A Match to the Heart

by Gretel Ehrlich

  Immersion in water stands for annihilation and a return to formlessness, followed by rebirth and regeneration. In the geography of death, it’s not the ferryman who counts but water itself: the ocean as medium between fire and air, life and death. After lightning struck I felt like a twig in the shape of a cross floating inside the sea.

  When the storm came the whole world began moving. Brown ribbons of kelp came untied. Swells that rose tall as buildings sank into black troughs and the troughs redoubled themselves so that the swells kept falling. Rain shot down from all directions at once, then it was a silver sheet sliding into the sea like glass, pane after pane shattering. I left the doors to the house wide open to welcome the storm, secretly hoping the waves would come in. I’d dreamed a tsunami had broken through windows, that I’d stood in a shower of foam that rained down people, dogs, and horses. After coming so close to death, these were my quiet celebrations of life.

  A blue hole in the roof of the sky appeared. The ruins of the storm washed up: lemons, plastic bottles, oak limbs, avocados, bumpers from the side of a boat, a fiberglass hull. In four days, five vertical feet of sand had been taken away, and exposed rocks rattled in surging tides. From the beach the row of houses looked taller, as though the moisture had made them grow. Out beyond the waves that came in series of four and five, not one or two, a pelican dove down into kelp beds. Each time, the sea closed over the bird but let go fast: he rose and flew. Floating logs pretended they were seals, and seals poked their heads through the middles of waves. Surf scooters—homely diving ducks with black feathers and thick red beaks—floated en masse, resting before continuing on to Alaska. A wreath of black clouds that had broken away from the storm pulled apart over the islands, but no sunlight poured through.

  During the storm the boat of a local fisherman went down. He had been fishing for halibut up the coast when a wave swamped the foredeck and bridge. The wheelhouse filled fast with water. Barefoot, he had to kick out the windows with his feet to escape, and as he did so, saw his dog tumbling, then she was gone. There was shark danger, intensified because of his bleeding feet but his coworker—called a “tender”—had plucked two survival suits from the sinking vessel, and when they finally found each other in churning water, they managed to get the suits on. Though survival suits won’t prevent shark bites, they’ll keep you warm, even if you’re already wet. When they didn’t show up that evening the other fishermen called the Coast Guard and the two men were rescued after being in the water for five hours.

  The next week, sand-bearing waves brought the beach back, erasing all the scars of the storm. The coastline kept reforming itself—revising drafts of how it should be shaped, how many rocks, how deep the sand. Only the unmoving tide pool creatures stay the same.

  One morning the sky was a red wall—meaning fair weather—and at dusk it was an orange flame. But water puts out fire and no harm came to me. Except that unexpectedly I had to move, because the owner of the house I was inhabiting wanted to return. That house had been my refuge and the sea my restoration. I had a week to find a new place and I was too frail to pack and lift boxes, to move anywhere.

  chapter 16

  The Arctic people of Labrador say that a person is born empty: dreams fill him, and a person who doesn’t dream is no better than a black fly. That’s what I was, because I’d stopped dreaming almost completely since being hit by lightning. It’s now known that REM sleep is associated with a surge of sympathetic nervous system activity—of which I had very little, and so for six months my nights had been empty.

  Then I dreamed that I died. Water surrounded me and nothing looked familiar. On waking, I found that I hadn’t died, only moved. From an austere minimalist house on a lonely beach to a small cottage in a cove where the residents were gregarious and walked their dogs every day: I had been reborn into the realm of humans.

  Instead of tide pools, Sam sniffed trails to other dogs. We met Skippy and Minke—two Skipperkees belonging to a tall, long-legged, world-class diver, writer, classical pianist, and adventurer named Hillary. We met Thatcher, a huge German shepherd belonging to Kate, a glamorous and vampish Australian who might have starred in Cecil B. DeMille’s classics, and down at Fernald Point, another dog, named Dennis, who liked to chase boats from the beach, a habit Jim, his owner, bemoaned: “Why can’t he just chase balls like other dogs?”

  In the other direction there was a standard poodle, two black dachshunds, and a variety of surfers’ mutts, but Sam liked Dennis best, perhaps because their coloring and markings were almost exactly the same, though Dennis was larger.

  On days when I felt too dizzy to walk, I’d send Sam down the beach to visit his friends. “Go find Dennis and bring him up here for a snack,” I’d tell him, and off he’d go, a quarter of a mile down the sand, up through Jim’s elegant garden. Sometime later the two dogs would appear, looking very pleased with themselves. Or else Jim would call and say, “Sam’s in my kitchen, do you mind? I’ll send him home in a while.”

  Because Kate was homesick for Australia and the rituals that go with home, we decided to have a weekly Wednesday night “barbecue,” to which all the dogs and their owners were invited. She grilled “snags” (sausages) for the dogs and for us, and I’d arrive at her house down the beach carrying a wooden salad bowl—on my head or hoisted up on my shoulder if it was a high tide. I liked the fact that we’d all met because of our dogs; dogs don’t care who is rich or poor, accomplished or struggling.

  The nights were balmy. “Wet Wednesdays” were race nights at the harbor and the horizon filled with bright spinnakers. The dogs played until darkness came, and in the sweeping peace of the tide going out, they lay down all in a row and slept while we drank to the blessings of friendship, canine and human alike.

  It was spring, and while my new house was cramped and humble, it was on the sand and the ocean still came to the front door. At dawn I’d roll out of bed, not even bothering to change clothes, and walk. Squalls came and went. Storm surges carried huge swells into the cove, and as rain inebriated the coast, the thick stub of a rainbow pushed out of the sea like a green thumb on the horizon. After, the dark blue sheet of water turned metallic, and I wondered: What in nature is not a mirror, does not give back a true image of mind?

  It was March, seven months since the accident, but not without setbacks: when Blaine took my blood pressure, there was barely enough cardiac profusion, meaning my blood pressure was absurdly low. What had seemed like steady progress toward health was a fiction. There was only shuffling forward and leaps back. Just as capriciously, two kinds of winds started blowing: the sundowner, fierce winds that came from the north, funneling over the coastal range like a snake, then blowing out to sea; and the Santa Anas, hot desert winds moving in from the Mojave Desert.

  Between wind storms El Niño hoisted the jet stream on its humped back, bringing tropical moisture on narrow clouds stretching all the way across the ocean from Hawaii. The rains were monsoon-like, dropping two or three inches an hour, bringing an end to a severe seven-year drought that had downed 300-year-old trees. The bright crenellations of sea and the cliff faces of distant islands were like false maps of places I might go to if I could have walked on water or slipped out of my skin. But at least I wanted to go, even if I wasn’t able.

  Late in the day all that was left was a sliver of light on palm tree trunks and the stems of fronds blunt-cut like hair. For so long I hadn’t been able to see; that is, I didn’t have the energy to absorb what was around me. Then things began to interest me again. After all, it was spring. I told Blaine I thought my cortex had turned green because it started giving me dreams: I was swimming upstream, leaping up waterfalls to get to a spawning ground. But someone—a huge human figure—was obstructing me. With legs spread, he stood above me, throwing me out of the river as I approached, but I leapt back in again.

  Sometimes I walked the hills overlooking the ocean to get away from the drone of surf. I walked slowly and relished the return of migrating and mating song
birds. I wanted to walk when I could and it occurred to me that stillness doesn’t mean not moving—seated meditation is only a reminder of a quality of mind in which one is wakeful, lively, spirited, humorous, not acting out of desperation.

  At my new house a green symphony played: clumps of volunteer bamboo clacked so loudly it might have caused whole orchards of lemons to ripen, and woodpeckers drilled into palm trees. Dreaming had loosened the terrible claustrophobia I felt as a result of amnesia and six months of blank nights: it knocked peep-holes into the mind’s closed rooms.

  Blood orange and bitter lemon trees blossomed, rafts of migrating ducks flew north in ragged, aerodynamic formations half a mile out from shore, their many wings appearing as one, and swallows arrived to build mud nests on sea cliffs with an opening at the front so they could take in the view. Walking was my slow-motion flight from and back into civilization, my meditation in action. When afternoon winds came, clouds that rose above the islands were shaped like the islands—mist imitating lithe-sphere—and hillsides of eucalyptus bent their fragrance down to wild, whitecapped seas.

  chapter 17

  In April a dead seal washed up in front of my house, and a duck, and a Christmas tree. Where storms had stripped the beach of sand, exposing rough cobblestones, brown waves brought sand back, erasing all evidence of death, and in doing so, provided a fresh canvas on which to etch our comings and goings. Then other storms came, disinterring what had been hidden by sand.

  Up and down this small beach, madness had not been a stranger: a house built on the edge of a Chumash burial ground burned; a woman’s young lover stabbed her husband to death; a doctor put on his tweed coat to go to work but instead walked into the sea until it closed over his head.

  New sand makes the beach a graveyard, sweeping over whatever was there a moment before, and the tides erase even that. And no matter how far a foot presses into the flesh of the earth, it is pulled from it again by water.

  A beach is where the rock of the planet is ground down into minutae, where the general is splintered back into particulars only to become one thing again—a collective body of sands. Our human and animal bodies are mostly water, as is the planet, and water eventually takes everything and is everything—the true corpus whose aqueous flesh remains after bones have slipped from the envelope of skin and feathers have separated from wings.

  This is the beach where I first touched a boy’s penis during a makeout party, listening to Elvis and the Everly Brothers, quickly trying to figure out in the dark and under layers of clothes how it uncoiled and where it went when it stiffened. Now the house where we had those parties is closed up, and near the one that burned down a jacaranda tree blooms in cascading fire-works of red flowers. Beyond, dark creases in the sea opened and I saw the back of a migrating gray whale.

  These intimations of spring were accompanied by a deterioration in my health. I had trouble staying conscious even when lying down. Blaine was in the Galapagos for two weeks and I decided to tough it out until he came home. One morning a painful knot in the center of my chest tightened. A dull ache traveled down my arm to the elbow, my heart resting in the elbow’s bent L, trying to spell out something, maybe the word love, or maybe lost.

  Chest pain has its own particular geography; it is territorial, rising in the center of the upper body; the heart is a taproot laboring to bring minerals to the surface. Sometimes pain wraps all the way around the back in long vinelike lianas pulling tight, and underneath, the heart is an island floating—maybe Greenland, or an aquifer with a tentative land cover like Labrador’s, which makes me wonder why the equatorial waters at our centers, the punched hole of the naval or the muscular knot of the solar plexus, aren’t thought to be the seat of love.

  A voluptuous season of mountain wildflowers came and went, and I missed it. While trying to take Sam down to the beach one night, I passed out on the rock steps in front of my cottage and sprained my ankle. After that, I gave up even the least adventure. For ten days I was the sea’s prisoner, a sea that looked swollen and hard, a single oscillating block. Each evening the sun slipped into its hiding place, which the Chumash say is the hole in the top of the sand dollar—and rested in its round, gold room.

  The moon was a ghost that rode the ocean at night. Waves were the deformed prodigies of a marriage between moon and shore: they were the pages of an unwritten book. Wind scuttled white foam until it tore—an alphabet coming apart. People asked: “Are you still able to write?”

  The aboriginal people of Taiwan thought there were originally two suns, but one was shot down with an arrow and became the moon. It might have been more fitting if the sand dollar had been designated as the resting place of the moon, since they reproduce once a month in summer on nights of the full moon. Such amorous and romantic creatures! Thousands of eggs are released into the sea where they float until they are found by sperm of their own kind: a rendezvous which is accomplished by special “recognition molecules,” -knobs of protein that jut out from the egg’s membrane and link only with sand dollar sperm but no other.

  I groped in darkness and found I was bound to no one, by no one, and possessed no means of reproducing myself. It was hard to hold my head up, and the air around me seemed dark. The sea was a cauldron of passion and intimacy, which I hated that week. How maddening water’s fluency was as I lay transfixed by dead brain cells. Night after night I wondered what would become of me, and hoped that whatever it was, it would come fast. I sat in my dull cocoon and watched waves break into formlessness, then form back into waves again.

  In one dream the whole sea turned into human flesh and was divided up among shells. Shells were ears into which salt water sluiced, and out spilled the driving sound of surf onto my pillow, a sound so loud it woke me: I had been crying. A lump in my throat rose, a small planet shaped like my ranch in Wyoming: pastures, meadows, house, barn, sheds, lake, all rimmed by high mountains. I spit the lump out and it floated on a loose ocean, drifting until the horizon took it away. When Blaine returned from the Galapagos, my spirits rose, as did my blood pressure.

  At our next Wednesday night “barbecue” Kate, my friend who lives in semi-exile from Australia, broke down in tears. We had been talking about northwestern Australia, where alligators eat illegal Chinese immigrants, and about the high, pristine Snowy River country, and she said, “I’m not all gold jewelry and makeup. I miss my land. I want to go into the bush for a month and walk around.” I cried with her.

  The next day we met while walking our dogs. Suddenly Sam started bleeding from his rectum and doubled up on the sand. I ran to him. Kate was already heading for her house and yelled: “I’ll call my vet. He’s the best in town. He’ll be waiting for you.” She explained where his office was as she took off. I carried Sam down the beach as fast as I was able, through my house, into my pickup, and speeded—lights flashing—into town. As we were driving I thought that if he died I would not be able to go on without him, he was my last hope, the thin thread that fastened me to all that I had known and loved and lost in Wyoming.

  The vet, tall and quick-minded, examined Sam and immediately started an IV of glucose. He fired questions: What had he eaten, where had he been, what were his habits, had he been sick before? An X-ray showed no intestinal or bowel obstructions, and a blood test eliminated poison. “It’s got to be a wild bacterial infection.”

  Sam lay motionless. His flank was caved in and his breathing was labored. I held him while the nurse shaved another patch on his leg for a needle, and another IV—of antibiotics-was begun.

  Later, after I had done all I could to assist and Sam was sleeping, I went home to rest. How quickly my own health problems had been reduced to nothing. My chest hurt but I didn’t care. All I knew was that I could make it to the vet’s office from my house in exactly six and a half minutes, and that Ron, the vet, had been instructed to call me if anything happened. All my thinking was for Sam, about Sam. During the evening, I visited him several times. Ron was there because his own dog had also be
en hurt—hit by a car—and so he attended to our two dogs through the night.

  In the morning Sam was better but they kept him another day. It pained me deeply to think about his confusion: What was happening to him, why was he in a strange place, why were people hurting him? When he came home finally, he was very thin. I fixed his prescribed bland diet but he hardly ate. Instead, he curled up on the bed and slept with his head pushed against my stomach. Every few hours during that first night I turned on the light to make sure he was still breathing and that the bleeding had stopped, and held him in my arms until dawn.

  Then it was Sam who couldn’t walk far down the beach and I adjusted my speed to him. Some days, neither of us could go very far. But even if we did nothing but sit on the rocks, we saw things: pairs of western grebes, with their slightly flattened heads, floated in water on roller coasters of rising waves, and Sam thought they looked like rattlesnakes that could swim.

  He was too weak to chase birds, so I taught him the names of species, just as I had taught his father, Rusty, each of our horses’ names. Small groups of sanderlings ran on wet sand, chasing retreating waves, eating sand fleas. Godwits, willets, long-billed curlews, sandpipers, and semipalmated plovers strode ahead of us. Beyond the row of houses, where no people lived, pelicans sunned between feeding times, tucking their long gullets against their chests and facing out to sea.