Beachcombing at Miramar (2 page)

My toes are numb from the cold water, so I move up the beach to dry them in the warm sand. The upper shore is littered with
beach drift and tide wrack, splintered logs washed down from the redwood forests, broken stalks of seaweed and the brittle,
whitened bones of birds. I pause to inspect a piece of cork, and as I do, I see four soaked dollar bills lying by my feet.
There’s no doubt about their denomination, for I can plainly make out the dour face of George Washington staring up at me.
I pick them up, rub them between my fingers, hold them up to the noonday sun. In the upper-left-hand corner I read the words:
THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE.

I look up and down the beach, deserted both ways. Maybe the money belongs to a surfer, but there’s no sign of a human head
bobbing in the waves. I have a choice. I can leave the bills on the beach, knowing the tide will claim them before their rightful
owner passes this way again, or I can pocket them—and that’s what I decide to do. I have the feeling these saturated notes
are no different from the bottle, the canvas sail, the teak chest, or any of the other gifts that drift in from the sea.

I climb the sloping beach and flop back against a dune. I close my eyes and try to decipher the coincidence of these different
kinds of dollars in such proximity along the shore. When I look for sand dollars, I discover real dollars; when I look for
real dollars, I never find them, and I go by the sand dollars without ever knowing that they’re there. Suddenly I realize
something about myself I didn’t know before. All my life I’ve been tending toward this common meeting ground of the sacred
and the profane, the savage and the divine.

I might have been a millionaire; I mean that literally. Ages ago, long before I came to Miramar, I was employed by a New York
public-relations agency, which has since grown to one of the largest in the world. That firm had a highly seductive profit-sharing
plan, one calculated to keep its workers from taking flight, and I was part of it.

Each year the firm set aside a percentage of my salary in my name. If I remained in the plan for ten years, I would be fully
vested; that is, all the monies set aside in my name would actually belong to me. If I quit the company after ten years, I
would be comfortable. If I quit after twenty years, I would be rich. If I quit after thirty years, I would have gathered unto
myself sufficient wealth to care for myself, my children, and my children’s children for generations to come.

When I joined the firm, the financial vice president told me this was the way I could build an estate. He didn’t ask me if
I wanted to build an estate. He assumed I did, and at that early juncture of my life I assumed I did, too. But the cubicle
they assigned me had sealed windows and the duct over my laminated desk emitted fetid air. I had to sign in every morning
and sign out every night.

Every day promptly at noon I would leave the office and spend my lunch hour wandering the city streets, taking in the sights
and sounds. Some days I would stroll through United Nations Plaza, lean against the railing above the East River, and watch
the boats cruise by. Other days I would stroll to Rockefeller Center, sit in a pew in St. Thomas Church, or visit the Central
Park menagerie.

After a while I began to stretch my one-hour jaunts to two. I would walk to the ferry slip at the Battery, or up Riverside
Drive, near the Hudson, as far as the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial, or across town to the turmoil at Times Square. I didn’t
know it at the time, but I was beachcombing on Forty-second Street, Columbus Circle, and the Avenue of the Americas, preparing
myself for my true profession.

My boss said nothing, for I was a good worker and I made up for these extended lunch hours in other ways. One year I won an
award of one thousand dollars for the most creative project in the agency. But I derived no satisfaction from it because I
saw no value in what I had done. The real dollars were present, but the sand dollars were absent, and, to me, the one without
the other was like a wedding without a bride.

I left after six years, forsaking the money in the profit-sharing trust. Some of the people I worked with a quarter of a century
ago are there still. That is one of life’s mysteries. Why is it that some will stay and some will go? I bumped into one of
my former colleagues in a SoHo bistro shortly before I left for Miramar, and he remembered my departure very well.

“I always saw that as an act of tremendous courage,” he said.

I believe he meant it, too. But he was wrong, although I didn’t tell him so. I can no more say I acted with courage when I
quit that job than I can say a man who is suffocating acts with courage when he tries to breathe.

