On Whale Island

by Daniel Hays

  DAY 362—JULY

  We know many of the rocks by look and feel. Being habitual creatures, we often follow the same route, and it’s magic to feel that sharp point, that same slippery place . . . and the boulder that rolls around in the storms. Today we found a live baby duck washed up, threw him back into the sea. I’ll miss the adventure of each walk, what to find. I fell once and landed with my face two inches from some beautifully faceted quartz crystals.

  DAY 363

  Today the house is too small, so Wendy determines that the laundry must be done immediately, and I bring her ashore in stormy seas. We get soaked from waves of green water, roiling spray. We’re so wet that Wendy just laughs the last mile. We decide I should write a book called I Risked My Life for Laundry, or maybe Heroes Wear Only Clean Clothes. It’s joyful, riding up and down each wave, flowing around the wavelets on the waves. In some places the bottom shoals quickly, and the seas break suddenly, and we motor past thousands of tons of curling motion. Maybe the book will be called The Driveway from Hell.

  But what a driveway it is! It separates the civilization from the wilds so clearly. We all should have a moat like Wemmick in Great Expectations, a symbolic demarcation between our public and private selves. Telephones violate that with a vengeance.

  The biggest seas come in groups of three and are most intense in certain areas. At one point things get scary and Wendy screams. I hate that, because a woman’s panic scream at a tense moment like that signifies just one thing—imminent death—and, well, I’m busy steering, and the imminent-death shriek dumps about a quart of adrenaline into my body, and this doesn’t help me negotiate the fluidity of the sea, as I’ve almost broken bones going rigid with her fear . . . but the sea doesn’t quite break on us, and with a loud “Don’t scream at me!” we’re off toward the next wave, and Wendy is embarrassed.

  As usual, Stephan is riding in the bow. He sits in the middle of the seat, stretching his arms out on either side, holding tightly to the rails. As the boat leaps he lets out joyful cries of “Yahoo!” and “Yippee!”

  DAY 365

  Clusters of balloons wash up on these shores. Multicolored wrinkles of rubber sometimes tied with ribbons, sometimes with white string. Sometimes one, sometimes ten. Sometimes all popped, or maybe just very low on helium, half deflated and embarrassingly wrinkled.

  A white balloon with a purple ribbon sags before me. It washed up many mornings ago and I hung it up to remind me of all the intense bursts of life going on around me that I miss. If I were psychic I could see an aura around it.

  The balloon should not exist. A wish, a dream, it has no place existing to wash onto my beach, unless my beach were of another world. It’s like finding all the blown-out-for-a-birthday-wish candles, the lost teddy bears, the single favorite socks.

  Maybe my island here is the designated place for balloons to wash up. The waves come here to die too.

  Waves are motions that carry energy, but not matter, from one place to another. They pass along their energy as if it were a hot chestnut. When two people are holding a rope tightly between them and one flicks his end, a wave will move down the rope. The person at the other end will feel all the force of the first person but the end he is holding has not changed.

  An ocean wave is an edge of water wind has gotten under. Over continent-sized distances at sea the waves grow. In 1998 a one-hundred-foot wave was recorded off North Carolina. That is like the Empire State Building lying on its side and rolling toward you with alacrity. Waves are, like icebergs, bigger beneath the water. Much bigger. They can move sand on the ocean’s floor to a depth of 660 feet. But it is not the water from across an ocean that washes up on my shore; it is a restless spirit of the earth.

  A wave may travel thousands of miles at up to six hundred miles per hour. A wave’s energy can be months old, especially around Cape Horn, the bottom of South America, where they can blow around and around the globe without washing onto any shore.

  The wind, with some help from the moon and the earth’s rotation, causes the wave. It travels fully expressed for great distances. It playfully licks ships as it passes, lobs sea ducks into the sky, and makes tiny air currents, which albatrosses use to glide on, flying for hours just inches from the sea without a single wing flap.

  As the wave approaches the shore its bottom is pushed up, the top reaching higher into the storm, where it is torn by wind, shredded some, but still deeply whole and moving. It builds itself higher and higher, until, unable to support its reach for the sky, it tumbles and roars onto the shore, the hardest substance it has known since its creation. Then, no longer united, each drop of it is flung about, dissipated.

