LOST
Jerry and I roll into Portland around noon on a gray day in early December. We drive down Hawthorne Boulevard, toward my new rented room, not far from my stepbrother and his family’s home. My friends have all assured me that Portland is not that small, that the likelihood of bumping into Karissa is slim. But I haven’t been in the city for more than five minutes when she sends me a text.
I just saw your truck drive by! Welcome to town:)
As it turns out, the hair salon where she works is located five blocks from my new house.
I’m tempted to flip a U-turn, drive myself and all my shit straight back to Brooklyn.
Jerry takes me out to lunch, orders some tea to help calm me down. It’s pouring outside now, and the cover of the Oregonian shows a surfer riding a thirty-foot storm swell down at Lincoln City. Below that is a follow-up to the headline news about the lost California family. They’ve finally been located—it turns out they got their car stuck in the snow on a remote back road, and the wife and children lived in this vehicle for days, burning the tires for warmth, rationing out energy bars and bottled water.
All except for the husband, who made the choice to leave his family, wander out in the snowy woods in nothing but tennis shoes, jeans, and a rain jacket, searching for help.
It wasn’t the right decision.
SRI LANKA
After four years in Bequia, my uncle John and aunt Ann moved to Seattle to raise their children. By the mid eighties, though, they craved more adventure, so they took my cousins out of school for a humanitarian mission to Sri Lanka. Their plan was to spend a year or more building a water system for a small village. But soon after their arrival, civil war broke out between the Tamil Tigers and government forces. The U.S. Embassy advised my uncle to leave, but after the Red Cross gave him a special sticker for the family’s van—allowing them access to remote villages where they could deliver much-needed food and supplies to refugees—he decided to stay on.
They witnessed suffering and atrocities, but they survived the civil strife and helped hundreds of people. Things were going along okay—that is, until my uncle’s ocean obsession got the best of him. Down at the local harbor, he discovered a deal on a sailboat he couldn’t resist. His plan was to fix it up and eventually take his family cruising in the South Seas. Not long after he finished rebuilding the derelict craft, though, armed forces came aboard and located two handguns hidden up in the hold, likely left there by the former owner.
My uncle was thrown into a cramped prison cell with concrete floors and a bucket for a toilet, which he had to share with five other inmates. Within a week of his incarceration, infectious conjunctivitis rendered him practically blind; he developed a terrible case of dysentery and lost more than thirty pounds. He was so sick that he found himself wishing for death, but another prisoner was kind to him, helped nurse him back to health. Once my uncle regained his vision, this man drew all the Hindu deities on slips of paper for him. He taught John their names: Shiva the lord of destruction, Kali the Destroyer, Vishnu the Preserver, Ganesh the elephant god, Hanuman the monkey god.
But closest to this man’s heart were Ram and his lover Sita. He explained to my uncle how, with help from Hanuman, Ram rescued Sita from imprisonment by the demon Ravana, whose prison lair was located on the very island of Sri Lanka.
THIRTY-THREE
The poet Hart Crane was almost thirty-three when he committed suicide. He was on a U.S.–bound ship from Mexico, where he made a sexual overture toward a male crew member; in response the sailor beat Crane to within an inch of his life. Crane then finished the job for him by casting himself overboard.
David Foster Wallace was thirty-three when he voyaged aboard the cruise ship Zenith, which he rechristened the Nadir. Midnight chocolate buffets, skeet shooting, five-star dining, conga lines—these entertainments only intensified the despair he felt at night, on board the Nadir. “I am now 33 years old,” he writes in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. “And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful.”
Herman Melville was thirty-two when Moby-Dick was published. At thirty-three, and partly in reaction to the commercial failure of Moby-Dick, he wrote Pierre—a semiautobiographical novel in which the author passive-aggressively rages against the literary establishment, antebellum American culture, Christianity, his own family, and himself. It’s one of the most bizarre, nihilistic books ever written. The main character’s suicide in the end symbolizes Melville’s own career suicide. It would take seven decades to resuscitate his dormant, shrouded reputation.
When he was thirty-three, William Faulkner wished to marry a young woman named Estelle, a family friend who’d been like a sister to him when they were growing up. Since he’d embarked on what they feared would be a non lucrative writing career, both his family and Estelle’s parents forbade him from proposing. When Estelle became engaged to another man, Faulkner poured his rage and heartache into The Sound and the Fury—a narrative that spins furiously around a sister character, Caddy Compson, like electrons around a nucleus. Three of the book’s four sections follow the Compson brothers in the wake of Caddy’s elopement. Benjy Compson, the “idiot” brother, wails by the golf course whenever a player calls for his caddy. Quentin, the suicidal, intellectual older brother is tortured by his incestuous love for Caddy, so much so that he eventually drowns himself. Jason, the oldest, rage-filled brother, tries in vain to keep Caddy’s illegitimate daughter (also named Caddy) from ending up like her mother.
