A Match to the Heart

by Gretel Ehrlich

  chapter 29

  A wave is a disturbance on the surface of a body of water, a kind of derangement. Waves are born when wind drags itself across calm water and the friction pinches it up into ripples and wavelets, which later become waves. Wind, the ever-present gardener, thins out the smaller, weaker ripples by pressing them into whitecaps and in a saga of bathrhythmic natural selection leaves the larger wavelets to grow. As these swells move out from the winds that raised them, they take on a voyager’s shape: less steep and wind-resistant, their crests become rounded, and they travel in sets, or “trains,” of similar period and height for hundreds, even thousands, of miles.

  Most of us are so earthbound, so terracentric, we think of the continent as the centerpiece around whose edges oceans lap. But to a set of waves journeying across the Pacific, the sea is the central body into which the lithosphere rudely bumps. The life of a wave ends at the edge of the continent where water becomes shallow. As they approach the shore, their length suddenly decreases, and to compensate, the waves slow down and steepen. The shallow bottom refracts waves: they are bent, not by a twist of wind but by the shape of the ocean floor. For a moment the wave is a mirror image of underwater contours, then, as it moves into critically shallow water, its back is broken and the long-distance runner falls.

  The gravitational influences of sun and moon drive the tides. A full moon pulls the waters into a bulge; and spring tides, when sun and moon are aligned with the earth, bring on the big waves; and big waves bring surfers. In spring the surf came up, and the report on the marine weather station brought surfers in droves. They migrated from Rincón to “Hammonds,” to “Edwards,” to El Cap, to Jalama, running down twisting paths to the beach with their boards.

  If human beings are fire watchers they are also wave watchers: eight-to-ten-foot waves had been predicted. After the tide passed its negative low point, it came back in with a storm-driven fury. Migrating godwits and plovers waited out the bluster on beach rocks, but the surfers ran to meet the waves that had journeyed so far for their pleasure.

  Slathering sand on their boards for better grip they leapt on and paddled into walls of water, grabbing their boards and rolling under the foam. Positioned far out, they waited, paddling, sometimes gaining, sometimes losing a swell that rolled under them, until finally they were propelled forward as if the whole ocean were just that one wave.

  A wave is speed plus time equaling distance that has taken a particular shape. Surfers are destiny’s warp, turning in the gyre, twisting time backward, paddling against current, wind and tide, then with it, turning back into the wave’s curl. Surfers are acrobats of time.

  Between sets of waves there is a gap, like the one between living and dying. The waves are time and surfers ride time’s back. Then they glide over the gap, erasing limbo, but before reaching shore, they reverse their direction, as if turning back a clock, and meet waves head-on, where white water pushes down on their necks, releases them into a lull until the next set of waves.

  To fall is to rise.... Random pressure fluctuations in the turbulent lower atmosphere create perturbations on the water and, in turn, these disturb air flow: all one current. Underwater we can’t find where anything begins or ends, and up on top between sets of waves, surfers rise and fall, sliding around in the amniotic bardo of water that mirrors ground but is in no way solid.

  A ringing phone woke me.

  “Do you want to go to the islands?” Jim and Hillary asked.

  “When?”

  “In half an hour, and bring the lunch.” Their boat is a twenty-five-foot Radon, designed and built in Santa Barbara for urchin and abalone divers. A small forward berth, hung with wet suits and flippers, opened onto a wheelhouse, with a broad deck behind where the air compressor is mounted on the stern and lengths of hose were coiled—air for the divers. Against the winch on top of the cabin, two surfboards were wedged, pointing toward the open water of the channel.

  By eight-thirty we had passed the breakwater and glided in fog past bell buoys and channel markers. There was a northwesterly wind at twelve knots and a three-foot swell—choppy but not gut-wrenching. “See those little white clouds coming over the tops of the mountains?” Jim said, pointing over his shoulder. “We call those catpaws, or the fingers of death, because they mean twenty-knot winds in the outer waters.”

