| VACATION #19 CATALINA ISLAND Twenty-six mile off the coast of southern California, owned by the Rigley chewing gum family, are seventy-five square miles of wild mountainous desert land. When you're on the island you feel like you've left the United States. You can't see the mainland and it's easy to leave your worries and wants back in that more "civilized" place. There isn't much to do. You take the glass-bottom boat ride, the inland tour to the Arabian horse ranch. You go to see the flying fish. You stroll through the town of Avalon which is only one mile long, and you've seen it all. The best part is you spend a great deal of time sitting on the cliff outside your bungalow, gazing at the ocean, watching the dark green-grey of the sea gently swelling and contracting -- like music, like a dancer, advance and contract. The coming in and the going out. The being and not being. The water becomes swollen, the surface rises up like an injured, bloated animal, then the area slowly sinks down, withdraws, sunken, sucked in like hollowed cheeks. You look down on the white water swirling like bubble bath, like feathers. Dancing white froth making plies and arabesques, on tiptoes rising as a wave, then falling to crawl to the shore. Curls and whorls whirling, tangles whitened with the wisdom of eternity. Then it all retracts and the bubbles creep back to the sea. Beneath the surface sways the giant kelp, the hair of Mother Sea, blown by an underwater wind, tangled and matted. Or sometimes the kelp looks like giant snakes, Medusa's hair escaped from her head, or entangled caterpillars of brilliant green and copper, or Christmas tree garlands. While some of it floats on the surface in patches like body hair, or like the stubble of a night's growth. The ocean is a hermaphrodite. On cloudy mornings the sky and water are one, all grey. They blend into an enormous cave of greyness in different degrees. It is somehow proof that oxygen lives in the sea and water lives in the air. On cloudy, foggy mornings there is little difference between the two -- sister and brother from the same womb, birthed by the universe. As you sit by the sea, you turn to look at the shore, at a house, a fence, a man walking. The contrast is awakening. How mortal, how fragile, how ephemeral is everything on earth compared with the sea. There is no energy, nothing is more lasting, more permanent, yet in constant metamorphosis than the sea. In winter there are no regattas, no tourist boats or music. There are only the sounds of the sullen sea, of the boisterous ocean. The angry shouting and explosion of a storm. No drum, no cannon is louder. Deafening, yet sensitizing the ear, it pierces the membrane, penetrates it with its anger and energy. We are nothing, you think, the ocean eventually devours us all. It took Atlantis, it takes us daily, millimeters at a time, but it claims us. At night the fog rolls in. You go to the window and open it. You hear the gentle ebbing and whispering of the waves. Then the breathy moaning of the foghorn like an oboe at sea, like the sound the wind makes when it blows across the top of an empty Coke bottle. They say that the ocean is cleansing, that it takes from you and gives back to you, pure for tainted, wholeness for fragments. You stand and stare out the window into the dark, into shapes and forms the fog collects. They are nameless images that change with the wind, images not unlike the ones you see in your dreams. ***** FIN |