This kind of authorial-biographical analysis isn’t much in vogue these days, but to me the novel reads like Faulkner’s heartsick howl for Estelle. Though formally challenging even by contemporary standards, The Sound and the Fury helped earn Faulkner his epic literary ascension; on the heels of his success he and Estelle eventually married.
In the first Canto of The Inferno, Dante writes, “Midway along the journey of our life / I woke to find myself in a dark wood.” Since the life expectancy for men of his era was about sixty, we can guess that Dante was around thirty-three when he made his symbolic voyage down into hell, out through purgatory, and, eventually, up to paradise.
In 1992, famous pro surfer Mark Occhilupo had a mental breakdown during a surf trip to France. Though he’d been on his way toward a world championship and was nearly thirty, he moved back home with his parents in Australia. For several seasons he did nothing but lie on the couch, watch TV, and drink beer. Having reached obese proportions, and diagnosed with bipolar mood disorder, he disappeared completely from the world of surfing.
He was the opposite of lost at sea.
Then, at age thirty-three, he rejoined the pro surfing circuit and made one of the most miraculous comebacks in the history of sports. According to Australian surf writer/photographer Sarge, “The highlight of the life of Jesus Christ was his rising from the dead, after dying nailed to a cross. He was thirty-three; so is Occy. [Mark] has already come back from the ‘dead’ and he is currently doing the nailing.”
THE EMERGENCY
Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.
∼ HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
Whereas I’d been lucky to get a few hours’ rest in the city that never sleeps, the ever-present overcast makes Portland my city that always sleeps. During the dark month of December I often sleep until noon or later, making up for the countless hours I’d missed in New York. My first weeks are spent struggling to adjust to the demands of a new job, avoiding parts of town where I think I might see Karissa, and missing Dawn, Asa, my roommates, and all my other f
riends back in the city.
During my first staff meeting at my new job, I have another mental blackout, similar to those I’d suffered back in New York. But in this case, rather than sitting alone in my cubicle, I’m now surrounded by volunteers and fellow employees—people I barely know, people who’ve been waiting three months for me to show up.
Someone asks me a question about a problem with our database—a problem that has arisen as a result of the theft of our old staff computer—and while I’m trying to explain what little I know about the situation, the circuitry of my mind abruptly powers down. It’s not like having a word escape you for a moment—this feels more like I’ve been robbed of words, like my capacity for language has been ripped from my body, pitched into the back of a black SUV, and driven off into the night.
Somehow I recover and finish the meeting, and, fortunately, this being just a few days before Christmas, the next morning I fly back to Colorado to stay with my parents over the holidays. It’s a good trip, and I get some much-needed rest, and by the time I head back, I’m feeling a little better about everything.
Until the flight home, when, just after takeoff, I feel the plane start to descend, and I know immediately that something’s wrong.
As confirmation, the captain’s voice echoes over the loudspeaker.
“Folks, it looks like we have a little problem,” he says.
It’s amazing how one short sentence can conjure so many images of major disaster. Right away my mind is full of 9/11 and Lockerbie, Scotland—two hundred suitcases and seats scattered through a pasture. And also scenes from the comedy Airplane, where the panic erupts into full-blown chaos, and an actual wrestling match—turnbuckles and singlets and all—breaks out in the aisles.
“The flaps on our left wing aren’t working properly,” the captain explains. “Flight control is advising that we swing back around Denver. We may have a bit of a hard touchdown, so I’ve asked the flight attendants to prepare you for an emergency landing. Emergency crews will be on the ground waiting for us.”
The attendants seem overly chipper and happy, as if they’re thrilled about this hard landing we’re about to make.
“What’s that mean, anyway—a bit of a hard touchdown?” I wonder out loud.
It turns out the guy sitting next to me is an amateur pilot. He explains that a hard landing could mean anything. An extra little bump, the kind that causes overhead bins to spill open, a thing I’d witnessed when I flew with my family to Cancun in the fifth grade. Or a hard landing could mean the kind whose aftermath you see on the nightly news: a fuselage in flames, the nose cone crunched up like a recycled Pepsi can. Emergency crews? That means fire trucks, rescue crews, ambulances equipped with special burn victim units.
“And if you ask me,” he says, “the thing about the flaps is bullshit. They never tell you what’s really going on.”
The flight attendants take to the aisles, still masked with strained smiles as they guide us through emergency landing procedures. Instead of putting your head between your legs, contemporary protocol calls for placing your hands up on the seat in front of you and resting your face against your forearms, as if this will mitigate the force of a 500-ton aircraft smashing into the earth.
Whereas I was once scared to even set foot on a plane, now I’m surprised to find that I’m not the least bit anxious—something for which I have the New York City subway to thank. In fact, I find myself not really caring what happens either way, a bit of a hard landing or a full-on, flaming disaster—something for which, again, I have New York to thank.
Fuck it, I keep thinking, let’s do this.
In Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary, he writes, “The book to come is as much the story of Ishmael’s not killing himself as it is the story of the death of Ahab and his crew. Ishmael had to survive himself before he could survive the destruction of the Pequod.”
