Reminders

            Friday afternoon on my lunch break I drove to Bishop’s Beach. Lucky for me a car was pulling out of my favorite parking spot just as I arrived. Sometimes, especially on a sunny day, I like to sit beside the ocean and eat my lunch and listen to podcasts on my break. This time I had trouble getting the app to work on my phone, so I ate my burrito in silence and watched the beach scene unfold around me.

             A mom and her son scoured the trail that led from the beach to the parking lot for something they’d lost. A man in a wetsuit loaded his surfboard into the back of his truck and beside him three kids in matching jackets with their arms spread into imagined wings chased seagulls. A couple navigated their way over the rocky part of the beach with walking sticks.

            Behind the parking lot, on one side of the public pavilion a group huddled close to a fire. On the other side a man I know from the library juggled setting up his barbecue grill with shooing away crows and one bold and persistent bald eagle.

            When I finished eating I ventured out into the cold. My jacket was warm enough and I had good boots, but my hat didn’t fully cover my ears.

            I walked east from the parking lot until I reached the part of the beach where the water flows through on the high tide to fill Beluga Slough. I kept my eyes peeled for rocks as I went. I know there are people who don’t look for rocks when they go to the beach, but for me it’s automatic. The way one of our dogs has to howl whenever she hears howling, I have to look for rocks whenever I walk the shoreline.

            I found a good rock, a candidate for keeping, and carried it with me for a while until I found another. And I did this a few more times, having to make a choice about which one to keep with each new find. Finally I found the rock I wanted to bring home with me. It wasn’t the most beautiful rock of the day, but I chose it because it’s got an amber hue to it, like the pegs on my fiddle.

            Satisfied with my beach gift, I plunked myself down on a driftwood log for while. I lined up the rocks from my pockets beside me and sorted them by size. For a few minutes I was just a person with rocks on a driftwood log on a beach on a breezy, brilliant Friday afternoon in March. For a while I wasn’t striving for anything. I wasn’t scheming about what to write or how to write it. I wasn’t planning anything for the future. I wasn’t considering all the ways Dean and I need to make our lives run more efficiently so we can fit in all the things we want to do.

            Ambition is a fine thing to have, but it can make for a noisy headspace: so many problems to solve, so many ideas to consider, so many pros and cons to weigh. It was good to let it all go away for a time and let myself be taken by the sound of the waves, the cold air on my exposed skin, the brilliant light, the sea of sand and rocks and seaweed at my feet, the enormity of it all.

            Soon enough I could no longer ignore my cold ears, but before I packed up my rocks and headed back to my car, a friend walked by and we talked for a few minutes. She and I used to attend fiddle camp for a week every August. There we learned the same tunes and made the same friends and we sipped whiskey together around a few all night campfires. She loved old-time music the way I loved old-time music and seeing her reminded me of those fiddling days and of the old violin that hangs on my wall and how for me it has what the ocean has, which is the ability to make all the chatter in my brain quiet down for a while, but only when I give it my attention.

            The car was warm when I returned, and quiet too, away from the roar of the breakers and the gulls and the wind. I examined my haul of rocks one more time. I sipped what was left of my coffee. The mom who’d been searching for something with her son strode past my car carrying a toy dinosaur, which must’ve been the object they’d been looking for.

            Just outside my car other beach goers came and went, dogs retrieved sticks and parents tucked their children into puffy jackets. The birds that’d been scavenging on the ground earlier were now creatures of the wind. The crows dipped and dived, allowing the gusts to knock them every which way. Further above, three eagles found a current to ride and they circled higher and higher. I admired their effortlessness and the ease with which they climbed.