A Match to the Heart (11 page)

Sam's paw marks and my footprints crisscrossed that of a snail, which secretes a mucous trail to trap plankton and small creatures, then reels in the trail to feed on the catch. We came upon spotted nudibranchs that looked like bits of body parts, un-shelled, skinned, globs of flesh exposed to sea and air. They were easy to spot near the sponges, because that's what they dine on.

Nearby were brown sea hares, which look nothing like a rabbit but are in the mollusk family—a type of snail. They lay their eggs in long strings that get wound up into spongy yellow balls the size of grapefruit and contain as many as a million eggs apiece. When the larvae hatch, in ten days or so, the young swim free, but most are quickly eaten. This is rather fortunate because if they weren't, the population of brown hares would exceed the combined populations of animal life on the entire earth in only two or three years.

Fertility, gluttony, tenacity, and a who-cares-who-does-what-to-whom sex life—that's what typifies creatures of the inter-tidal zone. No sinner has had a life as rigid and voluptuous as the tube snail, which lives clustered and unmoving, its shells growing entwined, or the sea cucumber, whose water and oxygen is pumped in and out of its anus, or the vaginal-looking aggregate anemone, which stings its prey with a paralyzing toxin and reproduces by splitting in half lengthwise, generating two individuals of the same sex.

chapter 14

A black-crowned night heron stood on an apron of wet sand, looking across the channel. The feather plume at the back of his head lifted in a faint breeze. Out there the channel churned its cyclonic eddies counterclockwise. Schools of anchovies, halibut, and sea bass came and went: silver flashes, small storms that well up from the inside of the sea but are short-lived, like lightning.

A shifting wind sailed up the beach from the southwest, which means rain. As he walked, sand blasted Sam's face and ears. Spray from the tops of waves blew backwards into the sea and came up again as whitecaps, and the green shoulders of swells pushed hard toward shore but never seemed to arrive. From the beach I could see the plate-glass windows of my house bulging into wide-angle eyes, and wondered what they could see.

A hundred and fifty thousand years ago, southern California turned frosty during two ice ages, beginning a long warming trend that continues today. The sea here was 400 feet lower than it is now: the channel was a mere lagoon, with little surf, and four of the five channel islands were fused together into one large ocean-bound mountain range. The mountains behind Santa Barbara had a covering of pine forests and only in later, warmer years did they change to oak savannah. Despite the mild climate now, this is one of the roughest channels in the Pacific. Two currents, the warmer Japanese current—Kinoshiro—and the cold California current, meet and sheer off at Point Conception and on the northwestern tip of San Miguel Island, and prevailing winds bounding down the coast funnel through the channel at high velocities.

 
 
Sam and I climbed a rocky knob and tried to see out beyond the protective arm of the islands. “If you look hard enough, you can see the Antarctic, Hawaii, or Japan from here,” I told him. But I wanted more: I wanted to see the topography of the ocean floor. Ocean covers 78 percent of the planet and averages a depth of 12,000 feet. Its topography, a frontier now “seen” by side-scan sonar, which produces high-resolution images of the ocean floor, is as grand as the terrain up top, but there's more of it, since the volume of habitat in the sea is much greater than that on land.

I thought about all the ways the ocean covers things. Rogue waves can appear suddenly, as if the sea floor had shifted its buttocks, causing an ephemeral ripple that swallows fishing boats, islands and people. Instead of a tsunami I saw only pelicans bobbing on swells that broke into tame, three-foot waves.

In the evening we went for another walk. Sinking into sand, Sam's tracks were bright meteors, appearing suddenly, then fading to black. I stood in water up to my knees, grabbing phosphorescence and invisible plankton, squeezing light out of the ocean's dark brew. Light is chemical, electrical, mineral, just the way memory is, and I wondered if light had invented the ocean and my hand dragging through it, or if memory had invented light as a form of time thinking about itself.

Down on hands and knees, eye-to-eye with Sam, I tried for an all-inclusive panoramic view. Between tide pool and sky there were rhythms and plasmas holding me up. Lightning, cosmic dust, human blood, ash, plankton—these are all referred to as “plasmas” by scientists, as “broths of life” that rocked and rolled to various kinds of music along with the fluctuations of the dinoflagellates periodic light. Did they have the same beat as the electrical firing pulse of neurons in the brain, or did spring tides (those at the dark of the moon, or when it is full) and neap tides (when the moon is in between) match the shifting and quiescence of tectonic plates, or does everything modulate only to chaos?