  What is so wonderful, what makes each wave a story as deep as a human life, is that it’s not the water traveling great distances, just the energy. Are we these bodies, these suits of meat? Each particle of water makes a small circle, receiving and then transferring the wind, moon, and earth’s spin onto another drop of water. Is that any different from our own doings in this life?

  So there is no body to a wave, only motion. When our tired bodies finally wash ashore, our living energy spent, our loved ones must struggle to separate our bodies from our souls, so that that energy lives on in their memories. Their idea of heaven—of whatever happens to us when our bodies die—that’s where we do continue to live, how we become immortal. I have noticed that this is what I strive for so much, not to be gone when I’m dead, my life’s mist at least getting another wet.

  One of my near death experiences was in a big storm when my dad and I were sailing around Cape Horn. The wave that lifted our small boat to seemingly impossible heights threw us down the front of itself moving too fast for the boat to stay in the water. Falling and then floating in the enormous chaos, I thought, completely and wonderfully helpless, of the power around me, the beautiful force of the sea, and how it was difficult to really appreciate it unless you were in a situation like my own. I felt sadness that I would be unable to share this moment, that I would have to take it with me, alone. I wanted someone who would continue living to know about this particular death. Like Peter, I just wanted to be immortal.

  I watch waves here build in the shallows—building as the bottom comes up and tumbles the top till it slams into a cold inarguable rock, bursts into the air with thunderous power. I hear the booming half a mile away. A mass of ocean travels white straight up. The winds slowly pull out the mist and then the pieces till it is all translucent, and all that adventure, all that chaos, that fury, is dissipated in the winds. And I am there to see it.

  Yesterday on a walk around the island I heard and felt a wonderful deep grumbling under a small cliff where fairly large seas were expressing their last. On my belly I crawled to the edge and peeking over, I could see a huge green boulder rolling back and forth. It had smoothed a large bowl out of the bedrock—a bowl big enough to sit a family in—and it was thudding this and that way, slowly grinding a hollow in the bedrock, already quite smooth and patient with time.

  I watched for many waves and felt its motion relax my body. Deep thudding, when not accompanied by anxiety, is a wonderful penetrating bone message. I am hopeful that my life will be as deliberate as this rock, that I will leave a perfect expression. I want for Stephan to always have me in his heart. I want for him to live fully, to be all used up when he dies. And also for him to pass on a part of his soul, just a little mist, to his own child.

  Epilogue

  I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

  I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.

  —THOREAU

  SIX MONTHS LATER IN IDAHO

  I awa
ke already startled, unsure of at what exactly, but I can feel that it is something alien to the life I perceive as human. There it is again. It’s the starting of the number two jet engine of the 7:05 flight to Salt Lake. The airport is directly across the street.

  It is the concept of “background” noise that is bothering me. I fly; I know it makes noise—that’s not what I mean. It’s the not hearing, that we can and do learn to close off our awareness and our senses. When I lived in New York City I had to not notice a man sleeping in a doorway. I had to exercise a muscle that I am embarrassed to even have, the “Oh, that’s somebody else’s problem” muscle. So I moved away to an island of my own, and now back in the world of Homo sapiens I find that my background-noise muscle has atrophied.

  I groggily inventory the sounds about me. The lawn sprinkler is going just under my window. My alarm clock clicks on; it is 7:10 now, and two DJs who are either morons or paid to be moronic are laughing at a joke. A motorcycle roars past just as another jet revs for takeoff. Snow tires whine, and a police siren perfectly demonstrates the Doppler effect.

  My eyes are wide, almost in fear. I swing my legs to the floor and begin the day already feeling my shoulders tense. I take four aspirin.

  BRIEFLY, LET ME DEFINE what it is to readjust to the world of land, and you tell me who’s nuts.

  Adjusting is:

  1. Being assaulted by and not questioning the logic of a girl in a bikini selling milk on a billboard.

  2. Allowing others to interrupt meals, baths, sleep, sex, reading, writing, or any other personal activity by making a small object in your home scream and vibrate for your attention.

  3. Having to look two or three ways at intersections so that tons of steel, plastic, and glass don’t crash into you.

  4. Locking doors.

  5. Turning on switches or knobs for light and water. Not since times recorded in the beginning of the Bible has it been so easy.

  6. Having no sense of the earth: my blinds are drawn, I don’t walk outside of my fenced yard, I don’t know what tide it is, and I don’t know the phase of the moon. The wind and rain mean nothing; they have no affect on me at all.

