You, Me, and the Sea

by Meg Donohue

When I looked down from the sky, he was walking toward me. At first, I felt annoyed. I’d had too much to drink; my mind was playing tricks; of course it was not him. I had seen him so many times over the previous nine years . . . everywhere Will and I traveled, I saw him . . . only to be wrong.

  But now . . .

  If this was him, a powerful new silhouette had swallowed his wiry body. He moved in a new way, too, gliding from the shadows with confidence. His beautiful dark hair was shorn close to his scalp.

  And then he was before me, and I saw the silver scar near his temple, as pale as a sliver of winter sky. Up close, the boy he had been at sixteen was no longer hidden in his face.

  “Merrow,” Amir said, and the sound of my name in his voice made me feel as though he were rousing me from a long sleep, whispering “fire.”

  Part One

  Chapter One

  The thing that I’d said to Assim at Learning Together about every action being a link in a longer chain of events was something I had learned from my father. For my father, there was always a larger story; every action was a reaction. Assim and I had been discussing violence, but my father had always been speaking of love. My father believed that our lives were bound together—and to the past, and to the earth—through a web of connections both seen and unseen. Whenever you are lost, he’d tell me, search for that web. In the right light, it shimmers.

  ALTHOUGH HE WAS typically soft-spoken, Dad’s voice changed when he spoke of the past. He would start slowly and gain momentum, his stories unfolding with both drama and poetry. I wondered, when I was old enough to do so, whether his memories returned him to a time when he was a different sort of person. A bold dreamer. An optimist. A romantic. Through his stories, I came to know my father, and also—more exciting still—my mother. When he told me that my mother used to draw swirls on my skin with her finger, I remembered it. I remembered, too, the ecstatic frizz of her blond hair escaping its braid, and how her eyes held a promise of adventure that drew people close.

  “Your mother never wanted to put you down,” he told me. “It had taken nearly a decade to have Bear, and we’d waited even longer for you. Our little girl. A sister for Bear. When you finally arrived, your mom almost couldn’t believe it. When Bear was born, he was covered in fuzz, like a little cub. When you were born, your skin was slick as silk. You were perfect and strong and glowing, like something born of the sea. Our very own Merrow. All your mom wanted was to lie in bed and hold you.” At this point in the telling, he would smile. “And feed you. So you quickly became a fat baby. Fat and happy, like you knew how much you were loved right from the start.”

  I remembered the tight cradle of my mother’s arms as we lay together in bed for weeks, for months.

  This was the power of my father’s stories; they made me feel that I had been with him all along, a part of Horseshoe Cliff since the beginning. His stories made it seem as though the past were something I could step into, like a room in the house that was always there, its door unlocked by a combination of words.

  My father purchased our land for a steal at an auction in 1969. His expression would become gleeful, even cunning, when he told this particular story, the story of how he’d surprised my mother with a gift of seventeen acres, a quarter mile of which hugged the coast.

  I would eventually learn that some of the people of Osha felt the dupe had gone in the other direction. They thought that no one in his right mind would spend eight thousand dollars on a crumbling bluff with no water meter or well. Osha, with its tiny downtown made up of a natural foods co-op, a café with early-morning hours that catered to fishermen and surfers, and a schoolhouse, considered itself an oasis of peace in a troubled time, and they intended to keep it that way. The inhabitants regularly dismantled the street markers that newcomers needed if they were to have any hope of navigating the winding, coast-bound roads that would deposit them in sweet and stubborn Osha. And to discourage development in an area where the water supply came from a single creek, the town voted to limit the number of water meters available. No land that didn’t already have a water meter in 1961 had much chance of getting one in the future, and the Horseshoe Cliff parcel eleven miles north of town, uninhabited for as long as anyone could remember, had none.