  We passed large groups of shearwaters resting mid-migration, and seals hooked their flippers to rafts of kelp and slept until we roared by. Halfway out we could see neither mainland nor islands. The sky was gray and the water was inkwellgreen. We crossed a current line—one side was wrinkled and dark, the other, metallic and blue. Then the limestone cliffs of the western end of Santa Cruz loomed above us and the sky cleared.

  What had been a three-foot northwesterly swell was now much larger, maybe eight or nine feet, and we slid down green slopes of unbroken waves into troughs that were all chop at the bottom because the current was going the other way. This was the infamous “Potato Patch” that had downed ships and boats much grander than ours. We were like a bar of soap bobbing, slamming down so hard we had to hang on to keep from hitting our heads. In the stern, Hillary’s two dogs stood splay-footed, their bear-cub ears flattened, their black hair wet with spray.

  Twenty-six miles out, between two islands, where the water was too deep to anchor, Jim tied the boat to a clump of seaweed—a kelp tie—the way we tied horses to sagebrush in country where there were no trees. Squadrons of pelicans and seagulls sat on each end of the beach and the backsides of breaking waves were aquamarine and turquoise.

  We moved over a forest of kelp. “I want to dive here,” Hillary said, squeezing into her pink and black wet suit. Tall, loud-voiced from deafness, she’s a veteran scuba diver who has been in the waters off the Great Barrier Reef, all around Mexico, in the Caribbean, and in the southern and northern Pacific; and perched amid the diving and surfing gear at their house is her Steinway on which she’s happy to serenade any visitor with Chopin nocturnes.

  Looking down at the swirling canopy of kelp was to look at the top of a great forest. What lived beneath was much more interesting than the skin of the sea. A kelp forest houses and hosts hundreds of marine animals. Norris topsnails eat its fronds; crabs and lobsters use it as a ladder, eating invertebrates on the way; abalone feed on drift kelp—fronds that have been discarded—and bottom fish and schooling fish live in its shelter.

  Hillary stepped into fins, mouthed the regulator, and tumbled backwards into the sea. As she swam away from the boat, Jim fed out air hose, then stopped. “That’s enough.... She’ll never come back if I keep giving it to her,” he said gruffly, never taking his eyes off the water. “This is what my tender does all day, for hours and hours. He watches the hose, he watches for my bubbles.... You don’t want a guy who’s going to go to sleep on you when you’re a hundred feet down with no air,” Jim said.

  The swell was sloppy. We rocked and rolled. Jim tugged on the air line, signaling Hillary to come back. Finally water bubbled at the stern and her head popped up. “God... I was down in a canyon and it was filled with bat rays... hundreds of them... five feet across, flapping all around me.”

  We motored to the lee side of the island. Jim eyed the surf as we went. “The waves out here are hollow tubes; they’re scary and beautiful. We call the end section of these waves ‘the toilet bowl’ and try to make it through to the end without getting flushed,” he said grinning.

  The swell flattened and we dropped anchor near a beach. Jim pulled the surfboards off the cabin roof and threw them in the water. Hillary dove in, then Jim handed their two dogs, Skippy and Minke, to her and she placed them on one of the surfboards. Holding the board with one arm, she paddled alongside, and in the slack between sets of waves, the dogs rode to shore.

  Jim was a pink arch arrowing into translucent water. Twenty feet down the bottom was visible—that’s how clear it was. He emerged and saw me sitting on the rail in cutoffs and a T-shirt. “Well?” he asked.

  “I
left my string bikini in Wyoming,” I said. I hadn’t been in the ocean for thirty years but I wanted to go in; I wanted to blast the gray cocoon in which I had been suspended when my heart had stopped. “It won’t hurt you,” Jim said, laughing. I jumped. This wasn’t a turbulent hell realm into which I was leaping, but the real sea with its china-blue elixir cushioning me.

  Opening my eyes underwater, I was swimming in sparks. The shell of my body lifted off and was destroyed as cool water flowed in over new skin. Like a frog, I did the breast stroke, plowing despair aside. Pale blue poured in with bright light, as if, coincident with the theory of relativity, mass was exerting an influence on particles of light even though those particles were massless.

