The beach is so weird to me now. The landscape has literally been transformed. The Bolivar Peninsula is really just a big sand bar; big enough that your normal everyday weather doesn’t affect it all that much. What Hurricane Ike did was move the whole fucking peninsula around. It eroded some beaches and built up others. Tons and tons of sand washed up onto the land and settled. One of the first things you notice is there is very little green anywhere. All the open marshland as well as the carefully cultivated lawns in the subdivisions are now covered with sand. The sand dunes that used to run from High Island all the way down nearly to Point Bolivar are entirely gone. You can see the Gulf from anywhere on the peninsula now, which I actually kind of like. By the same token, I was looking out the north-facing windows of the cabin yesterday, one of the relatively few cabins that survived intact, and I realized that the tugboat and barges that appeared to be moving magically across the landscape were actually sailing up the Intracoastal. I’d never been able to see the ship canal from the beach side of the highway before. I’ve been coming down here all my life, and now it is hard to recognize anything. People have told me with all the landmarks washed away, they could not find their own property after the storm. It was just one giant sand pile. They were using old surveys and GPS to find the buried roads and streets. The whole effect of this lack of almost any significant landmark is kind of surreal.
Actually, though, I am amazed at how much has come back down here already, and there are numerous signs that the recovery effort is ongoing. There is heavy equipment everywhere, mostly Galveston County crews rebuilding the beaches. When I saw it a couple of weeks after the storm came through, I did not think Bolivar would ever be habitable again. But it is slowly coming back. Until the next storm comes through, anyway.
A couple of evenings ago me and the beagle were taking a walk down the beach, just before sundown. He was having a great time, sniffing out who knows what and running off in every different direction at once. He chased wading birds, and dug up a pair of bikini bottoms and brought them to me (I have no idea.) He is a pretty dog, all beagle but a mix between the standard breed, and a “lemon” beagle on his mother’s side. He is almost all white, with just a patch here and there of brown and black. He looks like a show dog, but he is not. What he is, is wild as hell. And he can pretty much run free down here (unlike in town), and he was enjoying our walk very much, and I was happy for him.
While the dog was doing his thing, the man was walking along, alternately staring out to sea and at the horizon and the setting sun, and looking ahead at miles and miles of empty beach before us. What a gorgeous scene, I was thinking. I was looking down, too, trying to avoid stepping on anything really sharp. This part of the beach, near Gilchrist, has always had a lot more shell than the rest of the beach down here, I don’t know why. As I looked down at millions of fragments of broken up seashells, it occurred to me that what really defined this picture postcard scene more than anything else, was death. Death loomed everywhere. In the broken shells, on the empty beach. Looking inland at the barren landscape that used to be full of beach houses and people drinking and laughing and barbecuing and shooting off fireworks. All gone. There were dead bodies, too. Most of those were found with everything else that used to be on this peninsula, washed up on the far shore of Trinity Bay, in southern Chambers County. There are many more, I am told, that have yet to be found.
I’d like to be really dramatic and say part of me died in that storm, too; but that would not be accurate. I am sorry for what happened down here, sorry for everyone’s losses, but I find myself strangely unmoved by the complete leveling of a place I spent so many happy hours, from childhood up to last summer. It just doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. It is still the beach, after all. Despite all the hell-raising and womanizing and surfing and whatever else I did down here for all those years, the truth is that all that ever really mattered to me was the beach itself, the wide stretch of smooth sand and then the ocean. That part is still here.
My life went where it went, but I always, always had the beach in the back of my mind. I still do. Just the physical act of sitting or walking on the sand and looking out to the gulf is so powerful. I can sit out there for hours and just stare at the horizon, listening to the surf. I took up surf fishing several years ago, not because I am such a fanatic about catching fish, but rather so I would have a cover when I wanted to come down here and just meditate. A guy sitting on the beach for hours staring out to sea with a fishing pole in his hands is one thing; a guy just sitting there all day looks a little weird after awhile.
But just looking was never really good enough for me, either. I was never more than a half-ass surfer, but I really didn’t care. I just liked the feeling of riding on a wave, the accompanying lifestyle, and the fact the pursuit caused me to spend every available moment on the beach, with people as inspired and crazy as I was.
But even more than surfing, my favorite thing of all is to swim in the surf, at night and preferably alone.
