Beach Blind

 She was nudged by a manatee. She was a child raking clams in shallow water, somewhere in Florida. It was 1980. The manatee bumped her just slightly, whether the result of curiosity, poor eyesight, or as some sort of message. She turned around to see the huge leathery sea cow gliding off into deeper water.

Until this moment the girl does not know manatees exist.



This memory has become important to her for a variety of reasons. Now, as an artist, she has decided to tackle the telling of it in the form of an experimental performance piece that will put performers inside sculptural constructions, out of which they cannot see, as they "kind of rove slowly around the floor" of the gallery. She says the piece will be about blind faith. The title of the exhibit will be "Half The Floating World."  It will be a group show that she will curate. She invites me to create a piece for it.



I read all this in an email, on my smartphone, while laying on a beach.



It is day nine of our annual family vacation on the eastern shore of Virginia. All week long siblings, children, girlfriends and boyfriends rotate through our rented beach house. Days are spent getting tossed around in the vigorous surf until exhausted, followed by a stumble up the sand for a nap under the umbrella, or to fall asleep with a good book in a beach chair designed to last exactly one week. All of this set against the music of crashing waves and sand-muffled sounds of children playing. In the evenings, we make fantastic meals for each other, drink uncomplicated wine and tell new variations of the same old stories. It's idyllic in an unambitious, middle-class way, and I love it completely. But it makes it hard to remember my life back home, and by day nine I have had enough. Not of the family, but of the opiating effects of the beach. 



I'm thinking about all of this as I struggle to lift my head from a nap on the sand. I am stretched out beneath a big striped umbrella, covered with sunscreen, but I feel the UV making me red anyway. From where I lie, I can see the sun through two colored bands of umbrella fabric. When I close my right eye the sun is a fuzzy pink disc. If I close my left, it is green. I blink back and forth a few times making the sun jump between colors until my mind reconnects with that little grain of anxiety that brings me all the way awake. Time to head back into the water.



Every year I come out here thinking I will use this unallocated free time to start some new project. Maybe rethink my website design or do some sketches for new paintings. Once or twice I've actually tried to work on freelance design jobs out here. But every year I come back empty handed. Rested, but dull in the head. Rudderless. Vacated.



My friend's email is a welcome intrusion as I begin to plot my re-entry into real life. I know the show she is planning is likely to be good. She's a visionary whose career is on a bit of a roll. It can't hurt to be a part of this, whatever it turns out to be. I re-read her message to make sure I've got the title right. "Half The Floating World." I have no idea what this means, or how it connects with blind faith, but I love something about it. I'm certain that when I talk to her she will fill in the blanks, but in the meantime I know the puzzlement and wonder those gaps create are exactly the places creativity thrives. But blind faith? I have no idea what this is. I'm pretty sure everyone thinks their faith is informed, regardless if it is faith in a god, or in a partner, or a country, or even that your car is going to be there where you left it. But blind faith sounds risky. Unhinged. Foolish. I'm trying to think of a good example. Even in that bible story where Jesus calls Peter to step out of his boat and come walk on the water with him. Was that blind faith? Probably not, since Jesus was already out on the water, suggesting some new faith-enabled feasibility was at work. Either way I'm guessing Peter's fingers were crossed as his toes hit the water.



Finally on my feet, I decide to take a walk to give this creative challenge some time on the front burner, but my brain is over-rested and fogged-in by salt air and mid-Atlantic heat, and the ideas just aren't there. What if I don't come up with anything? This is what the fearful part of my brain always asks. Its tiny voice is there to remind me I might fail. I don't resent it, or seek to suppress it, because it's looking out for my best interests. Besides, there is another stronger part of me that knows I will find a creative solution. The same way I don't have to look at my feet when I walk. It just happens, thankfully.



I'm headed down the beach without my glasses. Normally I'd be wearing them for any viewing beyond arms length, but the blowing sand is hard on the plastic lenses, so I leave them in my beach bag. Until now I've forgotten how truly bad my distance vision is. All shapes have their edges rounded off, like beach glass, and radiate faint halos. I decide it's okay to keep walking, carefully, since I can still make out where all the people and umbrellas are. I look back at my own and memorize its cluster of colors. I tell myself I like the challenge of negotiating this impressionistic scene, except the lack of detail is beginning to make me paranoid, and with good reason. I freeze as I discover I've wandered into a congregation of kite fliers. I should have remembered they were here. They are mostly children, from what I can tell, and the blurry colors just overhead are their kites. A stiff offshore breeze keeps the kites flying at a low angle, the highest ones only thirty feet up. I know, without seeing it, that the air just above this expanse of sand is bisected by invisible strings. Strings that would be hard to make out even with 20/20 vision. It's hard to tell how many of the people around me are flying kites. Ten, twelve? Better to count the kites. At first I find eight but then realize two are multi-part contraptions, so six it is. Good. Now, how to work out a passage away from them that doesn't involve crashing some kid's kite or slicing myself on the taught strings? The next few minutes are spent cautiously zig zagging between kite fliers, and willing—without effect—for the strings to come into view.



At last I make it down to the water's edge, uninjured and unembarrassed. The way back up the beach toward my family is reasonably apparent, so I take a minute to jump in the Atlantic and cool off. I have completely forgotten about trying to have a creative idea regarding blind faith, or anything else. At the moment, I am at least part of the floating world, but which half, I cannot say.



Shadows drift below me in the cloudy surf, but even without corrective eyewear I know they are shadows of my own creation and not to be feared. Further out, just past the surfers, dolphins ply the whitecaps in the afternoon sun. Beyond them, the occasional marlin is unlucky in it's choice of prey and lands thrashing on the deck of a boat. And miles further out, Right whales migrate south along the rim of the underwater Accomac Canyon. These waters are rich with pelagic mysteries, some bumping us, moving us along, some capable of tearing us limb from limb. But there are no manatees here. We are too far north.