  Earlier I had thought about a small Tantric scepter—a vajra—sent to me by a friend in Nepal. Small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, its five prongs stand for aggression, pride, passion, jealousy, and ignorance. Old friends. It’s said that the sharp edges of the prongs are like razor blades: a reminder that we will cut ourselves if we live without awareness, precision, and basic sanity.

  Vajra is associated with blue and with water, and people with vajra-like personalities are keen-minded and open to the multifacetedness of any experience—a diamond-like quality of mind that operates with unconditional clarity.

  Bending my legs at the knee, I kicked out straight: the vajra spun, churning out diamonds until my head broke the surface of water. Up top, huge swells undulated, lifting and dropping, then slowed, steepened, and broke as waves. They frightened me. I bided my time for the lull, then, between sets, swam for shore.

  On the deserted beach we cast off our clothes and rolled in hot sand because the breeze was cool. With the two surfboards we made shade for the black-haired dogs. Hillary took their collars off so they could be naked too. Soon we were hot and began to swim back to the boat for drinking water. My timing was off and the undertow too strong and a wave caught me. I looked around just as its crest dropped down on top of my head. As Jim would say, I was getting flushed.

  Underwater I was lost again; it was like falling through white leaves. Earlier I had read a description of a neutron star’s interior as being nuclear matter interleaved with sheets, strands, or droplets of quark matter, which is matter that has been compressed by extreme pressures. That’s how my body felt; I feared I would never be able to breathe, and in my panic, gulped water.

  My head broke through the surface, shooting up in foam. As children, Hillary and I had been in the same dance performance of “The Little Mermaid.” Because she was tall and dark and I was small and blond, she was the witch and I was the mermaid. We did not remember each other when we re-met forty years later when I came across a photograph of the two of us—in costume on the lawn of my parents’ house. Now, coughing up water and gasping for air, I saw Hillary facing me like a dancing partner, pulling my arm up as if to place it on her sun-darkened shoulder—the mermaid and the witch—and she was laughing hard.

  At the end of the day we pulled anchor and headed home. Along the edge of the island, the pounding surf had carved out openings. In some of those caves, suns and planets and spider-handed humans had been painted by the people who had inhabited the islands for at least ten thousand years. It was too late in the day to go in; the surge, like a boulder rolling against the opening, would have trapped us. The dome of the cave looked like the bone-vault of a skull full of passing thoughts, the ocean filled and drained from it, the way blood fills and empties out of a ventricle. As we turned homeward, the Potato Patch jounced us hard. “Don’t worry, there’s only another hour or so of this,” Jim said wryly. The swells were bigger than the boat. There was no view over them, and I wondered if there really was a shore.

  chapter 30

  June marked the end of spring on California’s central coast and the beginning of five months of dormancy that often erupted in fire. Mustard’s yellow robes had long since turned red, then brown. Fog and sun mixed to create haze. The land had rusted. The mountains, once blue-hued with young oaks and blooming ceanosis, were tan and gray. I walked across the fallen blossoms of five yucca plants: only the bare poles of their stems remained to mark where their lights had shone the way. I was still trying to get my bearings. My blood pressure had normalized but I groped along the path.

  Walking had become an obsession. It was the way I moved in the world, achieved some rudimentary intimacy with a place. I had walked on almost every beach from Malibu to Big Sur, and though only in increments of four miles at a time, I did it often enough to parlay the distance into a thousand miles. My walks nearer to home were also vertical: up and down the mountain from beach to a ridge eyelashed with pines.

  As I trudged, my feet planted themselves in vertigo. Where was I? Why was I there? No matter how far and often I walked, I was still living in exile from the ranching community that had been my home. When fog came, only the weather buoy off El Capitan, lost in grayness, offered a bearing—if only one of sound-its plaintive blast was the tip of my tongue touching I don’t know what—the place where the bardo had been, which was now nothingness.

