by Ralph Bowden
*****
Back at the van, some minimal housekeeping: plug up the lamp, space heater and hotplate, heat up a can of soup, and unroll and prepare my sleeping bag. The warmed soup – not very good directly from the can – stirred some bodily functions requiring a portapotty, fifty or sixty feet away. Stepping to that, I heard nothing and saw nothing outside of the brilliant light tunnel the flashlight carved in the dark. There could have been hordes of monsters, terrorists, murderers, and the like lurking in the blackness on all sides. But isn’t all life like that? We see only what our local lights show us. All the rest is outside our direct perception. Our only knowledge of it comes through the suspect media glass, darkly, distorted, extracted and dumbed down. I was glad enough this evening to ignore what the van radio might have brought me, and to zip myself into the sleeping bag at what was probably no more than 8 p.m. No point in checking the time, either. It was dark. I was tired. Eager to let sleep anesthetize me.
The main things I was tired of were my thoughts, but they refused to be quieted. At first, I tried to visualize them as a whirl on a spinning flywheel, gradually slowing down and dying in the absence of input energy. It was impossible to deprive them of sustenance, however, and the whirl did not slow. Of course it was all in the past now. There was nothing I could do to change anything. But something there is in the mind of man – and of God, too, if He is in our image – that can’t let go. Nor can we stop regretting the past and worrying about, fearing, or anticipating the future. It’s all pointless, as sages and philosophers have taught us for millennia. But I was not entirely convinced. True, past actions cannot be changed, but our interpretation of them can, and that can bring comfort or anguish to those of us in the present who can’t let go. And of course the future deserves thought so as to determine what we want to happen and how to realize it.
Philosophy aside, my thoughts centered on whether I was really alone and anonymous here at St. Cecelia’s. The same quiet that let every bird chirp register on the beach, let every falling pine cone and rubbing or snapping branch jerk my ears around here in the campground. Most wildlife should be asleep for the winter, and silent. Deer, however, and owls and some other birds might be up and about. How about bobcats? Coyotes? Possums? Wild dog packs? I didn’t know. There were no rangers on duty to ask.
Nor was there any law enforcement. The last ranger truck had come though about five, as I was housekeeping in my van. I assumed the ranger closed and locked the campground gate as he left. I was therefore sealed in for the night. Were I to suffer a heart attack or stroke, they would find my body sometime. The gate, however, was not more than half a mile from where I had settled in. Local toughs could easily drive to it, park, and walk in to see who might be foolish enough to sit, as a duck, for their depredations. I did have a handgun in the glovebox, but I was not about to sleep with it under my pillow. That would be too close to lethality. It would also compromise the sense of solitude I craved.
The other issue was who might wonder where I was, how intensely they might wonder it, and what investigation they might initiate to find me. It would have been possible. A few people knew I had previously come to St. Cecelia’s beach. While I had been careful to wind up any unfinished business that might impel people to look for me, and had subsequently slipped away without saying anything to anyone, someone might notice my absence. They probably wouldn’t do anything, though. As a divorced male with no family nearby, no girlfriends or best golfing buddies, no one depended on me, and I could disappear for a few days without anyone caring. I was a contract employee, and the nature of my work did not require close supervision as long as the end result came in on the bottom line. After a week or ten days incommunicado, questions would arise, of course, but I surely could satisfy my current needs before then.
The whirl kept spinning, but I eventually managed to drift off anyway. Just knowing the beach was nearby helped.