I didn’t go directly to Miramar. I had other places to go, other lives to lead. I had mortgage payments to meet and a wife
and four lively children to feed. I became a self-employed freelance writer, producing articles for magazines and speeches
for corporate executives. I wasn’t paid by the hours I put in, but by the work I produced. When a paycheck came in the mail,
I knew exactly what it was for. I could hold the manuscript in my hand; I could read my words on the printed page.

My work took me into a world that might otherwise have been closed to me, and I discovered how it worked. I went to Indiana
to see the flaming hearth of a steel plant, and to Vermont to see airborne computer chips floating down an automated production
line. I went to a field campus in the Sierra to interview a noted economist about the underlying causes of inflation, and
to Washington, D.C., to ask experts to explain the reasons for the nation’s lagging industrial productivity. I met with the
chairman of a blue-chip corporation on the top floor of a Wall Street skyscraper, and with a conveyor-belt operator at the
bottom of a sandpit.

I went to all those places and I did all those things, and I don’t regret a moment, for each experience contributed mightily
to the sum of who I am and what I know. But the day came when my children were no longer children and had moved into lives
of their own, and I knew the hour had also come for me to move on to a place in life I had never been before.

And now I stand with waves at my feet and words spoken on a hillside two thousand years ago blowing like spindrift through
my brain.

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow …”

How they grow! There’s the nub—that phrase tucked in so innocently, which we so easily overlook. I wonder how stunted I would
be today if I were so worried about what I would eat, or what I would drink, or what I would wear that I never dared venture
to Miramar.

I stoop to pick up a pale flight feather, and as I do, a puff catches the blade and blows it away. I chase it down, holding
it by the hollow quill, rolling it between my thumb and index finger, a wand so slight, so delicate, I hardly know it’s there.
I judge by its length and color that it once belonged to a western gull who had no further need of it, so he left it on the
beach for me to find and use in whatever way I choose. I could make a pen of it, but I know there’s nothing I can do with
it that will give it greater utility than it has already served in the plumage of the bird. I decide to take it home and place
it on my desk as a constant reminder of the weightless strength it takes to fly.

Below the low-tide line, I see a pink scallop in the dark sand, exposed by a retreating wave. I pluck it out and examine it
carefully. It’s a near-perfect shell, one with a small chip in its margin, which is how I know it’s what I’m looking for.
I drop it into my shirt pocket. Later I will add it to the collection of periwinkles, razor clams, whelks, and mussels that
decorate my kitchen windowsill. I display only those with minor flaws; it’s the blemish that gives a shell its character.

I find a keyhole limpet and a turban snail. I put them to my nose and breathe in, hoping to catch the scent of tidal pools,
but they are salt-washed and sandblasted, as sweet smelling as line-dried clothes. It occurs to me that I could string my
shells together into a wampum necklace and offer it as legal tender to purchase this strip of land, this stretch of beach,
this Miramar! And then I realize that it isn’t necessary for me to barter for what I want, because, by the immutable laws
of nature, it is already mine.

T
he splintery deck of my beach house runs clear across the front, facing the declining sun. In the late afternoon I gather
myself there with my make-believe watercolors and the easel of my mind. I’m a patient man; I can sit for hours if I must,
motionless as a heron, waiting for a proper image to appear. I feel as if something momentous is about to happen and I want
to witness it when it does. It may be huge, like a rogue wave washing over the dunes, or small, like a hermit crab crawling
out of the sea.

I wasn’t always filled with this sense of expectancy, as if at any moment the universe was going to reveal its deepest and
darkest secrets to me. When I arrived at Miramar, I was like a castaway on a desert island, alone and suspicious of every
living thing. But I feel now as I imagine Paul Gauguin must have felt when at long last he reached Tahiti, the land of his
waking dreams.

