Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“Eagles,” T.C. said. “There’s a nest not far down the coast, in a dead tree. I don’t know why those guys always hang out over open water here; they couldn’t dive into that stuff down there, and there are no fish in heavy surf, anyway. I’ve always thought they were playing. There are about a million nesting seabirds in the cliffs, too, and a colony of sea lions down there. When the wind’s right you can hear all of it; it’s bedlam. Like a tenement. Want to walk down to the lighthouse?”

“No,” I said, leaning back against him, letting the wind pound me, letting it pour past my face like a tide. “No. I want to stay here. Oh, T.C. It’s a glorious place, isn’t it? But somehow you feel you shouldn’t make yourself at home here. It’s like a church; it’s not a place to just hang out in.”

“You couldn’t, anyway,” he said. “There’s usually fog, and the wind today is as mild as I’ve felt it. A bad one would blow you over, literally. Look, Merritt. Straight out, about three hundred yards offshore. See those black shapes? There are four of them, right there where I’m pointing.”

I could not see anything in the dazzle of light off the water, and then I could. As I found the shapes and tracked them, twin spouts rose from the sea.

“Whales!” I cried. “Oh, my God, T.C.! They are, aren’t they? I’ve never seen them.”

I felt him nod. His chin rested on the top of my head; he stood behind me, literally holding me up against the wind. I did not want to move.

“Grays. They’re on their way back to the Bering Sea way up north, from Baja. They go down there every winter to breed and calve in the lagoons, where it’s shallow and warm. The entire population of the Pacific Gray whales does it, sixteen thousand strong. They start heading back in the spring; the whole trip is six thousand miles, and will take them three months. For some reason there’s always four or six off Point Reyes into June; I’ve seen them several times before. Usually it’s mothers with calves, like those out there. See how there are two large ones and two small? The mothers only have one calf at a time, and they suckle them like humans do. They hug the shore all the way down and back, to avoid the killer whales, and the mothers will close ranks around the calves if they spot a pod of killers, like a wagon train circling. I’ve seen them do it. It makes you want to cry, somehow. Brave, classy broads, aren’t they?”

I stood in the circle of T.C.’s arms in the tearing wind and thought about the great mothers and their calves, braving all this, braving everything, to take their children home.…

The wind dried tears on my face as they came, and I did not think that he saw them. But his arms tightened around me, and he said into my hair, “I thought you’d like them.”

“So brave,” I whispered. “Such good mothers. Never losing sight of what’s important. They make me feel ashamed of the kind of mother I’ve been—”

“Yeah, well, they’re a lot less complicated than us, remember that. They don’t have the hard choices to make. Classy broads, but strictly limited. Don’t worry. You’ve got nothing to apologize for in the mothering department. I should have known they’d make you cry, though.”

“It doesn’t take much, does it?” I said. “I always seem to be weeping up here. I don’t cry much back home.”

“I’m not criticizing you. I’d hate it if you didn’t. The first time I saw them I stood out here by myself and bawled like a baby.”

Suddenly I wanted to be done with wind and tumult and water and the dangers that swam in all of them. I wanted quiet, and the sun falling in shafts through the great trees as in a cathedral, and the smell of sun-warmed pine and madrone. I wanted to hear nothing but the breath of the great silence.

“I want to go home,” I said. “Can we eat lunch there as well as where you’d planned?”

“I’d planned it for around there,” T.C. said, and we walked back to the Jeep hand in hand, saying nothing.

We sat locked in our separate thoughts until we were back across the Golden Gate Bridge and through the city and heading back up into the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was a comfortable silence. I steeped in the peace of the warm, sun-filled Jeep after the great shouting wind and cold of Point Reyes, listening to the soft jazz T.C. found on the old radio and, below that, the hum of the big, battered wheels on asphalt. We did not go back down Highway 1; it was as if we had both had our fill of the bellowing sea. Instead, we took 280 down the spine of the mountains, and cut over to Skyline Drive, and entered the domain of the redwoods as gratefully as if we had gained a fortress after a battle. Without meaning to I fell asleep against the window and only woke, neck cramped and mouth tasting of old salt, when I felt the motion of the Jeep stop.

“Are we there?” I said thickly.

“We’re here. Or where I wanted to eat lunch, anyway. You hungry?”

“Starved. How long have I been sleeping?”

“A while. We’re a good bit south of home, in a place called Mount Madonna County Park.”

“What, they gave her her own mountain and park? Not bad for a material girl.”

“I think they meant the other one, the one with the halo,” he said. “Grab the wine and I’ll take the basket. We’re going to walk a little way.”

We climbed into a thinning forest of redwoods and presently came upon a flight of stairs that led up into nowhere. Beyond the last stair I could see the slumped, vine-tangled shape of ruins, and a fallen chimney. A house. Here in this sunny glade among the whispering giants, its bones softened by shrouding ferns and baby evergreens and the wild white heaps of rhododendron and laurel, a house had sheltered someone and then watched them go, and fallen to the wilderness. The little pink flowers I had noticed around the base of the lodge’s redwoods teemed around the steps and at the base of these great trees, and the undergrowth was dense with what T.C. said were elderberry and thimbleberry bushes. It was very quiet; the voice of the silence only murmured. The sun fell in straight, near-palpable shafts. The smell of sun-warmed evergreen was hypnotic. There was a peculiar enchantment about the stairs and the ruins, as if something very old and elemental had made it appear for us, and could make it disappear in an instant if it wished.

“I’d never have left it,” I said, aware that I was nearly whispering. “I wonder who did.”

“Henry Miller,” T.C. said, putting the basket down on the steps and plopping down beside it. “You know, the writer. Or at least, I think he’s the one. It’s a summerhouse or was. I know that he had a place around Big Sur, and a lot of the artists and writers of his time hung out there with him. I’ve always thought this was where he came to get away from all those egos and all that talk.”

I thought of the great minds and names that must have clustered around Miller, and most probably followed him up here into the redwoods. I could almost see candles and Japanese lanterns on a stone terrace, and a great fire of madrone in a stone fireplace, and hear the atonal skittering of music yet unknown in the East, and the tinkle of ice in glasses, and late-day laughter, and voices raised in argument and dalliance far into the cold, still nights.

“I wonder why he left it? I wonder who let it go like this?”

“Who knows? From what I know of writers’ egos, they can’t survive long in a vacuum. He probably went back down to Big Sur where the faithful could worship and adore him.”

“You don’t like Miller?”

“Not especially. I think he really is a dirty writer. Consciously dirty, in a way the other so-called dirty writers never were. D. H. Lawrence was never dirty to me, but the old woman who lay down in the Tottenham Road and pulled up her skirt and masturbated bothers me. It’s like the sound of one hand clapping: self-aggrandizing instead of transcendent.”