sensing my discomfort, he dropped the subject. We went on down the hedgerow, picking blackberries until our pails were full.

But I wish my friend were with me now, in the aftermath of the memorial service for the fishermen, for I have reached a point
in my life where I am prepared to answer the question I was so anxious to avoid on that day we picked blackberries on his
farm. What do I think about death? I would tell him that it is the constant awareness of death that gives meaning to life.
The moment we lose the sense of our own mortality, we succumb to a different kind of death, a death in life, which is a death
far worse than the one we fear.

I have a choice, the same choice that faces every man. I can live a frivolous life, trying to impress others with the house
I live in, the clothes I wear, the car I drive. I can strive to be a success in the way of the world, seeking the admiration
of others, reveling in their jealousy. I can seek domination over my family and fellow workers in a vain attempt to hide my
own deficiencies. I can seek fame, which is the most elusive pursuit of all, for it has no substance and soon vanishes in
air.

I can indulge in endless prattle about my friends and neighbors, dissipating my life’s energy a little at a time. I can wallow
in self-pity, refusing to accept responsibility for my own circumstances. I can manipulate others into taking care of me,
which is the way of all petty tyrants. I can complain about boredom, as if it were up to those around me to inject excitement
into my day.

These are the patterns of the living dead, people who have forsaken life, who are willing to squander their most precious
gift, because they refuse to face up to the reality of death. If they wanted to live, truly wanted to live, they would rise
up in a resurrection of their own making and commit themselves to the life they have.

“This is the true joy in life,” George Bernard Shaw wrote in the dedication to his play
Man and Superman
, “the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown
on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining
that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

I have no way of knowing if the four fishermen were familiar with Shaw’s words. But I keep asking myself why they went to
sea on that fateful morning instead of waiting for the wind to lighten and the swells to subside. They, along with the other
crabbers, had been on strike for three weeks, seeking a higher price for their catch, and the word on the pier is that they
were hard-pressed financially. But I am certain that neither they nor their families would have starved if they had bided
their time one more day.

I have to believe that it was not money that summoned these fishermen, but an urge, a calling, a passion far more profound.
They were a force of nature. Having frittered away three weeks on land, they could no longer resist the mighty purpose of
their lives.