  A spirited, adventurous child, I sided easily with my father on the subject. As though to make up for the water that it lacked, Horseshoe Cliff offered an overabundance of alternative treasures—beaches full of shells that whispered the steady song of the sea, dark and echoing caves carved into cliffs that glowed golden at sunset, the towering eucalyptus grove that was perpetually draped with fog like a fairy queen cloaked in mystery. And of course, spanning to the horizon and roaring with excessive enthusiasm as it reclaimed the land foot by foot over the years of my childhood: the Pacific Ocean.

  What the people of Osha did not know was that my father had walked Horseshoe Cliff under the cover of darkness the night before the bank’s auction. Contrary to what neighbors might have thought, he’d done his research. He knew that the land had no water rights and never would. Yet, as my father picked his way through scrub grass with his flashlight bobbing before him, he felt possibility humming up toward him from the land. He trekked through fields of golden yarrow and wild daisies and poppies and bluff lettuce until he met the curving line of jagged cliffs that fell to the ocean. There, he turned off his flashlight and breathed in the salt air. Forty feet below, at the bottom of a drop so sheer it made his heart race, the sea swelled in the moonlight. The steady waves that hit the rock-strewn beach below made him think of an animal breathing.

  He was walking back toward his car and had nearly reached the road when his foot hit something hard underneath the brush. An iron pump. The pump handle joint was rusted over, but he got it to move, and after pumping for some time, water fell from the spigot to the land. He knelt down and found it tasted sweet on his tongue. I always felt a twinge of envy at this point in the story; the water from the well had never tasted like much of anything to me.

  The bank that had found itself in possession of Horseshoe Cliff had no idea that this well existed. When my father moved the beam of his flashlight in a circle around him, it landed on the remnants of the foundation of a small house. He felt willing to bet that the well would provide water for the cottage he planned to build, the horses he expected to buy, and the children he and my mother hoped to have.

  The septic tank he would have to dig himself, but he was young and strong enough and, having spent the previous three years living among a group that called themselves the Freedom Collective, he had plenty of friends to call on for help. My mother had been with the Freedom Collective even longer.

  My father met my mother on his first day in San Francisco. Until then, he’d lived his entire life on his parents’ sugar beet farm in the western panhandle of Nebraska. He’d been born prematurely and as a result suffered from weak lungs and chronic pneumonia throughout his childhood. Bedridden for weeks at a time, he’d had an unusual childhood for a farm kid. Like so often in life, he told me, what at first seemed likely to close doors actually opened them. In order to provide my father with an activity while in bed, his grandmother taught him to whittle when he was just six years old. It was not long before my father handled the knife even better than she did, creating fanciful creatures that delighted his family.

  When he wasn’t whittling, my father’s mother read him stories of the sea. My grandmother had convinced herself that the ocean air might cure my father, but without an ocean in sight, she decided that books were the next best option. My father’s lungs were not strong, but his mind was; my grandmother believed it held the power to heal him. She told my father to imagine himself in the world of the stories, to imagine standing barefoot in the sand as the ocean crept toward his feet.

  Close your eyes, she’d tell him, even once he was old enough to read the stories himself. Breathe.

  They favored myths and folklore and came to believe that the surprising overlaps between diverse nativ
e peoples’ stories were proof of a universal and ancient truth: the power of the sea. As he slept, my father, who had never stepped foot off the arid Nebraska plains, dreamed of the ocean, of cool salt air that would fill his chest as steadily as a bicycle pump does a tire wheel, making movement that was once hard, easy.

  And so he came to believe that while the land was in his bones, the sea was in his heart—and with it a yearning for the mystical and the mysterious. He knew that the farm would always be his home, but that it would eventually belong to his older brother, Nate, who had worked hard enough for both boys during those long spells when my father was confined to his bed. His family did not want him to leave, but my father craved adventure. The coast pulled him westward.

  In 1966, San Francisco was in the news. The city was home to the musicians my father listened to on the radio, the writers and poets whose books he read, the protesters of a war that had already taken the lives of two of his childhood friends. He’d been left out of so much of life while lying in his bed as a kid; now that he was stronger he didn’t want to miss anything more. San Francisco seemed the center of the Now. And it stretched right to the ocean.

