Want to come with us for a fun day at the beach? We wanted to get out of town without the expense and planning of staying overnight somewhere, so had this idea of a big one-day excursion… Here's the concept: A bunch of families and kids at the ocean beach, the Best Capture the Flag Game Ever in the sand dunes, kite flying, building a shelter out of driftwood, and a bonfire and hot dog roasting.
And that’s pretty much how it went down last Sunday. We threw sandwiches, sausages, chips, fruit, and beer into a cooler, piled into the car at 9 am, and drove 124 miles to Twin Harbors Beach (So easy! Just take 105 west out of Aberdeen and stay on it until Schafer Road deadends into the dunes.) By 11:30 we were dozing off on a blanket in the sun while the kids got busy digging a hole.
When we piled back in the car eight hours later -- sandy and sunburned and salt-sprayed and wood-smoked -- I had a pocket full of black and white pebbles and a head full of overwrought metaphors. For some reason my Semiotic Alert System was on overdrive that day, like the guy in that Cake song -- he keeps seeing birds fall past his window from the ledge above, and he knows that down below the window they are swooping outward and flying away, but he can't see that part from the couch, just the dropping "like stones, or small loaves of bread." And, he says, "due to a construct in my mind / that makes their falling and their flight / symbolic of my entire existence," he is compelled to go over to the window so he can look down and witness "their last-second curves towards flight."
A few of my beachy moments escaped this treatment, like Connie's driftwood xylophone (the harmonic plunking gently permeated my morning nap) and Maggi's strategy for getting a close-up view of the ocean (plant your legs apart calf-deep in the water with your back to the sea, then bend down and look out between your knees at the waves lapping inches from your forehead). The Best Capture the Flag Game Ever was a straightforward contest of speed, patience, and guile. And the strains of "I'm Yours" drifting out of the driftwood shelter (where Ian was holed up with the ukulele) were lovely all on their own, without being churned through the metaphor mill.My symbology attack may have started with the kite: having milked so much meaning out of Simon's experience with the space shuttle kite at Easter, I had a hard time not reading something beautiful yet doomed into the flight of our Warhawk:
And when I went for a walk down the beach, I couldn't help feeling unnerved by the strangely unstable terrain: whole swaths of sand kept sinking away under my feet -- even down by the water where it's always packed pretty hard -- and then just when I'd get used to clambering over the shifting mire, the ground would suddenly go solid again and my feet would come jarring down hard -- oof. For some reason (maybe because of Maggi's ocean-viewing pose?) I kept thinking of that experiment where people wore special goggles that turned the world upside down, and after a week of headaches and stumbling around, their brains actually adjusted for the inversion, and everything looked normal. But then when they took off the goggles, the world flipped over again, and they stumbled around headachy and clumsy once more until their brains re-re-wired themselves. I guess (my metaphor-manic brain declared) if you live long enough with craziness and difficulty, the sudden arrival of simple normalcy can leave you flummoxed.
From a distance the journey in and the journey out both look like walking in circles (and if you try to jump in half-way along, or get distracted and stray over a line, even you might not even know which way you're headed). But if you're at all deliberate about this ritual, the return journey feels totally different, because it's so colored by that decisive moment in the center when you took your first step back toward the entrance (transforming it instantly into the exit).
Sometimes your first step out of the lair can be daunting; it helps to remember that it'll take just as long to get out as it did to get in, so you can trust that by the time you have navigated all those twists and turns again, you'll be ready to emerge onto the open beach -- even if you're full of ambivalence when you begin. Plus, you can always come back: it may be a slightly different maze next time, on a different beach -- or maybe, like Holden Caulfield in the Museum of Natural History, you'll be the thing that's different -- but the inward journey will always be open to you. And those monsters aren't going anywhere, either.
I headed back to the group, to check on the status of the Great Hole to China after ten kids had spent all day digging and deepening it, sliding into it and clambering out of it, shoring it up, filling it in, jumping over it, and resting in it.
I think my little labyrinthine rumination must have cleared a bunch of metaphorical gunk out of my pipes -- otherwise how could I have stood at the edge of this gaping hole without having it yawn open into some sort of primal abyss? Instead I just jumped right in.
And found I was in good company.
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