++++++++++
I picked up the somewhat dangerous habit of swimming in the ocean at night when I was 12 years old. My scout troop was camping out at Gilchrist, not far from Rollover Pass. That was probably the best campout I ever went on. The surf was really rough that weekend, and we body-surfed all day long. Then at night, we sat around the bonfire we’d made from driftwood, and listened to our scoutmaster (who was a pervert, we later found out) tell stories that were either supposed to be funny or scary, I forget which. That got boring pretty quickly, and me and a friend of mine slipped away in the darkness and went down to the water’s edge. I wanted to go swimming, but he was too scared to. So I went by myself.
I have always been a strong swimmer. Not for speed – I never swam competitively – but I could swim all day and never get tired. And I had no fear. That spring, in order to qualify for Second Class scout, I’d participated in a mile swim. They would take all the boys to a spot on the Neches River, above Collier’s Ferry on the Jefferson County side, and we were to swim from there a mile downstream, to a pick up point on the far bank of the river, in Orange County.
A mile sounds like a long way, but actually it was a pretty easy trip. In the springtime the current in the Neches is pretty strong, from runoff upstream, and one can almost float a mile as fast as swim it. In fact, the toughest part of the mile swim was getting across the river to the opposite bank before passing up the pick up point. That current was strong. . . you’d be in the water and see big cedar logs passing you up, and sometimes a drowned dog, or a water moccasin. . . it is a wonder no kids drowned. I doubt seriously the mile swim is still conducted in this manner.
++++++++++
Anyway, that night at the beach I swam out into the surf alone, and it was the most incredible feeling of freedom and loneliness, I’ll never forget it. I was hooked. Since then, I have gone swimming in the ocean almost every chance I got. I like swimming at night especially, because no one knows you are out there. You are on your own. If you get fatigued and start going under, no one is going to save you. You’re fucked. On the other hand, knowing no one is watching over you, being your ‘lifeguard’, is part of the allure. People say, “I’m all alone,” all the time. But when you are out in the water by yourself at night, so far out the lights on the horizon from the beach highway are just tiny dots, you know you really are all alone.
I read a story once about Clint Eastwood. In his early 20′s he was in the military reserves, and one night he and another guy were flying from Alaska, I think, down the Pacific coastline to somewhere in California. About 2 miles offshore in northern California their plane shut down, and they ditched in the surf. The plane sank quickly, and Eastwood and his buddy realized if they were to live, they’d have to swim 2+ miles at night, through the cold and rough Pacific, to the California shoreline. So that is what they did.
That story is just incredible to me. At that point Eastwood hadn’t even begun acting yet. He had his whole fabulous career and life ahead of him. But I am guessing he probably had his life-defining moment out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that night, when he was barely twenty years old. It had to seem like it was all downhill from there.
++++++++++
I really got into night time surf-swimming in earnest in my twenties, and have continued up to today. I’ll just disappear for a couple of hours, no one knows. Usually, when I get to the water’s edge, I swim straight out against the surf for 750 to 1000 yards. Depending on the tides, that is past the third sandbar, the water is probably 25-30 feet deep. That is a tiring swim, so once I am out there I float for a little while and rest; then once I’m rested I swim parallel to the shoreline for a mile or so, then head on back in.
And that is it, really. A friend once told me that at dusk and just after is when sharks like to look for dinner. I hadn’t known that, but I will occasionally feel a sand shark ramming into the side of my leg with it’s snout. That is startling, and it scares the hell out of you, which is why they do it, I think. Sometimes I’ll come back in criss-crossed with welts from jellyfish; though I’ll admit that they usually look a lot worse than they really are. Mostly it is just stings from cabbage-heads, which itch more than hurt.
I’ve been asked, Why? Almost immediately I will think . . . If you ask why, you’ve really asked and answered the question. Why? Because it makes me feel free. Because it makes me feel all alone. In short, why the hell not? I could - in theory, I guess - get swallowed whole out there by the biggest sand shark in recorded history, there one minute, gone the next. Or I could huddle in the safety of my beach cabin, safe from a seemingly unthreatening hurricane that seemed unthreatening right up until the moment the giant dome of water it was pushing ahead of it suddenly showed up on my doorstep, and washed me away like so much flotsam and jetsam; only to have me wash up days later mangled and tangled up in a bunch of trash and debris on the shoreline of a remote marsh in southern Chambers County, where I might not be found for years and years, if ever.
Given that choice, I’ll take my chances swimming with the sharks.
______________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment