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(c) Courtney B. Duncan, 2000, 2005
East Point
The inside of the tent was bright, the wind calm. A small triangle of sunlight was just above my head, formed by the fly over the east-looking door. Katy’s eyes were open; I pointed out the triangle; she laughed.
So, today’s “structure” was that we might go to the “mild” beach at East Point and spend some of the day out of the wind; it all depended on what Andrea found out about her duties around 9:15. We turned over and tried more sleeping in the bright sunlight. In time we got up and did our normal morning chores: Fruity Pebbles and Lucky Charms, toilette, hair. The backpacking existence is so minimized that much of the daily routine becomes not possible and thus not necessary.
The cards being finished up to a playable stage, we decided to try some games.
Katy suggested Battle, which did in fact seem ideal for our homebrew deck. You just played off the top, knowing what was there by seeing through the cards wouldn’t make any difference. Katy tried to shuffle. Our cards weren’t good for that. It didn’t seem like you needed much shuffling for battle anyway. She dealt us each 26. We started play. Quickly, my hand was down fairly thin, then I won several and Katy’s went fairly low. With four cards left she won a battle. The nature of the game is that each player has something like 1/3 to 2/3 of the cards at any given time and only after much play does the random walk sometimes run one player so thin that they drop out entirely. A mere 3 will take a 2 then a powerful Queen will be taken by a King. Then a battle over a tie of 4s will net several face cards then a battle over aces doesn’t win anything higher than a 6 (well, and the two aces). Finally I lost, fair and square. We went back to our books. Today, I was beyond keeping notes, but, it being Sunday, we thought about what we would be doing back home and missed that routine some.
Katy asked, “What time is it?” It was 8:30. “Are they in church already?”
“No, I think momma is at work today and so nobody was going to church.”
“Well, let’s hope she didn’t go to work.”
“Yes, let’s hope. So in that case, they’ll be going to church in about an hour, it starts at ten. They’ll be getting ready, maybe eating right now.”
I did hope that this was the case, having been vaguely aware all weekend that Viann was supposed to be working Saturday, Sunday and Monday, that this would leave Viannah and John home alone all weekend and John by himself after Viannah left for Band Camp Monday. Of course, at the end of the day Monday, Viann would be rushing home from work to pick up John and drive out to Oxnard to meet the boat. There was that to look forward to. I hoped that no one had any wrecks or got into any trouble between now and then.
I continued with Our Town, Act II, the Wedding of George and Emily. Katy continued with A Horse and His Boy, the next in the Narnia series. In lieu of church for us, I intended to have her tell me all about The Silver Chair that she’d just finished, especially since that little “Bible” I’d brought wasn’t a Bible.
The watch said 9:15, Katy said, “Let’s play Slap Jack this time.”
“OK, how do you do that?”
“Everybody lays down cards alternately until a Jack turns up, then whoever slaps it first gets the whole pile. You win when everyone else runs out of cards.” There was other detail that had escaped me, and a few special cases that came up as we played.
We both hesitated in several instances. Nobody really wanted to slam anybody else. The Jack of Spades, the only one with the picture actually drawn in, always made us laugh.
Katy was low on cards and I didn’t hesitate enough on one Jack. She lost.
“That’s OK, I lost fair,” she said.
We put the cards away.
Those kayakers would need to be up early in order to start paddling across to Santa Cruz at first light, I thought.
Andrea came around to tell everyone that she had the truck and was taking people out to East Point for a day at the beach after all. The first load was leaving at ten, about half an hour, were we interested?
Katy was the same on this as she had been Friday concerning the Lobo Canyon hike, not interested in signing up to do something, but I knew she would enjoy being there once we made it and heaven knew we needed some variety, being only about half way through our Big Adventure at this point. I said yes, but we wouldn’t be ready in half an hour. I’m not sure why I thought not, we were already practically packed, for anything conceivable, and Katy right that moment was brushing her hair. I guess I just didn’t want to rush. No need to rush anything when the boat won’t be here for another 30 hours. She put us down for the late load and told us to be out at the kiosk about eleven.
We opened the food box and got out today’s lunch, put on our swimming suits under our clothes, put our books in the daypack with the lunch and sunscreen, and appeared ready to go. I also threw in the snorkeling gear and water shoes, this being apparently our best shot at snorkeling or swimming.
We rested and read some more and then it was time to go. There are always last minute things to do that you managed not to think of until you actually started to walk out. When we actually did walk out, it was already 11:00.
My underwear was still hanging there from last night. I took it down, sniffed it and threw it in by the head of my bag. It would be part of the pillow until I needed it.
“Oh, hurry, we’ve got to get out there.” That’s probably the only time I used the word ‘hurry’ in the entire weekend.
We made the 500-yard walk to the kiosk, inspecting the toilettes in the middle. Two athletic looking guys were already waiting with fancy fishing poles.
Katy and I inspected the ladybug colony in the big gatepost. I climbed up on the closed gate to take a picture then hopped right down, the angle and light not being good.
One of the guys said, “You shouldn’t climb on there…”
I interrupted, from nerves, “Yeah, to avoid breaking my leg,” smiling.
“That gate isn’t made to support your weight like that.” He looked very serious. I went over to inspect the hinge and had to agree. It would probably have 800 pounds on it with me standing out on the end. Wonder what would happen here if I broke a gate that I’d found closed?
This guy must be law enforcement back at his day job. His buddy was a little lighter hearted. It was slowly dawning on me over the next half hour that these were the kayaking heroes from last night. They must not have gone today after all. We learned later that, not wanting to repeat the ordeal of the previous day, they had decided to stop here and ride back on the boat with us Monday. This seemed like it would be safer.
We angled around and found a position to get a picture that might be reasonable. Not a whole lot of snapshots left to get us through to that Blue Whale we might see on the boat tomorrow. The Park Service truck came slowly up the steep incline from the creek. Andrea got out. It looked like it was just the four of us but she was going to make a pass through the campground to be sure. So much for having "hurried." We loaded our gear into the truck, the kayakers taking everything with them, except the kayaks themselves. Katy and I sat in the very back; the law enforcement kayaker sat in the front with Andrea and the other guy in the middle bench. The radio was on low, sounded like some sort of easy-listening station. I couldn’t see the number; it was soon drowned out by the noise of driving.
As we started down the incline, the two guys started plying Andrea for information that might be helpful in today’s fishing and sightseeing expedition, particularly the guy up front. She was more than their equal. One of their fishing poles fell down in the back; I reached back to set it back up. It was made of stout stuff, apparently for Big Fish fishing, for what little I knew about such things. The equipment atched the owners, solid, athletic types.
Back up the other side of the ravine, Andrea stopped the engine. No panic to us, we were old hands at this, but she had to explain about switching the vehicle from four to two wheel drive with the engine off for the newcomers.
The point we could see from the pier and campground waterfront areas was Skunk Point, the one that was off limits due to the nesting season of the endangered Snowy Plovers. We drove along slowly in a field of dead grass that was waving in the breeze just like it was somebody’s fallow field near Dalhart, Texas. Except, that is, for the cliff and the churning sea off to our left. And, except for the hills of blowing grass and a few scrub trees to our right. And, now that I thought of it, except for the presence of any hills at all. After about a mile, the trees were more substantial up the hill to our right. They looked like pines. ‘Torrey Pines,’ I thought, recalling the hiking map. Andrea explained that there were two groves of them in the world, this one and another in San Diego. You could drive to the one in San Diego if you really wanted to see Torrey Pines, I thought. ‘Torrey Pines’ was one of the hikes I’d thought about doing, since it was in the hunt-safe region. Driving by would have to suffice.
Andrea talked about a girl who had lived on Anacapa for seven years who, just this weekend, just today in fact, was moving to Colorado for better socialization. This was big scuttlebutt among the rangers. She had been talking about making the big move up to Santa Cruz. Andrea laughed. Anacapa seemed to me like a tiny place to live, for seven years.
The road was little more than two dry ruts, impassable during the wet season, with a fox trap every mile or so. Up front she was explaining again about the fox breeding program and how the guy in charge had fox traps everywhere to try to bring them all in for the first, captive phase. They hadn’t even started thinking about the release phase yet, being mainly worried about the current census. Problem was he caught skunks all the time but not many foxes. On the ride back, I asked about this and learned that he had to check the traps that were set several times a day, sometimes as often as every three hours. If they caught a pregnant female, she couldn’t stay in the cage very long or she might get distressed and lose her litter. That would certainly be counterproductive to the program. The island biologist spent his days driving all over the island checking these traps. He had one helper on another island that came over and filled in when he had to be gone. He didn’t always set all the traps, only the ones he could tend at any given time. It was hard work and he’d been at it heavy for a couple of years. It had all started as a three-month grant then, working that grant, the peril of the foxes had been discovered and so he was still here years later. (Yes, we had heard parts of this yesterday.)
The road passed behind the rise that blocked us from the huge sand dune of Skunk Point on the other side. Some corral-like improvements were still standing here. All that was said about them were that this had been part of the “other ranch.” There had been two, one of sheep and one of cattle. More work for a future YCC, presumably.
The truck moved slowly along the Coastal Road, bumping up and down sometimes more than going forward, and reached an east-facing waterfront at a lagoon. We drove a little further and Andrea pointed out the cove that marked the boundary of the off-limits area for Snowy Plovers. From here on the road would be in the dunes, “rough.” We continued slowly south passing other lagoons and at length turned off onto a side road where we parked. This was where the truck would stay for the afternoon. The kayakers got out; I started fooling with the seat controls to move the middle seat up. Finally we were all out with our gear, looking around. Andrea suggested several hiking possibilities, or just being on the beach somewhere. She also warned of places up on the point where people should stay out of the water if they didn’t want to be “shredded,” though there was an interesting blow-hole over there we might want to go see. I thought we might walk over at some point if the situation presented itself.
The beach seemed to face south to me, but I knew it really faced east and this was proven by the view of Santa Cruz across the Santa Cruz Channel. Other campers from the earlier load were already staked out at various points along the beach, the family of three in the best close spot and several ladies together down at the far north end next to cove-boundary rocks. The kayakers headed south to rocks along the point to try fishing. We walked the other direction to a rock in the middle where I judged the shade would improve as the afternoon progressed. This judgment was incorrect due to the mix up in directions.
We put down our stuff, I tried to instruct Katy how to keep things out of the sand and the sand out of things, but it was a day at the beach, keeping sand out was probably close to a useless exercise. We stripped down to our bathing suits and put on sunscreen. Katy tried fixing her hair. I took a GPS position: SREPT.
We got out lunch: the last peanut butter and jelly and the last two apples. Katy inspected the sandwiches for butter (or not butter) but, as always, I couldn’t tell any difference in the augmented mush. Katy cored her own apple and I just ate mine down to the core. We each ate a little sand in each course. Done with lunch and the cleanup, we turned to our books. I finished Act II of Our Town, George and Emily’s wedding. Right in the middle a big gust came up. I looked up just in time to see a dune’s worth of sand come flying at us and clamped my eyes shut instantly. Katy’s shirt had blown off the rock; we retrieved everything and put rock weights down on it all. Now we had sand in everything no matter where positioned or how carefully handled. At least we had already eaten.
Katy wanted to go swimming. We walked down into the light surf. Most breakers were two or three feet with some as high as four. The water was cold, colder than Campus By the Sea, colder than Anacapa, which we’d visited during the warmer El Nino years, not as cold as some of those days at the beach a few years back when people were barely able to get into the water at all. Katy wanted to get wet all over; we headed out further, but she giggled like a little girl with every swell. “Ooooh!”
We stayed a while out beyond the smaller breakers, in four-foot water and then went back up. We both caught a couple of surprises in the back; one of them got my hair wet.
Katy started building a square sand fort. I looked around the ravines emptying into the beach here and noted how high the kelps had washed in the recent past. Some right up into the mouths of the draws maybe five or even ten feet above the current water level.
“How is that possible?” I pointed this out to Katy.
“What?”
”See all that kelp way up there? The
water level must get that high fairly often for it to be up there.”
“Wow…. You know, they have jelly in them.”
“What? I thought it was air.”
“Yes, air and jelly we opened one up at CBS.”
I had noticed. Maybe Katy would be a sea-botanist.
She continued in the square sand fort, sitting in the middle.
“I need more flat rocks,” by which she meant ‘skippers,’ “I’m going to put them around the front then dig a moat.”
“OK,” I went off to look for more flat rocks. There were several. I waded out and skipped some into the surf. Some skipped quite far, then jumped a wave and kept going even beyond for a bounce or two. Standing waist deep in the water to start was part of the trick to this.
We were nearly at high tide but Katy was high enough up that she had only one washout during construction. I found a shell in the surf that was a small circle with the middle washed out making a ring, brought it up and showed it to Katy.
“Coool.”
I tossed it back out.
“Dad?”
”Yes.”
”I’m going to need some kind of treasure to put in the castle.”
“OK.” I wandered down the beach looking for treasure. About twenty yards away was a convergence of surfs that had a pile of tiny rocks washed into the resulting slough. It was one of those places where you could stand in the waves and have your feet and ankles pelted by little rocks with each crash of surf. Blasted by little rocks, more like.
I scooped up a double handful and brought it back to the castle. “Here use this.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“Right over here.”
We went off together for more treasure. It wasn’t as easy as it had looked at first. One could easily scoop up a handful of mostly sand if one was in the wrong place in the slough or the wrong time in the wave cycle. Some loads came up looking like a handful of tiny diamonds and gems. Some came up looking like mud. We experimented, dumping some back, carrying some over to the castle.
One of the ladies up the beach to the north was trying to wade into the water. She looked cold and didn’t try for long.
Katy dug the moat. I dug the ‘drainage for the moat.’
“What’s that for, dad?”
“So the moat will drain after a wave.”
“Oh, that’s right, we always do that.”
It always helps fill the moat too…. “A big enough wave will wash everything away.”
“I know.”
But, while we were there Sunday afternoon, the big enough wave never
came.
We were basically done with the fort/castle.
“Let’s go snorkeling, dad!” Katy implored yet again.
I was unenthusiastic. It didn’t look like there would be much to see anyplace I would feel safe swimming or letting Katy swim. All the interesting stuff would be over there in the rocks that were getting pummeled even by these low waves. We discussed this once again. Despite all of the prior promises about snorkeling in meaningful and safer places, she still wanted to give it a try. I could hardly blame her, but I looked around at the dearth of support facilities and personnel and considering once again my own relatively weak swimming and life saving skills and the vague warnings in the pamphlets. I still demurred.
“Why don’t you want to swim out there, dad?” she pursued.
“We might get in trouble….”
“That’s why we need fins, dad.”
“Well,” searching for a more concrete or at least explainable basis for my fears, “when I get cold water in my left ear, I get really dizzy and have to come in.” I had just experienced this Thursday before last at Campus By the Sea and had noticed the problem first, unequivocally at Barton Springs in Austin two summers ago when we swam in 65 degree water under 104 degree air. When I got down to the deep end doing my customary distance-covering backstroke with all but my face under water, all of the sudden, the world had started turning faster than it was supposed to.
“You need to use ear plugs, dad.”
“Yes, that would be a good idea. I tried that once at Galveston and had problems. I think I couldn’t hear very well.”
And so, we’d bought and brought the snorkeling gear on the trip and on today’s outing for nothing. It was a disappointment to me too, not so much because we weren’t going to check that activity off on our ‘list’ but because, once again, I was too inexperienced or too weak or too cautious for something that we really ought to be able to do. I guess the inexperience part was what worried me most, indicating once again a mismatch of dreams and realities, but as I got older the weakness part was also beginning to bug me more than it had before, and also I worried about the proper balance between fear and foolishness. Out here, I was always inclined to err on the side of caution. Just being here seemed brave enough. Those stories of people getting blown out to sea and dying of exhaustion or sharks kept hovering just below consciousness. And, we really weren’t experienced snorkelers or we wouldn’t be considering going here anyway.
There wasn't much to see in the "safe" water, after all.
Katy went out and played some more in the surf.
Andrea came by collecting up for the first return trip. “Do you want to wait for the second load or are you ready to go now, maybe get out of the sun?”
“We’re ready now,” I replied, “or we can wait, however the load works out.”
“Well, as of now, we have room, but I haven’t talked to everybody yet.”
“OK, whatever. Hey, how does that kelp get way up there in the washes?”
“Oh, that’s the normal highest tide. The tides aren’t very high today because of where the moon is (“neap” is the term), that’s why we have a beach here at all. At the extreme tides, the high tide goes up where you see there. We’ve just had the high tide for today, so that’s about as far as it will get.”
“Wow, that must be more than a ten foot swing!”
”Yes.”
“We’re used to places on the mainland like Zuma beach which are always cleaned up from stuff like that.”
“It’s much more wild here.”
She headed up the beach toward the last party to check with, three or four women. We started brushing sand off of and out of our stuff, repacking for the short walk back to the truck. The sand castle hadn’t been touched by water, not even the moat.
“I’ll tell you what,” I offered, “If we don’t get on this load, we’ll hike up there to the point and see what it looks like. Then we’ll come back down the road looking at the different beaches until we meet the truck.”
“I don’t want to hike,” Katy declined.
“OK.”
But, afterwards, studying the map, I realized that this had been our chance to look over on the south facing cliffs, the last bit of land at this longitude before Antarctica. Surely the waves and surf over there would have been very different, more severe. And probably the wind as well.
Andrea was down the beach talking to the three or four ladies for a while and eventually came back up. “You’re in, they’re staying here for now; we’ll be leaving in just a minute.”
We picked up our stuff and went toward the truck. The other six people were in; the two seats in front with the driver were all that was left. Andrea motioned us forward. We put our bags in the back and got in. Windows up, per-bench air conditioning controls running, we started back up the road.
After a few hundred yards, Andrea said, with uncharacteristic mischievousness, “Those ladies down at the end would have you believe that they were sacrificing to let all of you come back right now, but when they learned they’d have the beach all to themselves for an hour they were overjoyed.” Everybody laughed, Katy and I just a little nervously, having gone out in the late load and coming back in the early one, we were part of the problem. So were the kayak-fishermen, come to think of it. “You don’t get a big beach like that entirely to yourself for even an hour very often these days.” That was true.
We passed the lagoon; Andrea talked about how great it was to come here in the spring when it was full of migratory birds. “Of course, you have to hike in all the way, this road is totally impassable at that season.”
Another truck was parked in the road facing the other way. The biologist was out working a trap. It looked like we might be able to get around, but then saw a wash on the right side and stopped. “I’ll be out of the way in just a minute,” he yelled to us.
“No problem, take your time,” Andrea answered, then, to us, “That berm is just too low to drive on.
“Uh huh.”
The elder Katherine, the woman by herself, was out hiking, watching him work the trap. She was apparently hiking up the road by herself and would be picked up on the second trip back. The trap done, the trucks maneuvered around each other and we continued. The hiking Katherine smiled pleasantly as we passed.
On beyond the “other ranch,” the family of three, in the center seat, sighted a buck deer in the draw to the left, about a quarter mile away. Andrea stopped and backed up. There they were. Yes, there were two! They caught sight of us and bounded up the trail.
“Uh oh, we’ve scared them back into the hunt,” somebody said.
“Good job,” the man said to his wife. Everybody laughed self-consciously.
Looking out over the bay, Andrea observed, “Real chop out there, maybe 25, (40 km/hr.).” She also pointed out lobster pot marker buoys bobbing about in the chop.
She pointed out a big sea cave. The family of three had spent the day down there yesterday. They had learned the access trick from the ranger: Go down an incline, the some wading at the end. That would be an interesting, near-in, place to go.
As we approached the steep draw before the campground, someone asked about the Chevron windsock on this side. Did Chevron do anything out here? As always the windsock was sticking straight out and had flapped there so long that there was barely enough of it left for the word “Chevron” to show. Andrea said quietly that it was put in by CIA (Channel Islands Aviation), the people who chartered flights out here regularly and that Chevron was the company they bought their fuel from so Chevron provided windsocks.
Maybe the wind could be different at the end of the runway from the middle where the field windsock was, or maybe they weren’t both visible from the same place. That’s what that pilot had been doing Friday, I thought, looking at both wind socks before he started his landing pattern.
The truck was shifted into four-wheel drive and we finished up the drive.
The shower tee-pee had not been re-erected since yesterday’s disasters. Now it was stowed under the picnic table there, probably so it wouldn’t blow away just lying on the ground.
Back in the tent, Katy returned to her book. I picked Our Town back up and flipped to the back where all the reviews and biographical information about Thornton Wilder were. Maybe it wasn’t fair to do this in the middle of the play, but I wanted to save the final act for last. One reviewer didn’t think much of his handling of the afterlife, another didn’t like the omniscient Stage Manager device, but aside from that, and in general, reviews were positive. It was clear why this was a classic. Viann had urged us all to read it in that it had made a big difference in her life, particularly that scene from the Emily’s twelfth birthday which event had occurred before the play even began but which was recounted at the end from beyond the grave (her grave) as the brief but poignant demonstration of our failing to enjoy life fully while actually living it.
Viann told me later that this image had had a profound impact on her outlook. My analysis was that her personality was disposed to living comfortably and happily in the moment and that this material had just given her the idea or a focused example of how to do it. Thereafter, she said, she had sat in the kitchen for hours watching her mother cook. She had savored rides on the school bus (which must have been somewhat tiring in the thirteenth straight year). She had always gone with her dad to the oilfields on Sunday morning when he asked; and it was the only reason she would miss church. This spurred little side talks about why he did that sort of thing on Sunday and appendicitis treatment, then and now. (Someone in the play died from appendicitis.) Viann’s mother had had appendicitis as a girl and was sick a long time. One of the rare ones to recover at all, I thought, just another highly unlikely episode in the chain of events leading to us here right now.
