Every 22 minutes someone is killed by a landmine. Every 17 minutes there is a wedding. Every 5 minutes a woman in India dies. Every 360 years there is a total eclipse of the sun. Every 8 seconds a baby is born. Every 8766 hours the earth rotates around the sun.
I scanned the facts and figures in my father’s almanac. It was so early it was still dark. They meant very little to my seven year-old self, drops in the bucket of things I would later learn to take in, filter, analyze, and echo in a different tone, things I’m still waiting to understand. At the “thunk, thunk” sound of a densely packed duffel bag being dragged down the stairs above my head, I snapped to attention.
I sat watching for a second the slightly unsteady gait of my father, a most sober and serious man, who was struggling to maintain his composure under a massive hoard of boxes and bags. He seemed to me a Seuss-ean beast of burden, dead set on getting his Gortex millstone through the narrow front door, while directions and last minute items were, courtesy of my somewhat frantic mother, sent flying past his ears. Closing the book with a “thud,” I followed my father out the door and into our car.
It was the same every year, the mad rush to pack, then my father’s stoic combat with the luggage, like rats from a sinking ship we would climb into the family car, slam the doors, and back down our ridiculous driveway.
Then the tortuous 3 hour drive would ensue before my brother and I, our noses to the car’s windows — our breath making cloudy circles on the glass — would see the first speck of cerulean blue among the hills and bluffs on the coast of Northern California.
Over the years, the sight of the sea-water crashing against the lonely rock-formations just offshore and the feeling of my stomach lurching as our car sped, quite precisely and with surprising athleticism, around the turns with my father at the wheel stay with me still. I know every bend and view, not like the back of my hand, but like the palm, with its lines that lengthened and branched out and deepened with each passing year and each trip to the sea.
My Father and I were on the beach almost constantly. My little hands and feet covered in sand, wet cuffs of wet jeans smacking my calves, rubbing the skin just below my knees raw. I would follow my father from tide pool to tide pool, poking sea squirts who spit salt water in little jets at their attacker, or trying to pry mussels off the slippery, barnacled rocks they fastidiously clung to, while he clambered among the abalone shells and driftwood looking for sea anemones or examined the always-mystifying tide chart. We upended rocks and dug in the sand and found innumerable starfish and sea-cucumbers, clams, and snails, a certain variety of which I came to call “China Hats” because of their resemblance to the bamboo hats I had seen Chinese rice farmers wearing in a photograph.
I now know that what I thought were precious and packed into the sandy pockets of my sweater are Limpets, singularly common and unremarkable, but I don’t think it would have mattered a whole lot to me had I known that then. I was sublimely content just to follow my father, shoving handfuls of rocks and broken shells into his hands, telling him to keep them safe for me, not to let them break or lose even one, so that I could put each one into a cup when we returned to the house and watch the faded blues and yellows and pinks of the shells surge into vibrant hues underwater.
There is something magnetic about the throb and rush of waves. I would lay in bed, my body wound and twisted in the sheets, listening; sensing moist memories of the womb blurring at the edges of my vision. The water would draw me out of bed, pulling me towards a place, towards a call, the gulls.
I would get up, hoping that no one would be awake, and creep to the screen door. Sliding it in its rusty, sand encrusted tracks until I could edge through, sideways, my back pressing though my nightshirt against the metal frame. My bare feet would touch the deck first. The wood up there is all the same, rubbed and worn until it’s a rough kind of smooth. You can almost taste the evaporated saltwater it absorbed once during a storm.
There never was a storm. I would sit on the steps of the deck and watch the gulls hoping that if I held my breath and watched hard enough, listened hard enough, waited, I would understand what they were saying. If I was lucky, my family would wake up in pieces, each person shuffling sleepily into the kitchen (except my father, who never shuffles) until the only part missing was me. They never called me in, but I came anyway. I was small and young, and grew tired of listening.
Years later I would close a different book and set it on the table where the almanac once sat. My chest would feel tight and the echoes of these memories would race behind my eyelids as I thought about Steinbeck’s “Doc” and his jars, the incredible, subtle power of the ocean and the tide pools to awe my young mind, and the knowledge that I can hold my breath, and watch, and listen, and wait, and wait, but the I will never understand the gulls.
Every 1440 minutes the Earth turns.
-v
-r
t
) v.
ars old. I especially remember Dad carrying home white utility buckets full of dense off-white clams, “bivalves”, and seawater. I remember eating Fruit Loops, never permitted by my Mother at home, and watching them bob around in the pink-stained milk. And eating lobster for the first time and crab with thoes litte, three-tined forks, and ramacans of foaming, golden-hot melted butter. And I remember the sand dunes, great curves and arcs on the blufs covered in sea grasses and blown by a cool wind that coats your skin in salt and mist, clinging stickily to arm-hairs and tangling hair.
