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.