  Early one morning I walked to the top of the road that led into the mountains. Far below, kelp beds and current lines carved the channel into a thousand watery islands. A hurricane off Baja sent warm air dripping—more like sweat than rain—and the storm surge lifted waves in fast-period jade panes. High on a slope of tall oat grass, a redtail hawk whistled impatiently as if trying to summon prey up into its talons, and a bobcat—one that had become quite friendly—played king of the road as I approached, then jumped sideways into chaparral. The Spaniards called the oak scrub that covers much of the southern and central coastal mountains chaparral, thus the “chaps” needed to protect the legs while riding these brushy hills.

  Where marine air mixed with dry canyon winds, chaparral broke open into savannah and coastal live oak, Quercus agrifolia, thrived. Twin-trunked, stiff-armed, wizened, and venerable, the oaks were elephantine; their thick bark wrinkled at the crotch of each limb like skin. Mottled with pale gray lichens, wind-contorted, hung with green wisps of moss, they seemed to be the reservoirs of some ancient memory of this human-tormented part of the world, and from beneath, their canopy looked like a brain. These oak are judicial, their gray trunks leaning into a hill, balanced by a long arm that reached the other way, almost to the ground, then lifted up to suspend its green cloud of foliage.

  Coastal live oaks have ancient origins. They have grown on the California coast for twenty million years, and their more ancient predecessors are very much like today’s species. I picked up a leaf. It was tough and leathery, many-pointed and waxy—a botanic strategy to hold moisture during months without rain. Even the tiny stomata that cover the surface of the leaf like little mouths, letting carbon dioxide in and water vapor out, can shut down quickly in case of extreme heat or prolonged lack of rain.

  Under those trees there was no wind. The green acorn pushed its pointed tip out of a stippled cup and grew hard. Each oak gathered stillness with its brawny arms and brightened the ground below: everywhere, oat grass ripened to the color of maize.

  “Beware the ash, it courts the flash,” one European legend warned, but oaks, on the other hand, called “thunder-trees,” were known to protect against lightning. Said never to be struck by a thunderbolt—though in fact, they sometimes are—they provided a place of shelter during a storm. Even the branches or acorns lent safety to a house, and the wood from an oak that had been struck was hastily gathered as a charm against misfortune.

  Oaks are sacred trees, trees of peace, marriage trees. They live for hundreds of years, and the felling of an oak is still deemed a sacrilege. In The Natural History of Wiltshire, a British naturalist wrote: “When an oake is felling, it gives a kind of shriek or groanes, that may be heard a mile off, as if it were the genius of the oake lamenting.”

  Marriages were performed under isolated oaks, and lovers who wanted to know if they would marry floated two acorns in a bowl of water. If the acorns d
rifted apart, one lover would be faithless or else the marriage would not occur, but if they moved close together, marriage was certain.

  I’m not saying whether I floated any acorns, but the moon on water that night was a silver oak leaf folded on my tongue, and on it was written my fortune. Later, an eclipse—I watched it through open doors from my bed—covered those words, but I imagined myself as a tree pushing up through hard soil, or as a wanderer with a knapsack walking across the face of a blackened moon.

  chapter 31

  It was June again, almost two years since I was struck by lightning and I found myself packing for Wyoming—saddle, boots, slicker, hat, bedroll, and, of course, Sam. I had to smell sage and feel the crisp presence of autumn in summer winds. While I was packing the papers from my desk, a roadrunner appeared at the window of the living room. A dead lizard hung from his mouth. He moved from one window to the next, tapping, desperate to come inside. Earlier in the day I had heard his plaintive cries, a whining sound like that of a puppy tied up and abandoned. Through an open door he found his way into the room, and before I could stop him, he jumped onto my computer, lizard still dangling. I finally convinced him to leave. What did he want? I wondered. As I shooed him out through the French doors, he didn’t fly—he ran, his long blue tail feathers a balance pole that swayed up and down, back and forth, both ends of the dead lizard bouncing.