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my_window_seatOn the windowsill next to my bed is a seashell that looks something like this:
Imagine it in slate grey with blue and white accents. Beside it is a small scallop shell, only as big as the end of the fingernail on your pinkie.
Both of these shells came from the beach on Galveston Island. I was there last weekend.
For the first time in over 15 years, I went to the ocean. Gulf of Mexico - same diff - if you can't see the horizon over the curvature of the earth, you may call it ocean.
Drive to Galveston till you hit water. Take the car ferry over the short expanse of water and you are on a comparably desolate island. A few convenience stores, a couple of desultory restaurants, and a small forest of houses on stilts - the few lone survivors of last years storms.
All entirely ringed by the foamy surf of the beach.
It was something of a long drive down, punctuated by one night in a hotel in Houston before we went on the second leg and then getting to the desired location of - just beach. Water. Sand. The occasional truck scoping out their own space and other campers spread at discrete distances for privacy.
We found our on spot fairly early in the evening and after a sparse dinner of trailmix and fruit and a short rest reading, we set up the tent on the sand. And sat and read some more. I went beachcombing; taking care to avoid the sharper edges of shells not ground into smooth sand, and found my shell, and another one for Paco. And one to return to the ocean, so that we would always know where it was no matter where we went.
Spent the rest of the evening reading in the car, then reading after the sun went down by the light of the car's interior, and then went to bed. In the tent on our sleeping pad and bags, the sand was firmly compacted and unforgiving, but it felt right. Finding the pockets and squirming them into place until they fit. And then listening to the sound of the waves pounding themselves senseless just a few feet away.
To say it was perfect would be an understatement. To say, it felt like being as far away from everything as it was possible to be and at the same time as close to home in so many years that I hardly even realized until I was there how much I'd missed it.
Earlier in the day, while still on the mainland proper, I apparently turned into an 8 year old, cartwheeling down the the waterfront and running out into the waves, overalls rolled up above my knees, and then following out the granite jetty barefoot as far as it would go out, squealing in the spray and loving every warm wet minute of it.
Seeing the young girls in bikinis and children in sunsuits making sandcastles, the bike and cart riders, kite flyers, sunbathers - and then getting away from all of them to take a car ferry out the edges of a place where the concept of tourism has yet to be exploited. Away from strip malls and WalMarts and Pizza Huts and Panda Express and Subways and on and on and bloody on -
Here was the purity of nothingness. The crash and smash of water meeting the immovable, skirling back, and throwing itself down again. Over and over again. For the pure pleasure of pleasuring itself.
Imagine this, and imagine sharing it with someone you care about, without the need to deconstruct it, label it - just let it be what it is.
Imagine the darkness and the temperature and the sounds balanced so perfectly that the words and sleep are as natural as falling in and drifting under that vast expanse of pulling out and drawing near again. Finding that for each swell, you are as far away and as close as it's possible to be without moving.
The cat stands in front of me, yawning, with no idea why I'm holding my shell up to my ear, pretending that the small spoonful of sound it holds is like a fragment of a secret weekend soundscape writ small.
I went to the ocean and took these small pieces of it home with me. I took back more; things that I can't see or put into words, but that are as real as this beachworn reminder.
So much captured in so few moments.
Can you hear it?
Can you hear the sound of the ocean?
I can.
I can.
Imagine it in slate grey with blue and white accents. Beside it is a small scallop shell, only as big as the end of the fingernail on your pinkie.
Both of these shells came from the beach on Galveston Island. I was there last weekend.
For the first time in over 15 years, I went to the ocean. Gulf of Mexico - same diff - if you can't see the horizon over the curvature of the earth, you may call it ocean.
Drive to Galveston till you hit water. Take the car ferry over the short expanse of water and you are on a comparably desolate island. A few convenience stores, a couple of desultory restaurants, and a small forest of houses on stilts - the few lone survivors of last years storms.
All entirely ringed by the foamy surf of the beach.
It was something of a long drive down, punctuated by one night in a hotel in Houston before we went on the second leg and then getting to the desired location of - just beach. Water. Sand. The occasional truck scoping out their own space and other campers spread at discrete distances for privacy.
We found our on spot fairly early in the evening and after a sparse dinner of trailmix and fruit and a short rest reading, we set up the tent on the sand. And sat and read some more. I went beachcombing; taking care to avoid the sharper edges of shells not ground into smooth sand, and found my shell, and another one for Paco. And one to return to the ocean, so that we would always know where it was no matter where we went.
Spent the rest of the evening reading in the car, then reading after the sun went down by the light of the car's interior, and then went to bed. In the tent on our sleeping pad and bags, the sand was firmly compacted and unforgiving, but it felt right. Finding the pockets and squirming them into place until they fit. And then listening to the sound of the waves pounding themselves senseless just a few feet away.
To say it was perfect would be an understatement. To say, it felt like being as far away from everything as it was possible to be and at the same time as close to home in so many years that I hardly even realized until I was there how much I'd missed it.
Earlier in the day, while still on the mainland proper, I apparently turned into an 8 year old, cartwheeling down the the waterfront and running out into the waves, overalls rolled up above my knees, and then following out the granite jetty barefoot as far as it would go out, squealing in the spray and loving every warm wet minute of it.
Seeing the young girls in bikinis and children in sunsuits making sandcastles, the bike and cart riders, kite flyers, sunbathers - and then getting away from all of them to take a car ferry out the edges of a place where the concept of tourism has yet to be exploited. Away from strip malls and WalMarts and Pizza Huts and Panda Express and Subways and on and on and bloody on -
Here was the purity of nothingness. The crash and smash of water meeting the immovable, skirling back, and throwing itself down again. Over and over again. For the pure pleasure of pleasuring itself.
Imagine this, and imagine sharing it with someone you care about, without the need to deconstruct it, label it - just let it be what it is.
Imagine the darkness and the temperature and the sounds balanced so perfectly that the words and sleep are as natural as falling in and drifting under that vast expanse of pulling out and drawing near again. Finding that for each swell, you are as far away and as close as it's possible to be without moving.
The cat stands in front of me, yawning, with no idea why I'm holding my shell up to my ear, pretending that the small spoonful of sound it holds is like a fragment of a secret weekend soundscape writ small.
I went to the ocean and took these small pieces of it home with me. I took back more; things that I can't see or put into words, but that are as real as this beachworn reminder.
So much captured in so few moments.
Can you hear it?
Can you hear the sound of the ocean?
I can.
I can.