But, as we discussed all this, I realized that, whether by nature or example, this was why she had none of the angst, the planning anxiety, the concern about “getting it right” that I had. If she died today, she could say, “Well, it’s all been pretty good, I’ve been really blessed,” and would have no regrets about the undone things like I would. I suppose I could say the same thing but it would be much harder for me to see it.
I put the book down and asked Katy to review The Silver Chair for me, this being one that I didn’t remember much about from our readings together seven or eight years ago.
“Oh, yes,” she said, and started with a narrative. Katy, when asked something like this, could go on for literally an hour, recalling tons of nested detail and often trailing off onto tangents of plot not even near the main stream. Though this was what I was hoping for to fill some time, perhaps an hour, I was a little disappointed to find in this case that she had learned to be more concise, succinct, and to the main points with her summaries. The whole discussion, including sidetracks into other books, probably didn’t take more than 20 minutes.
“This wasn’t the one where they got into Narnia on a sailing ship that was pictured on the wall?” I suggested. “No,” I retracted, “that was the Dawn Treader, wasn’t it.” I was remembering more than I had thought I would.
“No, this is the one where they’re in a fight on the playground and go hide behind a wall, and all the stuff in the book happens and they come back at nearly the same instant they left and they can see Aslan’s back and it gives them courage to fight and win.” (This in turn brought to mind the motto at Jake’s Karate where John went for lessons, “Better not to fight, but worse to fight and lose!” And that always brought to mind the Klingon joke I had made of the motto: “Better to fight and win!”)
She talked at some length about how time could run at different rates or jump around between the two realities, that of this world and that of Narnia. She gave the high points of the story, about Prince Caspian the Tenth, who was older now and some of the problems Eduard had.
“Wasn’t he the one who got in the trouble with the, oh, what was it, the … ‘Turkish Delights’ back in the first book?”
“Oh, no, that was Edmund, the brother. This is Eduard, the cousin who is visiting for the summer. Edmund isn’t in this one.”
“Ah.”
She went on about how they had discovered the prince in the chair and he was crazy and they had to do valiant things to break the spell and Aslan was somehow involved. I didn’t follow closely enough to comment often. And finally they came back and finished up those bullies and somebody got in trouble with the School Master and so forth.
In this way we wrapped up church and Katy returned to The Horse and His Boy. She tried to read me the horse’s name that was clearly onomatopoeia for horselaugh. They called him “Bree” for short. I soon forgot the boy’s name.
Andrea came by one last time, “Just wanted you to know that the boat may be an hour or so late tomorrow, with the wind and all and the pick up at San Miguel may be rough and take longer than usual. I’ll try to let everybody know so we can all be together at the right time and you can make the most of your day.”
It wasn’t worth worrying about the pickup in Oxnard at this point. Things change so quickly and so often that now was a very preliminary time for the worrying about late tomorrow’s schedule. And, if there was some change, what could I do anyway? We were totally out of touch. There was no reason to doubt that tomorrow would be a long day for the crew of the Jeffrey Arvid, based on the winds we’d had for the last 48 hours right here.
I went off by myself to the toilets. Halfway there I heard a sharp report from a rifle that sounded like it must be in our canyon. Step away for five minutes out of the whole day and something like this happens, I thought. I hoped Katy (and everybody else, for that matter) was all right. Surely she was. I turned around and studied the canyon and campsites, seeing nothing. No more sounds.
Both outhouses had the Hunta Virus warnings posted in them, the same thing we’d seen in the literature and everywhere else. I guess this was the one place on the island where you were likely to encounter each and every member of the reading public. It had been torn off the door of the “near” outhouse (southwest) but sitting in the “far” outhouse (northeast) I took the opportunity to read the directions about the toilet paper.
The gist of it was that toilet paper was hard to maintain here on the island, it all had to be shipped in from the mainland. Users should use the smallest rolls first and go easy on the stuff! Right now, the three rolls in here were “small, large, and empty.” I used the large one because it was easier to reach.
I walked back upwind to the tent.
“Dad, did you hear that!”
“Yes, it was a shot, sounded like it had to be down in our own canyon. Are you OK?”
“Yes, it was loud.”
I wondered about the deer we had seen, couldn’t have been two miles from here, maybe an hour ago.
She returned to her book, I read the last act of Our Town, the one in which the dead reflect on life and the inability of the living to live it fully while they can. Then, suddenly, it was over. That one scene was ever so brief, a model of life itself, perhaps. I didn’t have a pencil handy, I would have to mark “cbd 8/19/00” at the beginning and “cbd 8/20/00” at the end later. It wouldn’t be hard to remember what days I read it on, started on Saturday, finished on Sunday, this particular Saturday and Sunday.
In fact, I didn’t feel much like taking any notes or writing anything down today at all. We were just out in the middle of it all, still another night and a big part of another day to go before we could leave. Yes, we would be on the boat by this time tomorrow, Lord willing. I toyed some more with an idea I was having of volunteering to get on the boat when they stopped tomorrow morning, of riding out to San Miguel to watch the pickup and maybe set foot for a few moments on that most remote of the islands myself. This might be as close as we ever got. I toyed with the idea, but that would make tomorrow rushed and would be irregular to the concessionaire and the park staff. I didn’t mention the idea to Katy.
