“Thanks for telling me. It’s a good story.”
“Sonam and I live in Mendocino, but I’m photographing here at Point Reyes so often, it’s sort of a home away from home. My husband has a medical practice that keeps him very busy.”
“What kind of medicine does he practice?”
“Regular old general practitioner, though I guess that’s kinda rare these days, huh? He went to medical school in London. A lot of people hear that my husband’s Tibetan and right away they figure he’s into some kind of freaky-deaky medicine. And sure, he tells patients to try alternative medicines of all sorts if they want. Of course he does. And he’s even studying serious acupuncture. But he always wanted just to put out a shingle like in a Norman Rockwell painting, you know? Except our little family joke is, Norman Rockwell never painted Tibetans.”
“What does Sonam think of your photographs—that’s personal, I know.”
“Why not ask him yourself? You could have dinner with us.”
“That’s nice of you, but the restaurant here’s a bit pricey.”
“How about that little white clapboard place near the turnoff to Inverness?”
“Pretty late for dinner, isn’t it, or not?”
“How’s nine o’clock—they serve till nine-thirty. Come on. Sonam will be pleased. He says I’m an antisocial hermit. Hermitess.”
With obviously long-practiced dispatch, Halley unraveled her dreadlocks into a waterfall of hair and said, “I’m surprised a seagull didn’t fall out.”
I went up to my room to put on a pair of socks and grab a jacket. My notebook was open to that favorite Robert Frost line from “A Servant to Servants,” “the best way out is always through,” which had become a kind of talisman along the journey from Mathilde to the murder-suicide to this moment in room 1 of the Olema Inn.
When I sat down to dinner with Halley and Sonam, every table in the restaurant was occupied. The menu was in French and English, and our waitress alerted us to her limited patience after a long night of waiting tables. “If any of you are in the mood to practice your French,” she said, “I’m not.” Sonam ordered in French and so did Halley, but I did not have the language. Our table was on the slatwood veranda near a eucalyptus tree.
Sonam was fifteen years older than Halley and at least five inches shorter. He was neatly dressed in grey jeans, starched white shirt, penny loafers. He had a handsome face and short-cropped black hair and sported round tortoiseshell glasses. “Halley thinks I look like Mr. Moto in these specs,” he said. We chatted about this and that. Sonam asked what sort of books I wrote, and when our food arrived Halley said, “Sonam, our new friend here asked me what you thought of my photographs.”
Frowning in an exaggerated way, Sonam said, “Well, do you mean my opinion of her technical skill, the aesthetic quality of her pictures? Or what it’s like to have a house full of—let’s see: seagulls torn to shreds, festering whale carcasses, seals with hollowed-out eye sockets, ummm, what else? Oh, yes, there’s an eviscerated bobcat, vultures poking their heads inside a mule deer—and Halley told me you saw her hanging around a dolphin today.”
I set down my fork and stared at my food as if I’d lost my appetite. “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked the question,” I said, and there was laughter all around.
“Actually, Halley sees herself as a . . . Darling, how do you say it? A chronicler of transitional states.”
“Meaning,” I said, “you think the dolphin was on its way to being reincarnated.”
“Yep, transitional could mean that,” Halley said. “But it could also mean just turning into organic stuff, you know? Food for beetles. Seagulls turning it to shit that drops on your windshield. It’s all pretty straightforward, don’t you think?”
“As for the artistic part,” Sonam said, “I’m her greatest admirer.”
“By the way, what were you doing out there today?” Halley asked me. “Are you a birder, God help us. Probably not the sort I hate, because you had those cheapo field glasses.”
“No, not that sort of birder, if I understand you correctly. Though I’d love a better pair of binoculars, that’s for sure.”
I suppose I could have delicately alluded, in a way that might honestly address Halley’s question but at the same time indicate my discomfort in dwelling on the subject, to the haunting incident that had occurred in my house. In turn I could have said that I’d come out to Point Reyes to lose myself among shore birds, to walk every trail until I could hardly walk another step, to empty out physically and mentally, then get filled again. But for goodness sake, if the best way out was always through, it didn’t mean one couldn’t afford to take a moment away from the effort. Besides, I thought that to foist all of that bleakness on these kind, engaging folks at our candlelit table, with a full moon rising, during such a get-to-know-each-other meal, would be, as we used to say in the sixties, too heavy.
