Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [122]
“It would be nice,” she admitted, “except for the way the salt air gets to everything and ruins it. And it’s so foggy most of the time.”
“I wouldn’t mind that. It’s so wide open.”
They drove through the scattered beach towns and up into the Devil’s Slide area past Pedro Point, and Jack could see the waves crashing into the ocher cliffs four hundred feet below the narrow rim of highway; the water looked impossibly deep and blue, and out a way from the cliffs there was a slow-moving ribbon of dirty-looking foam, and he wondered if that meant the tide was going out, or if it had anything to do with the tide at all. He realized that he really didn’t know anything about tides. There was so much for him to learn about things, even unimportant little things like tides, which everybody ought to know. It made him wonder where he had been all his life.
Eventually the road straightened out and they came to and passed the tiny ramshackle community of Montara, and then came to Moss Beach, and Sally showed him where to turn off onto the dirt road that led to the reef.
The tide was going out, and as they sat on the sand and ate their lunch, they could see the waves beginning to break dramatically over the long brown fingers of reef, and watched a calm lagoon form right in front of them. There was a kelpy iodine smell to the air, and Jack was overwhelmed by a desire to go out and wade in the lagoon, to get into the water. He took Sally by the hand and led her down to the edge of the sand and they waded out into the weed-filled, gently undulating water. She seemed to understand his mood and said nothing; she understood that he was discovering this immensity for the first time, and she did not want to spoil it for him by admitting that it no longer had the same attraction for her, that she had made the discovery when she was twelve and become bored with it by the time she was eighteen. But she followed Jack through the water, and climbed up onto the slippery reef with him, and watched him discovering the tide pools, squatting in fascination at the perfection of calm and beauty, the scuttling hermit crabs, the tiny green shrimp, the rock fish and snails and flowery anemones, such a peaceful community right there at your feet; listened to his exclamations of discovery and answered his questions about which animals were which, until needles of pain shot through the backs of her knees and her eyes smarted from the glitter of the sun on the water; but when she stood up and suggested that they get some coffee and have a cigarette he just gave her a dirty look and then went on staring down into the water, and she had to go back alone.
She watched him from the beach as he went farther and farther out on the reef, and saw him at last on the final edge, staring toward the open sea, breakers crashing beside his tiny figure, and she knew there were all sorts of romantic ideas pouring through his mind about life, the sea, nature, the size of the universe, man is a tiny creature, etc. etc. But she did not feel like sneering at him for it; she began to have images of this man, locked somewhere in a prison cell away from all possible thoughts of immensity, and she felt a great wave of pity for him, for the loss of his youth, for his naive, childlike expectation that the past was all over and he could just start from where he was and bury it all behind him and become a cultured person. It made her feel so bitter she wanted to cry.
Jack was having a hell of a fine time. He was playing a game with the ocean. He was standing at the very edge of the reef, watching the rollers swell in front of him, rising high above his head, and then break and crash at his feet. The game was a modified form of “chicken”—he had already seen that the reef undercut the waves so that they could not hit him full force, and he was watching the waves come in, testing himself for the fear-reaction, the urge to flinch and jump back when a big one