Back at our beach enclave I locate my glasses case and peek inside at the unsanded lenses. Among the many things I am thankful for, these glasses are at this moment right on top of the list. But I do not put them on. I snap the case closed and stow it back in my bag. I'm okay without them for now. I stretch back out onto my towel and close my eyes under the striped umbrella.

White Wires

A father tosses a ball with his son in the park at the end of my street. A scene so ordinary it should go unnoticed, except for one detail. The father wears white earphones and seems to be listening to some sort of i-device. At first I guess he may have taken a phone call, and needs his hands free to continue the game of catch, but as I watch I noticed certain gyrations in between throwing and catching that suggest the dad is grooving alone to himself. There is no conversation between father and son, just the back and forth of the white ball against the green of a late summer afternoon. The boy, perhaps six, wears a comically oversized mitt which only occasionally helps him locate the ball.

When I walk the multi-use paths around my newly designed "urban infill" neighborhood, the people I meet almost invariably wear white headphones. It doesn't matter whether they are running or pushing a stroller, they all seem mid-workout, so I know there isn't going to be any chit chat. An unintended convenience for the wearer of the white wires is that they can be spotted from a distance, thereby signifying unavailability. It's a fair-warning of the listener's near-total disengagement from the social sphere. Though they may be in a public place, their behavior suggests preoccupation with something utterly private. You're lucky to get a "hi" out of anyone with headphones on, and you're supposed to know that ahead of time.

Headphones used to be black, with maybe some "chrome" accents. It was this way for decades. When Apple introduced the iPod the wires were suddenly a bold white. Apple had bucked convention right down to the tiniest detail. Now it's hard to find a set of earphones that aren't white, not that you would want them. Even the sketchiest of off-brands imitate the white Apple ear buds.

On my way down Mount Shavano in Southern Colorado earlier this summer, I was surprised at the stream of white-wire-wearing solo hikers that were on their way up the mountain. Though it's not a technical climb, any hike up above 14'000 feet in elevation would suggest you have your wits about you and pay close attention to every aspect of your environment. Particularly when you've gotten a late start, as these folks obviously had, and storm clouds have crowded the sky.

In full disclosure, I'm no stranger to the use of headphones. Though I'm irked by some of the sociological affects of headphone wearing, I know how critical a high energy mix can be to powering through a tough workout. I'll also admit I've dropped over a hundred dollars on a set of top-end ear buds just so I can get the extended audio frequencies a high definition source can deliver. Furthermore, I've worn the white headphones in public when I 'm not listening to anything at all, just to be left alone. And, outrageously, I have used them on top of a mountain. Which I can explain.

Even the easiest fourteeners can be extraordinarily demanding. When I first started hiking them, I noticed that lots of climbers perform some sort of ritual, or reward themselves with something special on the summit. After climbing a non-standard route on Gray's Peak in Colorado a few years ago, one of my climbing buddies took a kite out of his pack and flew it from the peak. Another produced a rotisserie chicken from her pack, which she proceeded to share with other hikers. I have seen flasks passed and cigars smoked. A friend of mine even reported seeing two young men with wooden Corn Hole game boxes strapped on their backs struggling up one peak. So it would be unremarkable to admit I've listened to my iPod on top of 14,196' Mount Yale, in the Collegiate Peaks Wilderness. I mention it simply because the music I listened to led me into something of an ecstatic state, which I'd never quite experienced before.

It's no coincidence that every religion I can think of equates mountains with holiness, or states of spiritual bliss. You might say it's all just the effects of endorphins and the thin air, but until you've gotten yourself up to a high summit under your own power, and experienced the intoxicating numinous weirdness of just being up there, you'll only be able to guess at its mechanics.

The music I chose to accompany my stay at the top of Mount Yale was Carl Orff's O Fortuna, a particularly over-the-top piece of mid twentieth-century classical music. Purists who resent pop culture's appropriation of this piece for everything from movie soundtracks to video games, dismiss it as high camp. It's sort of the Bohemian Rhapsody of classical music. But no matter, listening to a piece of over-the-top music on top of a mountain requires no justification. From the opening choral blast the effect was overwhelming. That critical little voice in the back of my head which rarely shuts off, tried to remind me that this experience was a contrivance. But the voice quickly fell silent. The world tumbled away in every direction. Far below, the shadows of cumulous clouds drifted across the forests. I did a slow 360-degree turn as the names of familiar peaks in the distance drifted away. Only three minutes later the piece was over and I was nearly in tears. Returning to my bodily senses, I looked over at my friend Donny, who was smoking a huge cigar. Donny doesn't smoke, so I had to guess his nicotine buzz had him at least as blissed out as I was. I unplugged my white iPod headphones and stashed them in my pack for the trip back down.

Pretending to be busy with my smart phone, I watch the father and son toss, drop, and chase their ball for several more minutes. The boy hardly says a word, which causes me to suppose he is used to his dad only being partly present. Imagine a six year old boy playing catch and not talking. But his dad is there. They are doing a thing together. Which is something.

I walk the block back to my house and try to inventory all the sounds I can. Air conditioners, a truck backing up. Traffic. Two jet planes. More air conditioners. Concentration reveals another layer of acoustics. Crickets in a hedge. Children playing in the distance. The crisp scuttle of an empty Cheetos bag blowing down the sidewalk. My own footsteps. And beyond the individual sounds is the way they describe a space. A brick corridor sounds different than an open field, even if the sounds in them are the same. On my way home I do not pass any other pedestrians. The sidewalk is empty in both directions. There are no conversations, short or long. But I'm ready for one should it happen.