But I’d had a little too much wine and said, “Out at McClures Beach I wanted to be invisible for a few hours, go out there on the rocks, all that sun and big waves, and sit right next to an oystercatcher, and it would look up every so often, sensing something was there, but then go about being an oystercatcher again.” And I don’t know what got into me, but I added, “Amen.”
My existential riff had the effect that is sometimes the case when something of staggering pretentiousness or insufferable sentimentality, however genuine, is spoken: it caused an eyes-cast-to-table silence for a moment. Then Sonam ordered espresso for himself and Halley.
“You know,” Halley said, “I might have two or three photographs of oystercatchers. Sonam, would you mind looking in my studio when you get home tomorrow? You know, the photographs are filed away in alphabetical order. If you find oystercatchers, bring them back Friday so our friend here can have a look.”
After dinner I sat again on the porch of the inn; the late-night air drew out the fragrance of eucalyptus even more intensely. I thought of Nabokov’s phrase “memory perfume.” The inn’s resident, almost lynx-sized cat, Truffle, bounded up onto my lap, a very well-fed animal, and settled in nicely. She allowed me to comb her back with my fingers, and whenever I made the effort to lift and set her down, she dug in with her claws. I quickly understood that this cat would decide when she was through with me.
Mulling it over, I was not so sure I wanted to see photographs of dead oystercatchers just when I was becoming so engaged with the lively oystercatcher I’d seen at McClures Beach and hoped to see much of during the next ten days. Perhaps Sonam wouldn’t find the photographs. I hoped he wouldn’t.
But sitting in the eucalyptus breeze, feeling Truffle’s growl-purr roll in a kind of gentle, seismic wave from head to tail, with nothing to do but wait for the familiar, advanced signs of insomnia, I thought hard and with some uneasiness about why I had been so willing to subscribe to Halley’s reductionist philosophy of life and death. Why couldn’t I muster up a response that was more natural to my character, something caustic, or at least probing? Why didn’t I confirm, if only in my private thoughts, that death in fact is not “all pretty straightforward”? Of course we’d really just met, but that was not it. Maybe Halley’s platitudes offered solace, in the way a beautiful landscape can offer solace. If you are fortunate and willing, you can live inside it with perfect equanimity.
At dinner I’d been impressed by Halley’s phrase “eddies of wet feathers” to describe what she was reminded of when she looked at her photograph of a dead crow she’d recently developed in a darkroom in Point Reyes Station. When I went up to my room at about two A.M., that photograph was leaning against my door. Taped to it was a note:
See the moon? It’s about 1:30 A.M. now and in an hour I’m heading out to McClures Beach. Sonam may or may not go with me. Nobody’s supposed to be out there at night but you can only see certain things at night. So that’s where I’ll be—since you seem interested in my work. By the way, oystercatchers sometimes are active at night, if there’s a big moon and so on, little known fact. But I
’ve seen that. Halley.
Generous invitation, I thought, and sat down on the overstuffed chair in my room, switched on the floor lamp, and looked at the photograph. I saw the eddies: three stilled whorls of black feathers on the crow’s mangled body, and each appeared to be sculpted by a water spout. Studying the picture, I went from being almost repelled by the eerie vortexes to imagining what a mercy it must have been for the bird to blink out of consciousness, to perish, all evidence indicating (“Almost every bone was broken,” Halley had said) that the crow had been tumultuously storm-tossed, spun, and plummeted to the ground. In other words, I was beginning to see things from Halley’s point of view, and in that I found a reprieve, because I was sick and tired of my own morbid distress about life and death and what felt like my painful dislocation of soul.
I set aside the photograph, took up my paperback copy of Frost’s poems, and read through “A Servant to Servants” (whose narrator admits that she has been away in the state asylum), and while reading heard mourning doves, which I’d never heard before at night. Just in the past five minutes my new education in birds—Halley’s experience of seeing oystercatchers, and my hearing the doves—made for interesting speculations about the role of moonlight in extending the diurnal activities of birds on into the nighttime hours. I fell asleep in my clothes, crosswise on the bed.