Well, it was true, no human did fully live life every moment they were living it. It seemed like an impossible standard. Did anyone ever accuse a cat or an island fox of failing at something like that? Of course, this is exactly what we were here for, to be acquainted and happy to be together regardless of the circumstances, to live the joys and miseries of at least a long weekend moment for moment. That was happening, I thought. Mostly I was ready for it to be over, to sleep in a real bed again, to eat fast food again, but when I could do that, Katy would be upstairs sleeping in her room again, she wouldn’t help get the food out of the box then. She would spend her time in front of the TV, or doing homework, and I would be at the computer working. Or, writing The Book. I wouldn’t be able to wake up in the middle of the night and see that she was sleeping just fine. I wouldn’t be part of every little thing that happened in her day. Part of me, part that I could barely feel, wanted that dimension of it to never be over. I looked at her and thought again about my idea that we could have a business together; we could both do things to sustain a business, and that way we could always be together.
“You know, Katy,” I interrupted her book again, “when I was in the Grand Canyon with Viannah, I got upset when I realized how big she was and how few years we had left with her before she would be gone. In fact, how few years we had left with all of you then. You can read about it in The Book,” I continued, smiling. “And now you’re getting big too and Viannah really is close to leaving.”
“Yeaaah.” She was interested. “Well, you still have to do something with John.”
“Oh, that’s right, but don’t talk to me about John, he’s so energetic he’ll probably come up with something that will kill me. But worse, when I’m done with John, it will all be over. I can hardly bear to think of it. Don’t talk to me about John.”
“You could do something big with all of us.”
We had talked about this possibility.
“Yes, but it’s so hard to get on Viannah’s
calendar for anything even now that I don’t know if we could ever pull
it
off. And you’re schedule is getting
busy itself; pretty soon it will be the same problem with you.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, at Family Camp, they talked about Family Night, an evening every week where they take the phone off the hook and do something all together. They keep it pretty inviolate. I think we’ll do that.”
Katy didn’t look like she embraced or rejected the idea.
“Oh, it’s not something heavy, they just eat out or go to a movie or play a game or do something fun all together. They have three kids like we do and each one gets to chose once a month what it will be some week. I guess the parents chose the fourth week. The parents have veto power but they nearly never have to use it.”
Katy understood about veto power.
“Well, anyway, I want to be involved in all you guys lives and it just all goes by so quickly that it’s hard to know what has happened. You and I are alike in this respect; we’re clever and have talents but don’t transition well from one thing to the next. Once I understand something, I want it to stay the same so I’ll always be able to deal with it, you’re like that too.” I was beginning to choke up. Katy seemed grave but alert. “And, I realize that this trip doesn’t match what your interested in perfectly, I just planned things for whatever reasons and you came along, and you’re OK, you’re OK with anything, but I just don’t know you well enough and so we can’t be done. We’ve had our Big Trip and I’ll write the book and all but what we really have to do is get to know each other, and that’s hard for me and it’s harder for you than the other kids and so we’ll have to continue doing things together. We need something we can do together.”
I was beginning to sob.
“Oh blast,” I rolled up, “Excuse me…. Dad used to do this too; he would break up in the middle of a sermon, in the middle of a sentence. It was embarrassing for a teenager to have to watch but I adjusted to it and I understood now what his problem had been.”
I calmed a little.
“Maybe we could build a car together. That would be fair, I don’t know any more about building cars than you do, not like ham radio where I already know everything. We could build a car together and then we’d have a car,” I was exploring possibilities.
Katy smiled tenderly, a little red around the eyes herself. Her expression did not show any enthusiasm about building cars.
Anyway, if we tried to build a car, Katy would be entirely concerned with its appearance, including the insides of the cylinders and the style of the piston rings. It would be a good lesson, but we’d have trouble staying on track. I needed something more practical, smaller and more do-able year to year.
“I know, we could read books.” Something like that would have to work. “I always wish I could read all the books you guys have to read at school. Of course, I don’t have time to read all the books I need to myself and I’ve already read some of those in your assignments, but we could read books. We could read the same books and then write reviews of them and compare the reviews and have discussions and see what comes of it. I think that would help me a lot. Do you know I write a review of every book I read? Have for years, I have a big stack of Book Reviews.”
“You do? Every
book?”
”Yes.”
”I didn’t know that, when I write book reports it hasn’t gone very
well, it’s
not much fun.”
“Oh, well, I’ll show you how to do it. This isn’t like school, it’s not an assignment; it’s just writing down what you remembered or what it made you think.” It didn’t occur to me to mention that I’ve also thought of doing the same for every movie I see. Boy, the documentation load for my life must be huge! “We’ll read books and talk about them and after you leave home, we’ll do it on e-mail as long as there is e-mail. How about that?”
Katy didn’t readily see the long-term value in this, but thought maybe it would be all right, “OK, dad, I like books.”
“Well, the important thing,” choking up again, I needed to find a ‘plate’ (paper towel) to blow my nose on, “the important thing is that we are all together while we can be. Do you realize how little time we get to be the five of us? How long is it, let’s see, John was born in 1990 and Viannah leaves in 2003, that’s thirteen years. Thirteen years! Do you realize how short a time that is?
Katy, at the moment thirteen years old, was sitting up in her sleeping bag, I was alternately lying down or up on my left elbow. She reached over, a little awkwardly like I would be, and took my hand, her eyes red, but she wasn’t sobbing like me. I made a mental note to pay a little more attention to Sailor Moon and Pokemon, things that they were interested in and to look around for more common ground.