  In Nebraska, the summer sky hugged the land in a tight, airless embrace, but in San Francisco my father was surprised to find that the sky appeared demure and distant behind a veil of fog. The bus station was crowded, and the streets roiled with cars. He’d planned to find another bus to take him to the ocean, but now he felt too excited by the number of people surrounding him to leave their swell. He hitched his backpack on his shoulders and began to walk, following first one person and then another on a jagged westward stroll.

  The news had prepared him for swarms of meandering young folk, dreamy kids around his own age in dungarees and T-shirts, but from where he found himself on Market Street everyone seemed older. Men with crisp haircuts wore suits. Women wore belted dresses and high-heeled shoes. All possessed a purposeful pace that made my father feel slow and conspicuous. When he stopped to catch his breath, he watched a security guard chase a pigeon from a hushed lobby with a stone floor that gleamed. The air was thick with car exhaust, and he felt his chest tightening. It seemed possible that he’d made a terrible mistake and San Francisco was nowhere near the ocean. He blinked up at the office buildings, walked into an intersection, and was sent reeling back to the curb by the blare of a yellow taxicab.

  “Damn cabs,” said a man beside him on the curb. He had eyes like my father’s grandfather, a soft brown that shone with kindness. His hair was the same color gray beneath his hat, too, but his skin was pale and smooth, where his grandfather’s was cragged by lines. Still, the resemblance between the two men was enough to make my father feel as though his grandfather were sending him a sign of encouragement.

  “That one had you in his sights,” the man said. “Are you in one piece?”

  My father nodded, thanking him. He wondered how near he’d just come to the end of his adventure.

  The man looked him up and down, his eyes lingering on his backpack. “I’m going to take a wild guess and say you’re looking for Haight Street.”

  Haight Street. My father recognized the name. “Could you point me toward it?”

  The man laughed, not unkindly. The light turned green, but still he stood on the curb beside my father. “I’ll do you one better.” He took a small notebook and silver pen from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and scribbled a quick map. “Good luck,” he said, tearing the sheet from the notebook. He seemed on the verge of saying something more, but instead nodded and crossed the street.

  “To this day, I wonder what he was going to tell me,” my father would say at this point in the story. “I suppose I always will.” He had a way of finding a bit of mystery even in the smallest moments of life. Or if not mystery, exactly, perhaps what he sensed was possibility—glimmering threads that spun out in every direction, forever unbroken, connections that existed whether seen or not.

  By the time he made it to Haight Street, his backpack was beginning to dig into his shoulders, but here at last were the kids from the newspapers, the young people with their long hair and colorful clothes. Music poured from the shops that lined the street. The buildings were lower than on Market Street; the sky didn’t seem so far away; my father felt the knot in his chest begin to loosen. The people on the sidewalk moved more slowly, and there was something different in the air—it vibrated with excitement.

  A few blocks before the spot on his map that showed Haight Street meeting Golden Gate Park, a crowd had gathered on a corner. In its center, a beautiful woman stood beside a large cast-iron pot. Her dress was long and white and snaked with red embroidery. A blue scarf hung around her shoulders. The crowd whistled and laughed as she spun a tin mug around the long neck of a metal ladle above her head. My father watched the mug spin, impressed, and was momentarily blinded when sunlight hit the metal with a bright flash.

  This was my favorite moment of this story, the moment my father met my mother.

  When my father opened his eyes, she was looking right at him. “Hey you,” she said. The hum of metal on metal slowed and then stopped as she lowered the ladle to point it at him.

  Hey you, I would say in my head along with my father, my mother.

  He stepped to the front of the crowd. The leather sandals on the woman’s feet were flecked with dried mud. Her toenails were painted citrus orange. She emptied a ladleful of what appeared to be stew into a tin mug. When she handed the mug to him, she cupped her fingers around his.