Now, I’m more than aware that relating a dream makes most people’s eyes glaze over as they morph into the figure on the bridge in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. But the dream of mine I want to tell illustrates Rilke’s idea that the unspeakable is quite capable of intervening on any normal day of waking, breathing in the hours, and dreaming. Anyway, my dream was set in a Chinese restaurant in the North Beach section of San Francisco; I recognized the location because, looking out the window, I saw City Lights bookstore. Sonam, Halley, and I had just completed a feast; bowls, plates, chopsticks, glasses, and teacups were on the table. Sonam and Halley read their fortunes and shared them with each other; Halley looked at me and said, “Same old, same old.” Out of nowhere, an ancient-looking hag with beautiful cat’s eyes—I think they were Truffle’s—threw herself onto our table. Shocked, frightened, Halley and Sonam pushed their chairs back. The old woman clamped my face between her hands (their texture was like sandpaper) and shouted, “I beg you, don’t read your fortunes! Don’t read your fortunes!” I was aware of being puzzled about why she used the plural fortunes, since there was only a single fortune cookie remaining in the porcelain bowl. Then, in a phantasmagoric locution, a squalling flock of seagulls flew in, lit on the hag’s shoulders, lifted and carried her off, out the door and in the direction of the ocean.
The restaurant, absent waiters, cooks, and other customers, was now fog-ridden and cold. For some reason I snapped open my fortune cookie. A bunch of fortunes sprang out, as if in a heart-attack surprise from a jack-in-the-box, and rose to the ceiling, where each was caught by the tongue of a magnificently painted dragon. A wooden ladder with wheels presented itself, and I climbed it to the top rung and read the fortunes, going from dragon mouth to dragon mouth. As it turned out, they were not the sardonic witticisms or prefabricated proverbs we generally associate with fortune cookies. Instead they were—and I comprehended it right then and there in the dream—replications of entries in those three-by-five black notebooks Reetika Vazirani had tried to hide, or hide in plain sight.
I startled awake in my bed at the Olema Inn, sweating, with a terrible headache, the knowledge of what those fortune cookies contained having crossed over into consciousness. The alarm clock on the bedside table read 3:50 A.M.; I could hear the voice of an owl, but that lovely sound did not prevent me from feeling disoriented, near to the point of weeping. My thoughts were frazzled, and I said to myself, “Look, you can’t help where your mind goes in sleep.”
The telephone on the table rang: it was the front desk, the night clerk reporting that my next-door neighbors in room 2 had lodged a complaint about “loud talk—even screaming.” I apologized but did not say that I had had a nightmare. I thought the best thing would be to drive to McClures Beach to see what Halley Shagran might be up to. Extend the night that was so rudely interrupted, take in the air, the moonlight.
Halfway into my drive to Pierce Point Historic Ranch, I experienced a reprise of the all too familiar, cramped tightening of gloom in my stomach, a minor attack of nausea, the sense of a threaded pulse, so I immediately pulled into a turnoff along the road. I got out and leaning against the car, taking as many deep breaths as I could. What was this? What was happening? The moon was so beautiful over the ocean. There was a strong wind off the sea, a shushing whisper of it in the conifers close by to my right, and far off in the distance to my left, the constellation of lights and the vague outline of a behemoth freighter slowly moving north.
Despite my headache and nausea, I got back in the car and drove slowly, and when I got to Pierce Point and parked in the lot, I took a high-intensity flashlight, got out of the car, and followed the long, wide beam down the path to McClures Beach. Moonlight flooded the beach, but there was no sign of Halley, and I hadn’t seen her car anywhere in the vicinity of Pierce Point, either. I walked down the beach toward the cliffs. Sprawling, tentacled bulbs of Medusa kelp lay here and there—you can easily slip on them. I walked past the dolphin carcass, which, on quick inspection by flashlight, had been considerably picked apart, but there was still enough left for the carrion gulls at first light.