“Viannah always walks on my arm. Do you know why she does that, to train me for her wedding, I always learn so slow.” I was bawling now. “I wish we could always be together, but you’ll have to meet somebody your own age and build your own life. That’s the way it should be. You have to be your own generation.”
“Dad, what’s a generation?”
“It’s the time from parents to children. Sometimes it’s taken as twenty years, sometimes forty. In our family it’s thirty, more or less.”
I was thinking it was OK to spend time building sets for the school play even when Viannah has a small part, just because it’s being there with her, it’s part of her life. Not that I'd ever followed through and done that.
“I miss Viannah, and the rest.”
I could imagine a life in which I did nothing but
participate in the kid’s stuff.
Everything else on my personal agenda seemed unimportant, well
maybe
except for church. A lot of church was
kid stuff too. With three of them it
would still be a challenge and there wouldn’t be room for anything else
hardly
at all. All that other stuff just for
me didn’t seem very important right now.
I was glad I hadn’t come here as a thing just for me. “And of course, we’ll do all those things we
said we would. We’ll go snorkeling
someplace on the mainland where there’s something to see and it’s safe. And, we’ll go to Hurricane Harbor, all five
of us, a week from Tuesday.” This was
known to be part of the medium-range plan.
”Yeaaah!”
And we’ll go to Magic Mountain some Saturday after
school starts
every fall starting next month.”
”Yeaaah!”
“And we’ll read books, OK?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes, we’ll read books. You could read Red Mars, that’s a book I’ve already read (and reviewed) that you could read, I think you’re big enough to enjoy something like that now.” I heard another rifle report more muffled this time. “Did you hear that?”
She shook her head “no,” looking a little concerned.
“It sounded like another shot, further away.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“Well anyway, I tried to get momma to read Red Mars but she didn’t have time, and I tried to get Viannah to read other books, but if she read them she didn’t tell me about it. You know, it occurred to me that coming here was a lot like going to Mars, except on Mars there’s no plants at all, just dirt and rocks.”
“Yeah, this is like Mars but with grass. If there was life on Mars it would be a big deal.”
“Yes, that’s the thing we’re working on at JPL right now,” I was beginning to straighten up and just talk fast facts like I do about subjects I think I know something about. I was sitting up starting to reach for the food box; it was getting to be time for supper. “We’re looking for life other places, that will be the great discovery of our lifetimes, both yours and mine. We may find life elsewhere but on earth. But Mars is pretty hostile, it might be buried pretty far down somewhere.”
“Yeah.”
“It will be bigger than anything that happened
this century,
the 20th Century ends at the end of this year you know,
bigger than
the A-Bomb, bigger than even walking on the moon.”
”This is kind of like going to the moon,” she said.
“Yes, they camped out in little capsule for three days and then they got in another spacecraft and went down to the moon for several hours, the first ones just a couple of hours, and they walked around in the dirt and picked up rocks. It was very dirty, they brought back a lot of dirt on their suits and stuff,” and, it occurred to me, a lot of moon dirt was left behind in the pieces that didn’t come back. “And then they came back up to the main ship and spent three days coming home. It was a lot like this, but no plants or Island Foxes.” Or running water showers, I thought.
“Yeah,” she laughed at the idea of Island Foxes on the moon.
“Going to Mars is much worse, you spend most of a year getting there, then more than a year there, then most of a year getting back, and no fast food the whole time!”
“Wow.”
I was smiling, drying up, passing out Vienna sausages, crackers, and fruit cups. I had to open the Vienna Sausage can with a knife. Katy opened her door and poured the juice out on the ground under the picnic table. We split a can of spam. I would be able to go back and read more Dostoevsky now, but not this evening. We had been able to “talk in the tent,” now and this was an important reason we had come.
After supper and its trash were put away we started thinking about getting to bed for the last night of howling winds. We still hadn’t finished off even the first jug (out of three) of water. I was determined not to carry any back, at least not much.
“I’m not going to bathe at the spigot tonight, I’m going to use our water and see if I can use some of it up,” I said looking for my swimming suit.
“Plastic water,” she replied.
Yes, I thought, plastic water would be better for bathing anyway than for drinking.
I went out and did my teeth first, standing by the water at the north corner of the tent. When I stuck my head around the side to spit, the ladies behind us looked up in alarm, but just for an instant. I didn’t manage to use much water that way. The wind was blowing; it was going to be chilly bathing right here. My throat was still a little tickly, I thought about those boys in Dostoevsky and in Wilder not wearing their galoshes and their mothers worrying about them “catching a death.” I’d found that I could start out this process sitting in my clothes in the sleeping bag and change into swimwear and go out and go through the motions then come in and be warmer as a result, probably just from all the moving around. And shivering.
Bathing out of the jug didn’t go as well as the spigot, mostly because the jug couldn’t be adjusted for much flow and then it wouldn’t burp, so it would go to nearly nothing while you stood there shaking, trying to rinse a towel. I did nothing with my hair and felt like I got enough soap off my arms and body not to engender a rash. As usual, no towel was needed, but I wiped the new one around anyway, just for the sake of tradition.
Katy and I traded places. She came in after about two minutes and said, “I didn’t take much of a bath.”
“That’s OK,” I said, “we bathed in the ocean today and we’ll bathe at home tomorrow.”
Now I had to take my lenses out for the last time here. If I could get them out and cleaned again and in again tomorrow morning, we’d have it made. Sitting on the inside bench of the picnic table nearest the shelter wall, I set up the equipment on two towels, the face towel on top of the bath towel. The right lens came out and went in fine though, as usual there was visible dirt in the soaking solution. The left lens came out and hit the side of my right hand. I saw it there, cupped inside the left hand, then there was a gust and it was gone. I looked all over both hands thinking it must just be in one of the towels. “Blast!”
