A Trip to the Beach

    

     People of religious faith will sometimes warn those of us who lack it, “It's important to believe in a power greater than yourself,” or something along those lines, implying that agnostics or atheists not only don't believe in any kind of a higher power, but are so egotistical and self-absorbed that they think themselves the greatest, the wisest, the only relevant power in town. The idea is that those of us who don't kowtow to an omnipotent being are guilty of the sin of pride; and in addition, we're a smug, complacent bunch of delusional assholes.

      I've got to say, I've never really understood that line of reasoning. I know I believe in a power greater than myself, there's never been any question of it. Many powers, in fact. A grizzly bear is much more powerful than me, a knowledge I find appropriately humbling. A hurricane is mightier than a trailer full of grizzlies, so that's a lot stronger than me too. I'm pretty sure lightning or a downed power line would reduce me to a glob of sizzling gristle if I should ever be unfortunate enough to run into them head-on. Fact is, the world is full of deadly things that, exactly because of their lethality, I'm required to accord a generous amount of respect.

      I suppose what the religious really mean is that one should acknowledge a higher authority. Okay then, let's take that into consideration. Most types of authority a person is likely to run into are strictly human in origin, and almost all of it is coercive: “Do as we say, or you'll get yours.” Meaning a fine, jail, or the death penalty in places that have it. God's authority, interestingly enough, looks very much the same: “Do as I say, or go to Hell.” Hell being spirit jail, where the sentences are incredibly harsh, and cruel and unusual punishment is strongly encouraged. It's the kind of authority you'd expect from a petty dictatorship, and I won't be the first person to say that I don't feel comfortable around people who only behave themselves because they think doing otherwise will put them on God's shit list. I tend to imagine them going on long drinking, whoring, and     gambling binges in Vegas whenever they have a “crisis of faith”.

      A higher authority, personified by an omnipotent being, never assured good behavior from anyone in the entire history of religious belief. Just look at the Crusades or the horrors of the Inquisition. And as someone very sagely noted in the documentary The God Who Wasn't There, there are very few atheists in maximum security penitentiaries.

      Ideally, moral authority comes from within, not without, and right behavior stems from a respect for others, not a fear of reprisal. Personally, I feel if I must respect something out of fear, and acknowledge its authority to grant me life or death, I'd rather it be an element of the natural world that I can verify empirically with my own senses, and that doesn't bear an ill will toward me for childish reasons as a human authority figure or institution might.

      I can think of a pretty good recent example, and it's no accident that it just so happens to relate to the main theme of this blog. Hannah and I took a trip to the beach a few weeks ago with some friends who are on the island doing construction work. We owe them a debt, because it would have been very difficult for us to get to a beach any other way. On our side of the island, waves run into a shoreline of steep bluffs, and what beaches there are tend to be spare and rocky. It's pleasant to watch the waves from the cliff's edge, especially the way the water turns aquamarine along their apex as they begin to crest, but we have no desire to descend the treacherous walls just to get our swimwear wet.

      The beaches near Waikoloa are altogether different: sand and palm trees, surf and body boards. The waves are big and hypnotic, low undulating humps that crest in shimmering, bubbling froth, able to lift fully grown adults off their feet and push them over in waist-deep water. We saw boarders and swimmers ride each rolling advance like shorebirds maneuvering into a stiff wind. Children shrieked and squealed with excitement as the waves came at them, as if strapped into a carnival ride.

      Once in the water, Hannah and I didn't go more than thirty yards from shore, fearing we'd be dragged out to sea, struggling and floundering toward the infinite horizon as broad as deep space; the recoil of the waves pulling back from the sand could easily yank a swimmer several feet at a time and make it hard to stay safely close to the beach.

      I had never gone swimming in the ocean before, and the thing that struck me immediately was the irresistible power of it, the nearly overwhelming force that only a strong and experienced swimmer could navigate with relative security and ease, and even then always with a mind on possible hazards. Suffice it to say I'm neither a very experienced, nor a strong, swimmer. I thought of all the times I'd heard about riptides and undertows, never having a solid grasp of what those words really meant, and the dangers such things pose to an unwary person. But floating there, enveloped in salt water, I could feel the meaning swelling all around me, and I quickly gained a fresh respect for the frightening and potentially destructive strength of water. I have to say I sort of liked it, being in the grip of such a monstrously huge and utterly indifferent entity, squeezed into the narrow space between mortality and a really good time, a little like Fay Wray swinging on the end of King Kong's arm. It's not base-jumping or rock climbing, it's not even like driving too fast, but nevertheless there was a thrill inherent in the knowledge that it could kill me.

