Here, as my opening offer, are a series of short pieces I wrote about or at the ocean, while living in southern California. It was a summer place, that confirmed for me a long-standing suspicion that I need to live near water in order to thrive.

I'm torn & confused by these pieces, especially their form. Do they belong together, or separate, or with something in between?

Untitled: Notes on the Ocean

The first time I went to the ocean in California, he was with me. We walked along the pier and it was windy and I felt so much like a little girl. We bought French fries at the little wooden shack—there is always a little wooden shack at the ocean—and we ate apples and crackers and cheese all the way down at the end of the long wooden pier.

I suddenly remembered salt. I had forgotten the smell of salt during my years at the interior of the country. You never smell salt in the air of upstate New York or in the mountains of Montana, or in Yellowstone National Park. But there it was, like the ocean, a scent it had never even occurred to me to miss, all of a sudden pummeling me with familiarity. The wind whipped my hair into that salty tangle, and I searched for an answer to this puzzle, stunned and curious.

In New Hampshire, when I was a girl, the ocean was only an hour’s drive and we visited often in the summer time. I adored those sticky sandy days—days of seafood, and days of blistering, peeling burns. Days of seagulls and swooping, diving surprise. We got sand everywhere—everywhere, even inside our bathing suits and we couldn’t get it off our feet and then I’d have to ride in the hot car for an hour with sand up my butt and my two annoyingly energetic little sisters and I just wanted to fall asleep.

But somehow, despite all that, they were little treasures, absolute pearls in memory of squinting anticipation and ultimate brightness.

Now, I live in California. I have to keep repeating that out loud because it’s so foreign. When I think of myself, the New England girl, squinting in beach day photographs and burning in seconds under any sun, living in southern California, the utter surprise of the circumstances that brought me to the western shore makes me laugh a little.

There were lots of people fishing off the pier, and it struck me as odd; I realized I didn’t even know what fish you could catch in the ocean, especially right up on the shore. There is a lot I don’t know about California.

The ocean is so wide, and so long, and holds a bounty, but somehow, we can’t all get our hands on it. All the laughing families and men with beer cozies are fishing just for fun. But the two men whose bicycles sag from the weight of all their possessions fish so they can eat tonight.

We walked on the beach a little and saw a lot of trash and a lot of squirrels, which I also didn’t know lived on the beach. People rode bicycles and little pedaled carts, but I didn’t see anyone building a sand castle or tanning on a towel, with their bikini unhooked in the back. There is a difference to the ocean here that I can’t quite locate, a casual sag into the everyday. I want the magic of the beach back, and the wonder.

This may end up being about growing up, or this may really just be about water.


* * *

The second time, we were together again, and we went to the ocean at night, whispering feet padding right up close to that dark, terrifying water. Everything was a shimmering, fantasy blue, a navy of magic and secrecy. I eyed the waves suspiciously and a little obsessively as we just walked along the empty sand, far from the pier and from any people, and I was struck by how blue they were in the darkness. There was only half a moon, but even in that strange half-dark, the quality of blue was certain and faint at the same time—the hue was absolutely there, but I knew if I took my eyes off of it, the twilight might vanish below the waves, where it had been born.

As we pushed deeply against the sand, and my calf muscles began to tighten, I took his arm. We were swelling with the waves, our breathing a little heavier than usual. “Wait,” I said. I wanted to watch them crest, anticipating the beautiful white caps that would charge toward us.

We stood for minutes, watching wave after wave of silent heartbeats push against the shore, then suddenly burst into sparkling constellation tops. I was having more trouble breathing standing completely still: trying to master these waves, trying to understand the tidal pull and how it connects to the moon, trying to understand how I got to California and what this place and this night would mean in years to come, trying to dig deeper into his skin and trying to comprehend the swirling darkness of true love.

I didn’t want to get too close to the water, because I knew I’d be pulled in and no one really knows what’s down there, but the mystery was so beautiful, so magnetic, I would have drowned happily in that moment.

We walked on, and found the stars and a sparkling pile of kelp, and went back to the car.

Neither of us could really speak in bed that night; we just kept thanking each other for the evening, and kept knowing we should be thanking the ocean, and kept knowing we’d never really have the words.

* * *

I am consistently mystified by the surrealism of this Californian town built on the edge of the country. The ocean is a sorceress—she has an inexplicable power, her constant movement like floating tendrils of hair, stretching from the unseen center to all shores of the globe. Tonight she conjured a penetrating fog, thick and unbridled, that trickled into the streets of this seaside town. I was pulled outward to the sand, a tug from within drawing me down the wide wooden planks of the pier, searching for some unknown, nonexistent source.