  “This,” she said, “is the best Free Stew you will ever eat.” Her smile was warm. The mug she’d given him was not. My father, hungry and in no mind to disappoint this woman anyway, drained the mug of its contents and was surprised to find that the stew was delicious even cold. He tasted potatoes and bell peppers and buttery greens, and there was not a single sweet beet in the mix. It was only once he’d handed the mug back to her that it occurred to him to wonder if there were drugs in the stew.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “You’re right. I will never in my life have better Free Stew than that.”

  She smiled, as he’d hoped she would. Her eyes, my father saw now, gathering the courage to look, were a surprising green-brown color that seemed to glow against her suntanned skin. They moved from his face to the bag on his shoulder.

  “Where are you coming from?”

  “Nebraska. Just got here.”

  A line had formed behind him, but she seemed in no hurry to move on. “Nebraska.” She chewed her lip. “Then you need to see the ocean.”

  This was the moment, my father told me, that he fell in love with my mother.

  “Louie!” she called, not taking her eyes off my father.

  A man emerged from a knot of people who were handing out slices of dark bread from baskets. “Marigooold,” he said, drawling the name into song. His lips were hidden behind his beard.

  Marigold. A fitting name, my father thought. There was something bright and bold and a bit wild about her, like a flower that held the colors of the sun.

  “I’m cutting out to see the ocean,” she said. “Can you dish the stew?”

  The man named Louie ran his hand down the length of Marigold’s tangled blond hair and my father felt his heart drop. But then Louie dipped the ladle deep in the pot and smiled an easy smile at him. “Sure thing,” he said. He filled a mug with stew and handed it to the next person in line.

  When Marigold held out her hand to my father, he took it. A current of energy flowed from her. He sent a message of thanks to the man with his grandfather’s eyes for drawing the map that had led him to her.

  As they rode a streetcar toward the ocean, she told my father that nine months earlier she had left a girl named Mary Simon back in New York City. Now she went by Marigold.

  So my mother had been just like my father, chasing adventure, brave enough to change her whole life.

  Her people called themselves the Freedom Collective. “Emphasis on the free,” she
said. She had not yet let go of my father’s hand, and she squeezed it now and again in percussive backdrop to her words. When he told her his name, she repeated it and squeezed his hand three times: Ja-cob Shawe.

  At this point in the story, my father would reach for my hand and squeeze it three times. Mer-row Shawe.

  “We have a big piece of magic earth up north of the city,” my mother told him. “The plants burst out of this dirt all big and green and beautiful. We work in shifts up there on the farm. Then we take turns coming down here to the city to give away what we’ve grown.” She squeezed his hand. “I should have given you some of our Free Bread. It’s even better than the Free Stew.”

  “The best Free Bread in the world, I bet.”

  Marigold laughed. An elderly woman sitting in front of them turned to stare, and Marigold offered her a radiant smile.

  “Free is our special ingredient. It’s not a secret, but you’ll have trouble finding it anywhere else.” She looked through the streetcar windows at the rows of low, pale homes that lined the long avenue. “There aren’t really any sights to point out to you on this route. This is just where ordinary people live ordinary lives. It’s so calm, isn’t it? It’s beautiful just to be on this car driving through all these ordinary lives.”

  After a thoughtful beat, her smile grew sly. “But the ocean will blow your socks off. And if the ocean blows your socks off, our land up north is going to leave you wearing nothing at all.” She laughed. “Which is the way most of the Collective likes it.”

  She said this as though there were no question in her mind that my father would see the land, that he was one of them now. The idea didn’t bother him a bit.

  “Freedom Farm has a bunkhouse if that’s your thing, but most of the time we just sleep under the stars. When the clouds clear, the stars look so close they could just about blind you. And it’s quiet up there, but not quiet at all, you know? Because the land is breathing and moving all the time. You’re alone and never alone. There’s so much space, but every time you stretch your hand you touch something alive.”