 
 
The next day the heron was back. In all those rhythms he stood motionless, the solitary observer of a navy sky graying with rain clouds. Between two rocks a starfish righted itself by lifting up on a single ray and flipping over. Earlier, a painting by Picasso had caught my eye: it was a blue acrobat rolling like a wave. I thought of that figure as the blue acrobat of time who had given me a reprieve from death, had lifted itself up on one arm like the starfish and let me slide through.

The night heron's white plume moved stiffly in wind like a compass needle: to the west, northwest, then south and east. The sea looked like time, and time was water and tides, the heart's ardent tick and the sea star's flip. Spreading his gray wings, the heron rose slowly: the storm he had been waiting for had come.

chapter 15

A sound of tearing ripped across the tops of waves like a torn seam. Rain was the thread from which fluted waves had come unstitched. Wind poured down. Lightning cut sprays of rain that fell and lifted and seemed to emanate from the sea, not the sky. Palm tree fronds swept together in green flags and an oriole's swinging nest made of palm threads swayed with it, carrying unhatched eggs. A wind from the east blew seawater against its own current. Shorebirds hunched down on driftwood and pelicans flew in threes over the roofs of houses instead of shaving the tops of swells with their wings. What had been the waves' transparencies, through which I could see feather boa kelp and ducks' feet paddling gracelessly, were now walls of water mud-died with silt. Every few hundred yards another creek carved an urgent route across sand—water thirsting for water—and at the confluence, great fans of suspended earth spread out into the sea.

Immersion in water stands for annihilation and a return to formlessness, followed by rebirth and regeneration. In the geography of death, it's not the ferryman who counts but water itself: the ocean as medium between fire and air, life and death. After lightning struck I felt like a twig in the shape of a cross floating inside the sea.

 
 
When the storm came the whole world began moving. Brown ribbons of kelp came untied. Swells that rose tall as buildings sank into black troughs and the troughs redoubled themselves so that the swells kept falling. Rain shot down from all directions at once, then it was a silver sheet sliding into the sea like glass, pane after pane shattering. I left the doors to the house wide open to welcome the storm, secretly hoping the waves would come in. I'd dreamed a tsunami had broken through windows, that I'd stood in a shower of foam that rained down people, dogs, and horses. After coming so close to death, these were my quiet celebrations of life.

 
 
A blue hole in the roof of the sky appeared. The ruins of the storm washed up: lemons, plastic bottles, oak limbs, avocados, bumpers from the side of a boat, a fiberglass hull. In four days, five vertical feet of sand had been taken away, and exposed rocks rattled in surging tides. From the beach the row of houses looked taller, as though the moisture had made them grow. Out beyond the waves that came in series of four and five, not one or two, a pelican dove down into kelp beds. Each time, the sea closed over the bird but let go fast: he rose and flew. Floating logs pretended they were seals, and seals poked their heads through the middles of waves. Surf scooters—homely diving ducks with black feathers and thick red beaks—floated en masse, resting before continuing on to Alaska. A wreath of black clouds that had broken away from the storm pulled apart over the islands, but no sunlight poured through.

During the storm the boat of a local fisherman went down. He had been fishing for halibut up the coast when a wave swamped the foredeck and bridge. The wheelhouse filled fast with water. Barefoot, he had to kick out the windows with his feet to escape, and as he did so, saw his dog tumbling, then she was gone. There was shark danger, intensified because of his bleeding feet but his coworker—called a “tender”—had plucked two survival suits from the sinking vessel, and when they finally found each other in churning water, they managed to get the suits on. Though survival suits won't prevent shark bites, they'll keep you warm, even if you're already wet. When they didn't show up that evening the other fishermen called the Coast Guard and the two men were rescued after being in the water for five hours.

The next week, sand-bearing waves brought the beach back, erasing all the scars of the storm. The coastline kept reforming itself—revising drafts of how it should be shaped, how many rocks, how deep the sand. Only the unmoving tide pool creatures stay the same.

