| Vacationland Chapter 1, Page 3 I have always loved the ocean. The vastness of it, the power, the beauty. It is, most often, tranquil and meek, but has a predilection for occasional rage and fury, in the manner of a rottweiler, which may be gently licking your hand but could just as easily lunge for your throat and tear you to pieces if it so desired. By its very continuum, the sea seems to say something to us about time, about life, about the universe. There are lessons to be learned by listening to it; by sitting at the shore and watching the waves; by looking out to the blue-green horizon and wondering what lies beyond it. The ocean seems, more than anything else on earth, to be the physical embodiment of God. When I was a boy, maybe ten, I was at the beach with my mother and sister. It was the poor excuse for a beach that is located in our neighborhood, not far from St. Dymphna, and in the shadow of the airport. It is a little curve of land that looks straight across at a runway and, though the water there is connected to Boston Harbor, it feels more like a small lake. However, on that day when I was a boy, I found that it is surely deep enough to drown in. I must have decided that I was a big enough fellow to walk out there alone -- to my waist, then my chest, then my shoulders, then my neck. The sun was blazing, but the water was cool and refreshing. I enjoyed feeling it all over my body. And then I slipped, or the floor beneath me dropped off suddenly, or a weak wave lifted me. I thought I was going under. I could not swim a lick and for a moment � it wasn�t more than two or three seconds � I experienced terror as never had, before or since. I lost my breath, my body felt numb. When I found my footing, I immediately went back in to the beach, over to my mother who was oblivious to the whole incident, and sat myself down on a towel. Since that day I have only been in the water a handful of times, and never past my waist. I have never learned to swim. But my fear of the water has only added to my fascination with the sea. I have always sought the serenity and introspection that comes from being at the shore and looking out at the immense openness before me. Where everything behind me has changed greatly in the past 300 years, nothing in front of me has in the past 300,000. I also dash to the shore during storms to watch the surf breach the seawall and crash upon the land, cracking and washing away manmade objects -- benches, roads, concrete boundaries � as though they were made of toothpicks and sand. On the last day of finals, there was no breaching surf at Winthrop Beach. All was calm. On the sand an elderly couple walked along, staying just out of reach of the rolling tendrils of the tide which sputtered softly onto the shore. An occasional jogger or rollerblader passed by me as I sat on the wall. It was much cooler there than in my apartment and, if I had stayed at my place I might have consumed more beer � with unforeseeable, and almost definitely undesirable, consequences. My gaze went to the sea. Winthrop Beach is smaller and less well-known than its counterpart up the coast, Revere. And Revere Beach has a strip of bars and fast food joints, while there is one small snack shack on the shore road in Winthrop. All of this means that, though they are separated by just a couple miles, they are a world apart when it comes to attitude and atmosphere. Revere Beach is noisy and crowded and dirty. Summer nights there are filled with teenagers and twentysomethings driving their cars up and down the beach road, to see and be seen by the other teenagers and twentysomethings who sit along the wall, their car radios cranking. I was that age once, but now I was older and could find contentment � or some incomplete primeval mutation of it � by sitting on the wall and thinking. And so that�s what I did. There were no startling revelations that day; no moment of epiphany; no understanding of any fundamental questions. Just another stop on the journey, a chance to rest along the trail, though � as always � I had absolutely no idea where the path led. Jeez, most of the time I wasn�t even sure where the hell I�d just been! I did think about the summer and my goals of reading and writing�maybe taking some day trips, doing a bit of camping. First among those, like some Great Commandment for the summer, was writing. Thou shalt write. I could hear the grave, bellowing voice in my head. Thou shalt stop thinking about writing and stop whining about how thou couldst succeed as a writer if thou only hadst the time. Now I had the time and there were no excuses. If I wanted to be a writer then I had to write; there was no way around it. Time to stop avoiding, unless�well, unless what I was avoiding was the fact that I couldn�t do it, that I didn�t possess the ability and intellect to write fiction. Was that it? I continued to sit on the wall. After a while, the sea told me to move on, by means of the cool breeze coming off the water. I took a final scan of the surroundings and rode off to search somewhere else. My apartment sat in a brick three-decker which stood along Chelsea Street, one of the neighborhood�s main thoroughfares. It was one block over from the house I had grown up in. I was on the first floor, with the stairway passing right over my bedroom, which lay in the back of the flat. It was a small bedroom and there were clothes piled on the dresser and on a chair. The kitchen had an off-white linoleum and cabinets that were fairly new. The tiny bathroom was right off the kitchen. The front room got the sun in the morning, though my off-white mini-blinds were always down because I was at street level. There was a couch, several shades of brown, that I got from a friend several years ago; an entertainment center made from press wood, which had a TV and stereo system on it; a small bookcase, also made of press wood and with dozens of paperback novels crammed in at all angles; and a desk which was made from an eight foot piece of tawny-colored Formica countertop thrown on top of two halves of a second bookcase that I had sawed apart. My computer and piles of books and papers covered the desk, and there were more papers and magazines on the coffee table. The wood-toned paneling on the walls and the cinnamon colored rug (almost dirty enough to look like cocoa instead) rounded out the overwhelming feeling of brownness that greeted everyone who entered the room. It gave the impression of being in a treehouse. It was a small apartment and I really needed more space but, on my first year teaching salary I couldn�t afford much else. Plus, the landlord and his family lived next door and they were very nice people -- so nice that on the rare occasion that something in my place needed attention, I hesitated telling him. Once a day, since moving in five years earlier, a deep guttural gurgling sound rises out of the kitchen drain and the sink fills with soapy water from god knows where. It took me two years to tell him and it was only because he had a plumber coming in to install a water saving spout on the sink. Well, the plumber ran a snake through the pipes and found nothing wrong. The next day the same Satanic roar came and the sink filled with suds. Three years have passed and I still haven�t bothered to bring it up again. |