“I began to work—notes, sketches of all sorts,” he wrote in his memoir. “Everything in the landscape blinded and dazzled me.”
As he painted, he shed the leathery skin of civilization and became the naked savage—“my body bare, except for the essential
part”—he was meant to be.

Immersing himself in
noa noa
, the heady fragrance of Oceania, he met Tehamana, his lover, “… and bliss followed upon bliss. Each day at dawn,” he wrote,
“the light in my home was radiant. The gold of Tehamana’s face bathed everything around it, and both of us went naturally
and simply, as in paradise, to a nearby stream to refresh ourselves.”

Tehamana, Tehamana—I say it over and over, as if I could wring the mystery from it by repeating it softly under my breath.
How far, I wonder, must a man journey to find a woman with such a name?

I feel as if I understand the painter’s impulse better now than ever before, for these long, quiet days have taught me that
I am less alone on this stretch of beach than I was on the streets of New York. Gauguin wasn’t drawn to isolation; he was
fleeing from it. It was loneliness that drove him to the South Seas, the searing loneliness that overwhelms us in a faceless
crowd or a loveless marriage, the loneliness that evaporates in the gentle warmth of a tropical breeze. The gravitational
pull of that faraway place was so powerful that he had no choice except to forsake his wife, his children, and his job, and
migrate, as a swallow migrates when the season turns.

What he wanted to do, what he had to do, was paint with a moral intensity. He had to paint—not paint his canvases, which are
masterworks in themselves, but paint himself, paint the very medium through which he looked, which is the more enormous task
by far. He had to create the man he wanted to be, and he could accomplish that miracle, which we call transfiguration, only
on a soil that was congenial to his heart and soul.

I believe we are all bent upon this course, whether we know it or not, because, like Everyman, we are all caught up in the
same morality play. I see now it is so for me, and I understand how it came to pass that in the aftermath of my marriage I
made my solitary journey to the sands of Miramar. I was alone when I arrived, more alone than I had ever been before. But
day by day, as I dwelled with my aloneness, my loneliness faded, and my life as the sole creator of myself began.

I covet my solitude and I try to protect it, to defend myself against the intrusions, the interruptions, the well-intentioned
invitations of others who want to drag me into their way of life, which is the only life they know. I resist their efforts
as best I can, but each time the phone rings I’m afraid it’s the couple across the road, who can’t bear to see me sitting
by myself on my deck, staring at the sea.

They have made it clear to me that they think I’m lonely because I’m alone, so they ask me to dinner at least once a week
because they are sure I could use, as they put it, “some cheering up—some company.” But when I join them, I find they are
the dispirited ones and that the onus is on me. I feel as if I’m not so much their guest as their entertainment for the night.
They want me to be charming, my conversation witty, skimming the surface, never delving too deep or disclosing too much, and
that is more of a burden than I can bear.

I would share my inner life with them if they would let me, but I know if I revealed the intimate details of my days, they
would be embarrassed, as if I had undressed in front of them and stood stark naked in their living room. I try to talk to
them one at a time as individuals, as man and woman instead of husband and wife. But they make it impossible to talk to one
without talking to both, and they are in constant contention as they try to convey what they think and how they feel.

“What we believe …” the wife will say, and the husband will modify her statement, explaining what she meant to say, and she
will take exception to his interruption, claiming he misinterpreted what she said. He will smile wanly, conceding her point,
and she will acknowledge his apology with a nod and go on talking about their joint point of view, as if they were some mythological
beast with two bodies and one head.

Whenever they vie with each other in this way in my presence, I have no choice but to sit there quietly, sipping my soup,
hoping against all hope that they will find a common ground before dessert. It’s all I can do to keep from blurting out that
he doesn’t have to speak for her and she doesn’t have to speak for him—that he can have his perceptions and she can have hers
and the two don’t have to jibe. But that simple thought never seems to occur to them, so they go on playing out their life-and-death
struggle in a minor key, never realizing how portentous it is.