Someone asked me fairly recently what the most self-reliant thing I’ve ever done is and I glibly relayed an entertaining true story, but I’ve been thinking about
it. Now, see, that could be a lot of things, actually. I know I can't “compete”* with people who were abandoned or structurally neglected as small children, for example, or who single-parented
their way through major surgery or overcame blindness or brought water to their village or left an abusive relationship, or all kinds of stuff, but I do have some stories.
There’s the time in that other post when I had to
take a couple of small children to school in a cargo bike through a blizzard uphill while suffering from bronchitis. There was the time in that other post when I got out of that freezing bathroom stall. There’s standing beside my
baby for days after giving birth not knowing if we’d go home together, there was that time I built myself a getaway shelter with nothing but a machete and a bamboo grove, there was that time I
got trapped in the sucking mud thrown off the railroad trestle by bullies wrote a novel stood up to that doctor talked down that suicidal schizophrenic person... There was that time, there was
that time...
But you know what? Let’s do that entertaining story I told when I was asked that question. That’s the point here, right? Entertainment? People like this story, or
at least that’s what they tell me, so this is as good a time as any to throw it to the wolves.
So. This one time. I wanted, idly, to see what I could do on my own without going home for lunch. I admit I did bring a couple of things with me, specifically a
pocket knife, a short fishing rod with a hook and line, and a foil packet containing butter, salt, pepper, and garlic. This was a time in my life at which alone time was vital and I loved nothing
more than to just disappear into whatever form of the wild was at hand. This time, that was the beach. I filled a small backpack and announced randomly to the house that I would be back by
sunset. I think I was 14. 15? Something like that.
Getting to the beach from that house involved clambering down a long, narrow, sometimes dangerous canyon trail absolutely thronged with amazing Southern California wildlife, not all of it dangerous. Ground squirrels shrilling out a warning that I’m coming in, wild cucumber vines with their amazing spiky seed pods which explode at the right time of year, hurling the seeds like slow bullets across the canyonside. Indian Paintbrush flowers sweeping a rockside, cholla cactus lurking hazardously everywhere one might fall or brush past. Wild beehives with slabs of open-air honeycomb plastered into a crack, reeking of honey. Walls of prickly-pear. Swift, sandy lizards and inoffensive sleepy rattlesnakes, trapdoor spiders, various hawks and thrashers and warblers and thrushes. Mockingbirds. At the bottom the canyon narrowed to a set of delicate pools, emptying out, when there was water in them, into the ocean. And what an ocean.
To the right from there, narrow sandy beaches stretched away to the more popular locales, more often than not covered in heaps of barnacle-encrusted kelp, tangled with sea grass, dotted with boulders sporting deeply-sunk chitons. To the left, tidepools. That’s where I went this day, because among the tidepools was a long, flat, isolated rock overlooming the surf. On the way over there I’d gathered an armload of dry driftwood, and this I now arranged in a fire-pile, shaving one piece into long, thin slivers as kindling and reserving two for the lighting of the fire, which I did the twirling-stick way. Once I was sure it would stay lit, I cast my line, baited with the sand crabs I’d dug while getting the driftwood.
I caught four surf perch, a very tasty small fish indeed. I gutted them, tossing the offal back into the water for their scavenging brethren, and stuffed them with the butter, garlic, pepper, and salt, wrapping them again in the foil. These packets safely nestled in the flames, I watched the world go by out to sea. This was a place where humans teemed athletically, surfing and hang-gliding and kayaking, or passed by occasionally on a huge naval vessel, but were not all that much in evidence on the beaches themselves because of the big piles of redolent kelp. It was possible to see them, at this distance, as brightly colored intrusions on the actual world of pounding surf, moaning gulls, barking sea lions, pelicans and terns and sandpipers and scuttling crabs and the occasional brief flume of a whale coming up for air. Very peaceful, and, in the baking sun, completely hypnotic. It was only with effort that I remembered to turn the fish over after a little while.
That was one of the best lunches of my life. Completely subsumed in the realm and rhythm of the shore, utterly divorced from society and stunned by the sun, I ate
the freshest of all possible fish and thought about nothing at all. Later, the fire safely put out and the mess cleared and packed away with me, the sense of peace lingered as I climbed back up
to the world of men and women, took a shower, and read a good book.
Those were the days.
*I don’t actually see myself as being in competition with these people; it’s a figure of speech. That said, if it was a competition, they’d win.