      Spencer Beach was scary in a different way. We gave snorkeling a try, using our friends' equipment. I don't know about Hannah, but I hadn't been snorkeling in decades, and then only in a lake, scooting along and looking down into weeds and mud and maybe a sunfish or two not much longer than my index finger. This here was ocean snorkeling, in the waters of Hawaii, the kind people generally mean when they say “snorkeling”, because who gets excited about any other kind who's over the age of eight? That's what made the experience unsettling for me: this was a much, much larger body of water than any I'd ever dipped my toes into, with a different topography and a great deal more living things whirling around in it. I'd already had a look at the crabs—ghost crabs if I'm not mistaken—chittering along the short point of jagged rocks flanking one side of the beach, as fast or faster than sun-baked lizards, so I wasn't on the lookout for anything   with pincers and scrambling legs.

      As insensible and paranoid as it sounds, I kept an eye out for sharks, knowing full well the likelihood of one appearing so close to the beach was roughly the same as winning the lottery. I might as well have been worried about giant squid or terrorists with spear guns. But in my defense I should say that to float in such a strange setting leads to a feeling of vulnerability, an awareness that one is on the edge of a wilderness with creatures in it capable of harm. In spite of this, with the primal instinct in me calling up these vague notions of dread, I think a small part of me might have actually gotten a kick out of seeing something like a shark in its natural habitat. My guts would've turned to cement, but I know there is no other encounter in the world as charged with significance as an encounter with a large wild animal, and I'm sure fear would have given way, in some small measure, to awe.

      Visibility was low because of the sandy, opaque grittiness of the water. I paddled mostly with my hands, my face pressed down below the waterline, listening to my breath go shakily in and out with exertion and unease, touched by feelings of vertigo as the bottom would appear sometimes to drop away below me and leave only the topmost spires of green-and-white coral reaching up like stalagmites. Darting amongst the coral, or just hovering a few feet from the bottom like tiny helicopters, were small fish; not schools of them, no more than a couple dozen, but some unmistakably tropical, flat and yellow with dark stripes down their sides and tapered mouths like puckered lips. They swam alongside darker fish of about the same size but more solidly built, closer to trout in shape. Sea urchins, ranging very dark brown to black, clung to the sides of the coral towers, their prickly spines flaring out in frozen starbursts.

      I controlled my nervousness enough to enjoy myself. Hovering over the bottom, even at a depth of little more than fifteen feet, was a similar sensation to me as hanging over the edge of a very tall building. After twenty minutes of this, I was eager to get back to solid ground.

      The thought went through my mind that coral was reputed to be very sharp. I knew I'd heard of people being badly cut by it, and I tried to take care not to let my feet graze any as I swam. On our way back to shore, in about four feet of water, I felt something scrape hard against the bottom of my left foot. It hurt, but I didn't think much of it as we went about the rest of our day. How many times had I scraped myself against rocks in my life and gotten barely more than a mild, hardly even noticeable scratch? Hundreds, probably.

      Late the next day I was putting on socks and happened to look at my foot. In the area between the first knuckle of my big toe and the pad of my foot was a three-inch gash, clean and almost surgically neat, not bad enough to need stitches but ugly enough to give me pause. The last time I'd been cut like that I was five and stepped on a piece of glass in my bare feet. Hannah assured me that the salt water had probably cleaned it, but the severe look of it prompted me to apply some ointment and medical tape. More than once people have warned us about the possibility of staph infections on the Hawaiian islands.

      I choose to think of that cut as a momento from the ocean, or perhaps even the cosmos itself. Why not? I have been humbled and given a proper sense of perspective about my place in the great order of being. Those who insist on a religious interpretation of what takes place around them, and require the ghostly police state insisted upon by the concept of an authoritative god, can have them. A couple of visits to the beach in the space of about as many days, in the face of the terrific power of one of the Earth's elements at its grandest, is all I need to tell me of how little power I have in comparison, of how small a creature I am in the context of a universe too big and too ancient for me to begin to understand it, and how easily something as small as me can be snuffed out. That quick cut below my big toe served to emphasize the point. That's all the higher power I think I really need.