Eventually, I was completely surrounded by ephemeral clouds, heavy with the suggestion of water. Though I stood on the pier, built out across her, I couldn’t see the ocean, nor could I glimpse the vast gleaming light of the city back on the shore. Each exhale appeared as smoky condensation in front of my face, but my bare feet didn’t feel cold. I sensed no movement in the air, but a wind turned the pages of my notebook for me. I was deep inside another story—a sad island story of ghosts or pirated history and innate loneliness: the story of fog. But I was not satisfied.

When I was a girl, we would visit my father’s grandmother in her tiny stone house at the base of Mt. Washington. I would stare for long longing hours at the top of the mountain, dreaming of the day I’d be old enough to climb it, desperate to touch the clouds, draped over the distant peak. I wanted so badly to know the secrets of those half-real clouds, like pulled-apart cottonballs. If I could only be way up there, I thought, if I could only discover what the inside of the clouds looked like, if I could only take a piece of the clouds home with me.

I’ve been to the top of Mount Washington since then and have found no answers, only heavy rains, high winds, dizzying grey like the frosted mirrors of an amusement park funhouse maze. And I know that if I could somehow float out onto the air about the Pacific tonigh, I would find nothing, no truth, only the same maddening emptiness.Being at the edge—of the coast, the pier, the answer—isn’t enough. I want to be more than surrounded—I want to be wrapped into this fog, to feel it heavy against me like a blanket. I want to fall backwards into it and not hit the ground, to learn its truth.

I know this isn’t how fog works, or clouds. But I sit against the wood, and I still sigh deeply and wish. I hear the wind snapping straight the flag in opposition, or silent in surrender; and I feel the cold in my bones before it can touch my skin. I know I’ll never stop going further and further in search of the heart of these mysteries; I’ll keep hoping. And maybe someday I will write the answer down before it swallows me whole.


* * *

From a distance, the fog and the ocean seem connected, pulled together, one swimming army charging the land. But I know that isn’t the truth, because sometimes I get real close, close enough to see, crawling forward to the edge of the coast until my toes are nearly in the cold water. Creeping out from behind a rock and holding my breath when the tide comes in close, as if the white crackling foam that skirts the waves might be dangerous, I learned about the space that exists there. I’ve been right there, in the space between the fog and the sea.

It is a dangerous space, laden with a mystery that bites at my lips and quickens my heart, a space that you could never share with another person—the presence of others changes it into a peaceful picnic oasis of a place. A place where the rhythm of the moon and the absence of the fog make me long for cold darkness, make me hunch over. The seaglass-colored flood of memory and time isn’t malicious, but electric—the liquid form of lightning. The ocean sends strange creatures to the sand to greet me, whispers of exoskeleton and colors like the first part of a sunset. Her retreating tide hardens a path before my waiting feet. Walking there on the beach is a process of being born, my solitary pilgrimage into the heart of the storm.

Because it’s there, in the center of her moods, that I can see where the fog truly lives, above me and out over the ocean, a silken veil about to fall that never does. The curtain hangs above the ocean and me, simultaneously warning and tempting us. Our alternate sky. The fog, a frustrating, grey refusal to exist, just waits there, above the scattered, broken sea treasures and talus offerings, watching over the mighty wood the ocean has washed bare. I am on the verge of tears, nearly begging the fog please please please join the ocean again—dive back inside her salty throat and give me back the endless horizon and the hope of a sunset.

And I realize that the ocean is begging too—that’s the reason she moves. She dances the only ballet she knows, all for the fog. She pirouettes out onto the beach and within her own wet belly, creating waves and giving birth to clouds and trying to pull down the sky. I am her consolation prize, like a ship that can’t seem to find the shore, drawn to the periphery of the world again and again, hiding myself in the sand, and the possibility, and the space in between the fog and the ocean.

Sometimes I dance with the ocean, running out after her withdrawal, and scampering back out to the dry refuge of land when her swell comes back to claim my dirty footprints. The ocean’s cries are static hum, a roar that I can’t hear until I leave her side, after we waltz for a while. A few times, I let her win, her precious water fingers teasing my ankles and picking at my bare toes. But I only stay for a second, for just a hint of interaction, because we both know skin is no substitute for the sky.