Ursula Le Guin: Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

She explained that it wasn’t for piano but for a string trio, and she sang the violin part in places. It didn’t really seem very complex, or anyhow not difficult; there was a beautiful short tune in it that kept coming back, or pieces of it would come back, when things got rough. She was very tense, nervous, playing it; she was high. At the end she slammed the cover over the keys and said, “The end’s all wrong.” And then she had to go across town to give a lesson.

Natalie Field is very hard to describe. I guess anybody is. But typing up what I said about her into the tape recorder, I’m afraid it makes her sound pompous. I guess when we talked we were both pompous, part of the time. Because we were talking about things that were very important to us, for the first time—saying stuff we’d never had anybody to say to. So it all sort of poured out unfiltered. And she was definitely a strong-minded person, self-reliant and very decisive. But then, because she’d worked so hard—and she really had, ever since she was six when she had taught herself the piano so that her parents had been sort of forced to start getting her lessons—because she’d worked so long and hard at one thing, music, she was pretty young and green about some other things. For instance she hardly ever went to movies. I took her to a Woody Allen, the one where he throws the cello out the window, and I thought she was going to get sick she laughed so much. And the way she laughed at me when I clowned; she wanted to laugh, she needed to. All I had to do was go into the ape act, and she was helpless. Her father was this grim, fundamentalist type, her mother was always calm and serene, her older sisters had both married and moved away, she worked and taught and practiced and composed and dreamed music. There wasn’t anything funny, anything ridiculous in her life, till I showed up. What I realize now is that she needed me just as badly as I needed her.

But I fouled it up. Because I got my priorities wrong.

Before that, though, there was the day at the beach. The good one.

It was the day before New Year’s Eve. It had stopped raining, and gotten cold and clear and still. Heart of winter. When I woke up early, the sun was shining the way it does way up high in the mountains, flooding down light out of a dark blue sky. I knew Natalie had the whole day free, because some of her pupils weren’t taking lessons during vacation. So I called her up, and we decided to go over to the coast, in the new car.

It was OK with Mrs. Field. She seemed to think I was OK, as far as I could tell. Mr. Field, who I gathered was extremely Biblical about young men who cast their eyes upon his daughters, was working—he was a building contractor—and didn’t get home till around six. We’d be back before then, and what he didn’t know wouldn’t damage him irreparably. It was fine with my parents. All they knew was I was driving over to the coast with a friend. Mother was delighted that I had a friend, any friend, and dad was delighted that I was doing something, anything, with the car. So everybody was happy, and we left at nine with a sack lunch that Natalie had fixed.

It’s about ninety miles over to the coast and ten miles south to Jade Beach, where I wanted to go. It’s a cove between big headlands, not too windy, and not crowded even in summer. In winter it was completely deserted. Where there was some snow on the road in the Coast Range, I drove pretty slow, so we got there about noon. The sky was completely clear and very bright; the Pacific was dark blue with high white breakers coming in fast. It was cold, but down on the beach the only wind was the wind that came in with the breakers. The spray hit you like fine rock salt. After a while you could take off your coat, if you kept moving. We did. We horsed around in the shallow breakers for a long time, and kept getting a little bit farther out. The water was like ice, but after the first moments of agony, it felt good, in a numbing sort of way. I got wet from the neck down, Natalie got wet from the waist down. We came back up to a dry hollow by a big driftwood log, and built a fire to get dry and eat lunch by. We ate a lot of lunch. I mean an unbelievable amount. When Natalie packed a sack lunch, she didn’t cut corners. I don’t know how many sandwiches there were to start with, but there were none to end with, and I ate three bananas, an orange, and two apples. I might not have eaten so many bananas except that they became the cause of much youthful mirth and innocent merriment. Honestly, I don’t know why a basically sane person like Natalie was such a fall guy for the ape act. But true appreciation is the spur of genius, and the ape act definitely reached its highest moments that afternoon, with the assistance of the bananas.

Then we did some cliff climbing and some rock throwing, and built a sand castle. Then we came back and built up the fire, because it was getting colder, and watched the tide get closer to our sand castle, and talked. We didn’t talk about problems, or parents, or automobiles, or ambitions. We talked about life. We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn’t an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer. And the sea was there, forty feet away and coming closer, and the sky over the sea, and the sun going down the sky. And it was cold, and it was the high point of my life.

I’d had high points before. Once at night walking in the park in the rain in autumn. Once out in the desert, under the stars, when I turned into the earth turning on its axis. Sometimes thinking, just thinking things through. But always alone. By myself. This time I was not alone. I was on the high mountain with a friend. There is nothing, there is nothing that beats that. If it never happens again in my life, still I can say I was there once.

While we were talking we were sifting through the sand around where we sat for bits of jade and agate. Natalie found a black rock, flat, perfectly oval, and sand-polished. I found a lens-shaped agate, white and yellow; you could see the sun through it. She gave me the black rock, and I gave her the agate.

While we were driving home, she fell asleep. That was neat. That was like coming back down the high mountain quietly in the sunset. I drove well and carefully, quietly.

It was way past seven when we got home. We’d let time go on the beach. She slipped out of the car, still looking sleepy and windburned, and said, “It was beautiful, Owen,” and went into her house smiling.

The Fields went out of town over New Year’s, and I didn’t see Natalie till the day school started again. I waited for the bus with her. While we were hanging around there, I said I hoped her getting home late hadn’t made any trouble with her father. She said, “Oh, well.” And we talked about Ornstein’s book; she was interested in his explanations about the silent half of the brain, where the music is.

But if I wanted to blame anybody but myself for what went wrong, I guess I would blame Natalie’s father.

When she said “Oh, well,” of course it meant that he had made some kind of stink, and she didn’t want to talk about it, she preferred to ignore it or forget it. But what had he made a stink about, anyhow? She goes to the beach and eats lunch and finds an agate and comes home. This is wicked? This is sin? What did Mr. Field have on his mind, anyhow?

It was perfectly obvious what he had on his mind.

That it wasn’t what we had on our minds made no difference to him. You know these young people. All they’re after is kicks.

So, OK, I wasn’t corrupted by Mr. Field’s obsessions. I wouldn’t even have thought about them, if I hadn’t been corrupted already. That’s a funny word, isn’t it, corrupted? My dictionary says it means “To turn from a sound into an unsound condition…” That’s all I mean by it. I just got to thinking unsoundly.