 
 
One morning the sky was a red wall—meaning fair weather—and at dusk it was an orange flame. But water puts out fire and no harm came to me. Except that unexpectedly I had to move, because the owner of the house I was inhabiting wanted to return. That house had been my refuge and the sea my restoration. I had a week to find a new place and I was too frail to pack and lift boxes, to move anywhere.

chapter 16

The Arctic people of Labrador say that a person is born empty: dreams fill him, and a person who doesn't dream is no better than a black fly. That's what I was, because I'd stopped dreaming almost completely since being hit by lightning. It's now known that REM sleep is associated with a surge of sympathetic nervous system activity—of which I had very little, and so for six months my nights had been empty.

Then I dreamed that I died. Water surrounded me and nothing looked familiar. On waking, I found that I hadn't died, only moved. From an austere minimalist house on a lonely beach to a small cottage in a cove where the residents were gregarious and walked their dogs every day: I had been reborn into the realm of humans.

Instead of tide pools, Sam sniffed trails to other dogs. We met Skippy and Minke—two Skipperkees belonging to a tall, long-legged, world-class diver, writer, classical pianist, and adventurer named Hillary. We met Thatcher, a huge German shepherd belonging to Kate, a glamorous and vampish Australian who might have starred in Cecil B. DeMille's classics, and down at Fernald Point, another dog, named Dennis, who liked to chase boats from the beach, a habit Jim, his owner, bemoaned: “Why can't he just chase balls like other dogs?”

In the other direction there was a standard poodle, two black dachshunds, and a variety of surfers' mutts, but Sam liked Dennis best, perhaps because their coloring and markings were almost exactly the same, though Dennis was larger.

On days when I felt too dizzy to walk, I'd send Sam down the beach to visit his friends. “Go find Dennis and bring him up here for a snack,” I'd tell him, and off he'd go, a quarter of a mile down the sand, up through Jim's elegant garden. Sometime later the two dogs would appear, looking very pleased with themselves. Or else Jim would call and say, “Sam's in my kitchen, do you mind? I'll send him home in a while.”

Because Kate was homesick for Australia and the rituals that go with home, we decided to have a weekly Wednesday night “barbecue,” to which all the dogs and their owners were invited. She grilled “snags” (sausages) for the dogs and for us, and I'd arrive at her house down the beach carrying a wooden salad bowl—on my head or hoisted up on my shoulder if it was a high tide. I liked the fact that we'd all met because of our dogs; dogs don't care who is rich or poor, accomplished or struggling.

The nights were balmy. “Wet Wednesdays” were race nights at the harbor and the horizon filled with bright spinnakers. The dogs played until darkness came, and in the sweeping peace of the tide going out, they lay down all in a row and slept while we drank to the blessings of friendship, canine and human alike.

It was spring, and while my new house was cramped and humble, it was on the sand and the ocean still came to the front door. At dawn I'd roll out of bed, not even bothering to change clothes, and walk. Squalls came and went. Storm surges carried huge swells into the cove, and as rain inebriated the coast, the thick stub of a rainbow pushed out of the sea like a green thumb on the horizon. After, the dark blue sheet of water turned metallic, and I wondered: What in nature is not a mirror, does not give back a true image of mind?

It was March, seven months since the accident, but not without setbacks: when Blaine took my blood pressure, there was barely enough cardiac profusion, meaning my blood pressure was absurdly low. What had seemed like steady progress toward health was a fiction. There was only shuffling forward and leaps back. Just as capriciously, two kinds of winds started blowing: the sundowner, fierce winds that came from the north, funneling over the coastal range like a snake, then blowing out to sea; and the Santa Anas, hot desert winds moving in from the Mojave Desert.

Between wind storms El Niño hoisted the jet stream on its humped back, bringing tropical moisture on narrow clouds stretching all the way across the ocean from Hawaii. The rains were monsoon-like, dropping two or three inches an hour, bringing an end to a severe seven-year drought that had downed 300-year-old trees. The bright crenellations of sea and the cliff faces of distant islands were like false maps of places I might go to if I could have walked on water or slipped out of my skin. But at least I wanted to go, even if I wasn't able.