A View Of The Ocean

     The view from the highway overlooking our part of the farm co-op, on a day when the wind is blowing at a sprinter's pace and the sun is out, the clouds are spread like loose hunks of cotton batting pulled thin, and the overgrown grass that frames the road below us whips and thrashes in a riot of snapping leaves, while cows feed among ironwoods and macadamia trees in grazed pastures bordering fields of more writhing, untended guinea grass, together forming a wide ribbon of green ending where the treeline marks the edge of the land, falling away as cliffs into a titanic blue Pacific that runs on toward a horizon made indistinct by imperceptible distance—this is one of the best things I've seen.

      It is a simple and unadorned view, with very little about it that would mark it as distinctly Hawaiian except for the monstrous expanse of the ocean, a vast blue plain stretching off into a hazy mist of virtual infinity, meeting with the sky to create a wall closing off an entire quadrant of the Earth. Barges and cruise ships are dwarfed like caterpillars crawling across the floor of an empty ballroom, waves rippling along its surface appear as small as the wrinkles in a shirt. There is something unsettling in the realization that this immensity surrounds you on all sides, that the land mass on which you stand is two-thousand miles from the nearest continent. It would make Hannah and I feel profoundly isolated if the island of Hawai'i weren't so large.

      For me, to look at the ocean often leads to thoughts of what lives out there, the hidden menagerie that thrives beneath the waves just off shore. I've always had a fascination with, and fear of, aquatic creatures, particularly the very big ones. I know there are sharks out there, a few different kinds if I'm not mistaken, hunting fish among the reefs and further out where the water opens into an inky abyss. There might even be great whites—there's no real reason for there not to be—ghostly and huge in the deep water, their powerful bodies pushing along perhaps not even that far away, just a mile or so, if even that, and visible if not for the screen of the ocean's surface, as close to them as I've ever been in my life, even as I stand there thinking and wondering about them. Manta rays are out there as well, from what I understand, big as hang gliders, flying in the Pacific brine like liquid condors. And there are whales...

      Every night they make noise, and they've been doing it for over a month now at least, slapping their tails on the water so steadily and rhythmically you'd think a person was smacking a two-by-four against a tree stump, leaping and impacting with a sound like a distant shotgun blast, chuffing so loudly through their blowholes I swear sometimes they crawl up on dry land like sea lions and pass by twenty feet from the shack. I heard one just now, as I'm writing this.

      We've seen them, at last, after weeks of being teased by the sound of them, and not in the way portrayed in National Geographic: out on the water in a motor-driven raft, with a guide drawing on years of study and an intimate knowledge of the life-rhythms of great cetaceans, coming so close you could reach out and pat one on its barnacled head. No, we were putting a roof on our outhouse and saw first one, then two misty spouts firing out of the waves a couple of miles from shore. If the wind had been blowing we might not have seen them at all—the whitecaps would have camouflaged any sign. With the tradewinds still, their movements stood out in sharp relief against the water. One jumped, I think, its body barely visible at that distance, just a vague black shape and the foamy white aftershock of its splash, and I'm sure I saw a tail wave as it arched down into the blue. More spouts came as the pod moved along the general line of the shore, the black humps of their backs bobbing up and then down, going off to the left of where we stood watching, in the direction of Honoka'a. We didn't start work again until they were gone.

      They're humpback whales, the kind I've only seen on TV, and I've now been able to see them with my own eyes, albeit from a couple of miles away. All it took was a moment outside to work on the bathroom. We'll go on seeing them from time to time. The other day, as we were coming down the hill with jugs of water, a massive black tail rose out of the ocean and slid back in again, close enough that we could make out the cleft of the fins. Our attention is always drawn back to the ocean; it's as unavoidable as the sky, and from our perspective on the island, nearly as big.

      I've heard people talk about natural vistas that can make a person feel microscopic, insignificant, that bring on humbling notions of the spiritual or the cosmic because of their grandeur. Some have to hike along the spine of a sprawling mountain range or reach the top of Mt. Everest for that feeling to occur. It seems almost unfair that merely by standing on the shoulder of a highway, gazing out over cow pastures and an unmarked road, we see something that has almost the same impact on the senses.