  7. Feeling as if I’m somehow falling behind, not on schedule. In nature I am caught up, whole, and complete.

  8. Worrying about collecting small pieces of green paper, and then panicking about how they add up.

  9. Not waving at cars you pass, not saying hello to every person you see.

  10. And finally, living with drywall. Why would anyone choose to live in a home where a nail won’t stay in a wall? And white walls? Is this a joke? I personally carry enough dirt on me by the end of a good day to smear shades of gray along thirty feet of wall.

  I LOOK THROUGH the wanted pages, but nothing interests me except the truck-driving ads. As the tide no longer pulls on my blood, all that seems to matter is how to keep those numbers before the decimal point. To care about this is pathetic to me, yet what else matters just now? Stephan visits friends and plays on their computers and watches their TVs—we won’t have one. Last week he was at his friend’s house and was accidentally left behind by two parents and four kids. They went to a baseball game and neither they nor Stephan realized he was forgotten, immobile before the television.

  A few things are unchanged. If I look pathetically enough at Wendy she will get her tweezers and groom me. My feelings for her continue to slide up and down a scale whose range includes bubbly teenage excitement, gloom, lust, fear, and joy.

  Bear is still always by my side. We like to go into the yard and pee together. Abby continues to exult in a continuous brainless yet blissful moment, and I sometimes envy her.

  My relationship with Stephan has grown to include friendship. I am still the authority person, and that seems to be okay with him. He introduces me to his friends as “the evil stepdad,” and I introduce him to mine as “the thing that lives with us.” We laugh a lot. He continues to be the one who seems to grow when we struggle. I have apologized a few more times. He has always accepted it with grace. I still think that I am lacking some instinct that nature would have provided me if Stephan were my own blood. I encourage him to see his other dad in the hopes that he will find something there that I cannot provide. But is the nourishment one seeks available that way, like at a salad bar? I can only hope. I love him, and that still scares me.

  IF THIS WERE FICTION, somewhere near the end there would be a tearful scene that concluded with Stephan and me embracing, possibly after I saved his life. He would realize that I was the best father there was. Wendy would show me that I needed to rejoin civilization after all, and I would have returned, as Thoreau did, a wiser man.

  But my life doesn’t work like that. There is no swelling music to indicate that I am about to live happily ever after. My story does not come together as Dickens would have it at the end of Great Expectations. I live my life on the mainland, in a suburb, surrounded by day-to-day nonfiction. My return to civilization will always strike me as lacking, but for my family. Still, I do not live suspended between the disparity of reality and fiction. I find satisfaction in knowing that I am the author of my own life, and I would rather misspell a word than not have written it.

  I do daydream, though, and if I open the windows just right I can get the desert wind to browse through the house like its ocean cousin used to. Way in the distance I can feel the restless murmur of tides licking rocky shores. Like listening to a shell, I think I can hear the waves, but it is really just my own heart.

  A cross section of our house, as seen by my father.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to Robbie at the Creative Edge for teaching me how to train all those rebellious electrons, and thank you, Faige, for selling me my first computer, which was, incidentally, full of rebellious electrons. Barge and Karen for ruthless support, Courtney for encouraging my dirty mind, Ilene for keeping me afraid of my dirty mind, Laine for her heart, and Angel for her smile.

  Thanks and hugs to my mom, who I miss very much, and love to my dad for standing by me no matter what I step in. (Please send money.) To Roger Parrott, Jeff Campbell, and Will Lesh, thank you for sharing your passions, feeding the fire.

  Thanks to my editor, Kathy Pories, who cut most of the really offensive parts but left in a few; and to my agent, Brian Defiore, thanks for encouraging those offensive parts.

  Thank you, Stephan, for your willingness to train and put up with an untested dad.

  Author’s Note:

  Most of the names and locations in this book have been changed. I even had to change the name of a dog who visited. Any other names resembling those of real people are mostly coincidental. I mean, there are only so many names to go around.—D. H.

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2002 by Daniel Hays. All rights reserved.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted materials: Aerial photo of Whale Island courtesy of Service Nova Scotia and Municipal Relations, Nova Scotia Geomatics Centre from roll no. 98308, photo no. 263. Drawing of house cross section courtesy of David Hays.

  © 2002 David Hays.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for a previous edition of this work.

  eISBN 9781565128095

  ALSO BY DANIEL HAYS

  My Old Man and the Sea

  with David Hays

 

 

 
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