I love this idea, and I’d take it a step further: my theory is that the Pequod’s destruction was itself the result of suicide. It’s not a new hypothesis; in 1963 Edwin S. Sheridan wrote a “psychological autopsy” on Ahab, concluding that his was a case of “victim-precipitated homicide,” that Ahab “permitted suicide.” It fits with the Jungian interpretation of Moby-Dick—the idea that the book can be read as the night sea journey of a single soul, that Ahab is basically Ishmael’s own dark side. This explains why Ahab takes over narration at the end, why Ishmael as narrator has access to Ahab’s inner thoughts. Any modern practitioner would most likely diagnose Ahab as having PTSD and severe depression as a result of his being dismasted. And I know from experience that a common symptom of both is suicidal ideation.
For Ahab, a shipwreck would make it all look like an accident.
When I was in college, a young Air Force fighter pilot broke formation, not far from my plane’s current airspace. He intentionally crashed a $10 million jet into a mountain just twenty miles from my parents’ house.
Maybe this was Ahab’s plan all along.
Red ambulance lights strobe the runway as we begin our descent back into Denver. The guy next to me is sweating, white-knuckling both armrests. Everyone on board seems gripped with fear.
Everyone except me.
I don’t really feel anything but numb.
We hover for a moment over the runway, then touch down with nothing more than a slight skid.
The cabin erupts with applause.
We spend an hour at the gate while they repair the flaps. But when we take off again, the same thing happens. The captain comes on and says, “Folks, it looks like the flaps still aren’t coming up.”
The death drive in me—what Jung called thanatos—kicks up again.
Let’s fucking crash this thing, I think.
But immediately I’m aware of all the other passengers on board, people with kids at home, husbands, wives, families. These are people whose lives are working out, and what I want more than anything is to be one of them. And then the captain comes back on, explains that since he has full control of the aircraft, air control has suggested that we continue on to our destination.
So we fly back to Portland, broken wing and all.
THE RIP
In January I purchase a thick, hooded Body Glove wetsuit and a pair of Quiksilver booties. Homesick for Rockaway and anxious to get back in the ocean, I arrange a surf trip with an old friend from snowboard camp, Becky, along with her friends Dana and Cedar and their newborn baby, William.
We make the two-hour drive through miles of bucolic farmland, trout streams and pine trees, orchards and dairy farms and red barns. Waves of mist envelop the car as we summit the Coast Range, giving us the sensation of floating through a liminal, phantom forest, our destination obsured by a thick wall of whiteness.
Cedar takes us to a deserted beach north of Pacific City—a beautiful spot, but rarely surfed due to its lack of a protective headwall. The day turns balmy, sixty degrees and sunny, but the wintry ocean is breaking heavy, with ten-to-twelve-foot swells out at its angriest point. Given that the sea is a chaotic mess of foam and battling currents, it’s decided that Becky and Dana will stay on shore and I’ll go out with Cedar, a seasoned Oregon surfer who shapes his own boards from balsa and salvaged redwood. For William’s sake, he promises not to go in deeper than his neck. Sitting on the bumper of his Volvo station wagon while we stretch into our wetsuits, Cedar produces a large pair of binoculars from the bottom of his wetsuit duffel.
I ask if he and Dana are bird-watchers.
“No, not really,” he says.
“Then why the binoculars?”
He points with his chin at the turbulent, foamy sea. “In case one of us gets lost out there,” he says. “The girls will need some way to spot us.”
Shrugging off what seems like a preposterous notion, I finish pulling the hood over my head and pose for Becky’s digital camera. Cedar and I lug our surfboards down to the water; the minute I step in, a strong undercurrent yanks at my feet. The waves themselves come in a relentles
s, short-period progression, breaking every few seconds and from all directions. From water level I can see that on the outside, they’re cresting way overhead, some as high as thirteen feet.
These are by far the most chaotic conditions I’ve ever braved, and yet, because of my reckless Rockaway habit, my obsessiveness, I paddle right out past Cedar, hoping to catch one of the midsized lefts I’d spotted from the shore. A few pounding breakers try to send me sprawling back to the shore, but I persist, paddling hard though I haven’t been in the ocean or even a swimming pool for months.
Spotting a clean face, I stroke hard to the left, hoping for a good frontside ride. But the wave walls up quicker and steeper than I expected. Dropping down the face, I arch my back hard to keep my nose from pearling, then try to stand up, only to find myself crushed from behind. An ice-water torrent pummels me down to the depths, rolling me through a series of twisting somersaults until I no longer know which way is up and my lungs shriek for air.
I finally surface, only to find another saltwater avalanche about to break directly on me. I take a quick gasping breath and dive beneath it, feeling it wrench on my leash like some malevolent creature hellbent on dragging me down. Sputtering and coughing, I reel in my board and paddle hard for the beach, my arms and shoulders already cramped.
The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld Page 21