I continued on to the stretch of beach between the cliffs and the archipelago of small rock islands where I’d seen the oystercatcher. Feeling on my skin the cold balm of fog, I ventured out onto a peninsula of coral-jagged rock and stood there, hoping the sea breeze would move straight through my head, ear to ear, taking those horrid fortunes with it. And that is when I heard the oystercatcher.
Was it the same one? I thought it must be, since oystercatchers are solitary and territorial birds. While at first I couldn’t locate the oystercatcher in the gauzy, spectral light, I kept hearing its plaintive kee-ap kee-ap wee-o. And after ten minutes or so I saw the bird itself, and seeing it, I recognized the ventriloqual talent of the beach at night—the oystercatcher sounded as if it were farther north than it actually was. I moved twenty yards up from the peninsula and huddled in a rain slicker and blanket on dry sand beneath the cliffs, where I stayed the rest of the night, the oystercatcher appearing and disappearing until the mist burned off and the daytime world, with its ocean light, was revealed. Pelicans flew in formation low to the water, and seals bobbed offshore in the background—with the dead dolphin in the foreground, in repose, as yet free of scavenging gulls.
Roughly an hour after dawn broke, the oystercatcher flew off but was back within the hour. Where had it gone? The bird began to work its rock island again. I watched its frantic industriousness, its fluttering up a foot or two and back down to the rocks, its preening, and then Halley showed up with her camera and notebook.
Postcards, telephone calls, and the poems of Robert Frost kept me connected to Vermont, but by and large I felt like a resident, for those ten days, of Point Reyes National Seashore. I had taken to wearing a T-shirt with my favorite painting on it, Milton Avery’s California Landscape/Seascape, depicting a house and several outbuildings above a steep-cliffed horseshoe-shaped inlet, surrounded by fields of tawny brown and yellow dry grasses. And during the next eight days—and all through two nights—I accompanied Halley Shagran on her photographic traipses along beaches and trails, through wetland and woodland, all of which were, after my many visits to this preserve, as familiar as the palm of my hand. Yet as she narrated her own past experiences, railed against local anti-conservationists, imparted all sorts of zoological and botanical information, I came to see these old places in a new light. “Let’s face it,” she said, “I make photographic autopsies and never run out of subject matter.” I even became affectionately accustomed to her offbeat humor.
Simply put, I felt that by being so artistically absorbed in death’s spell,
Halley had come to cast her own spell on death. I watched her photograph gulls, pelicans, weasels, seals, sea lions, foxes, kestrels, mule deer, axis deer, butterflies, beetles, and cattle, each animal discovered in its final posture, in a stage of decomposition, with its fixed stare, agonized or oddly peaceful expression, its corporeal disarray. All of which would eventually be depicted in black and white, like negatives of creation itself, in the photographs Halley developed late into most nights in the darkroom at Point Reyes Station.
I estimated that, apart from my time with Halley, I watched my oystercatcher for roughly fifty hours on that visit. The oystercatcher’s existence offered me a hypnotic passage of time, a vicarious connection to the sea, and focus, distraction, sorrow, laughter, tears, all helping to move me through and escape the grasp of servitude to the fixed notion that only pain and sorrow are real truths, and that joy exists only to be subject to doubt. That is, at least in some provisional way, after all those hours in the realm of the oystercatcher, I was feeling joy as opposed to a simulacrum of joy, a condition that just might warrant use of the word healing. On my last afternoon at McClures Beach, I thought, When the spirit of this wonderful oystercatcher transitions, I hope it becomes an oystercatcher.
As I write this, in a house in Inverness, California, in the early-morning hours, with deer nibbling apples fallen from a craggy tree, a flock of pelicans in view high over Tomales Bay, a stack of letters on the dining room table, a manual typewriter there, too, after having had a breakfast of orange juice, cranberry scones, and coffee, I’m reading the posthumously published collection of poems, Radha Says, written by Reetika Vazirani. I notice that many of the poems have, as part of their narrative strategy, a broken-line form, caesuras imposing what Igor Stravinsky called “the exigencies of an interval.” In part what he meant was that silence between musical notes contains as much complexity, as much earned and rendered feeling, as the notes themselves. You could argue that the same idea applies to a Morse code message delivering alarming news.
I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place Page 18