“You OK, dad?”
“Yes, I’m just having a little trouble with my left lens.”
The towels were both wadded up.
I carefully straightened the one on top. Nothing.
I tried to turn it over in a low-profile way.
Another gust, still nothing.
I looked in the folds of the larger towel without disturbing
anything,
still thinking it would be right there.
It was getting too dark for this.
“Katy, do you have your flashlight?”
After a moment, “Yes.”
“Can I borrow it?”
“Yes, are you having trouble?”
”Yes, I can’t find my left lens and I think it will be better to try to
look
for it with the flashlight.”
“OK, here,” Katy’s door opened and the flashlight appeared. It was plenty bright for what I had in mind.
I reviewed my hands and shirt with the flashlight and my face with my hands and then looked back through both towels front and back with the flashlight. Still nothing. I looked on the table under the towels. I hadn’t done a totally careful or thoughtful loss-preventing job of this. It was probably gone. Drats.
Taking the flashlight, I got down on my knees and started pawing through the grass inside the shelter wall but downwind (more or less) from the site of loss. The grass was tall and thick in layers. I realized that by disturbing it I was probably just dropping the lens further into the mulch, so I dug down further. There was one glint but it turned out to be a piece of foil from a candy wrapper crunched up much smaller than the lens I was looking for. The lens had probably blown out into the field to the north.
“Are they expensive, dad?”
“Yes, but I’ve lost them before. I go through this every couple of years and dealing with them in campgrounds has always been risky. It’s worth it to get to wear them and be able to see, but it’s always risky. Even wearing them is risky, they can just pop out of your eyes.”
“I was always afraid you’d swallow one when you put them in your mouth.”
“Yeah, that doesn’t worry me as much, but it could happen. They always recommend against putting them in your mouth, but doing so is ideal first aid in a place like this. Relatively clean (at least if you’re not eating) and exactly the right PH for your eyes and all. PH is acid or base content, you know.” At least if it swallowed one, I’d know where it was, I thought, I always worried more about chewing them up subconsciously than swallowing them. Heaven knows I have enough trouble swallowing stuff I’m supposed to swallow.
I made a cursory inspection of the first 200 square feet of what I judged to be the plume zone downwind and found nothing. Brushed down my clothes again with my hands and found nothing. Drat.
Well, I was going to need my glasses and we were going on the boat. I needed a glasses strap too that I didn’t have. Maybe I could make one out of dental floss in the morning.
Back in the tent, I had given up. “When we moved here from Texas, I bent a contact. At first I thought I had just soaked it wrong and tried re-soaking it, but it didn’t change and eventually I called and had to explain that we were leaving the area and I thought they would have to mail it to me. I gave them the address of the hotel where we would be staying and a couple of days after we arrived in Pasadena, there it was. I made the whole drive out on my glasses. That was back when they were $65 a piece.”
“What are they now?”
”Last time I bought one they were $80.”
“Wow, that’s a lot.”
I put on glasses as usual, noticed the stars out of focus as usual and we set off on our evening constitutional to the toilets. I got done and came out. Suddenly, Katy from inside the near house, says, “Dad!”
What now, I thought, something in the pit? A Snake?
“Yes?”
”There’s no TP in here!”
There had been only part of one roll left in mine too. I went in and tore off a couple of wads and put it in to Katy’s hand that was sticking out of the door or the other house.
We enjoyed the stars on the way back. The wind was brisk and cool, more so than this time last night. Little chance that the boat tomorrow would be … early.
“When I worked at NASA in Houston, I was out walking in the grass one day when a lens flipped out of my eye,” I started yet another contact lens story as we strolled back. “I looked for it in the grass for over an hour then gave up and had to drive home, an hour and a half, with only one eye working. That was fine until it started to get dark. The last few miles were pretty scary. It was after that that I started carrying backup glasses everywhere.”
The scene in the tent for the night was little different than the two nights before, except that the triangle of the moon and later next morning the triangle of the sun were much larger. The northwest corner pole wouldn’t stay in place and the fly was deformed in ways that couldn’t be detected looking from below. The wind and wild gusts this night were worse than the two before and the three positions on the pad less satisfying. Katy appeared to sleep well, even snoring lightly on occasion, as usual.
That was a blessing. I prayed for the wind to die down in the morning and no trouble at San Miguel so the boat could be early getting here or at least not late. It was just an hour difference, maybe. I wondered what would happen if the boat didn’t come, or couldn’t come. What if they got in trouble or what if the weather was too poor to venture out for us?
We had come at this time of year to avoid most of the chance of that sort of thing happening. It was unlikely tomorrow too. Sure, we’d had stiff winds, but nobody around here even thought of them as un-seasonal. The airplane had taken off and landed several times, we could hear it from the campground. They would be able to make it, but it might well be a long, tough day for them. What if the boat sank? Well, we’d spend another day here and somebody would figure out a way to retrieve us. This was highly unlikely. Island Packers had never even needed rescuing in all their operations since 1968, so they bragged, although they had helped out others on the water. I prayed for the crew and the boat too.
It wasn’t totally selfish to want to get back home on schedule. Things need to run on schedule, it lends stability to our lives. All those other people here and on San Miguel were interested in getting back to civilization too, even if their faces didn’t show it.
I had a serious problem with trust. I pondered on this as the wind slapped the tent around, sometimes violently. It wasn’t moving out of place though. I wasn’t going to get up and do anything unless it did.