OF MORNING GLASS
Is this the first time that feeling comes, not at all frightening, but familiar to you? Your understanding of the water and its relation to the body, your being able to hold your own inside the enormous-unimaginable, to dive deep and come up far from where you started: when does it begin? Is it the day you step off of the last step in the shallow end of a neighbor’s pool up the street near the river, the water line shifting your vision to divide all that is in from all that is not in water? Or earlier, when you walk into the waves out front—an expression that means the water of the vast Atlantic Ocean that flows almost to your doorstep—feeling for the first time the relief that there is a thing that is much bigger than you, enormous in fact? Or the feeling has its roots in the way your father talks about the stars that make up the Milky Way, your relation to them mathematical, an infinite sense of connection among bodies, each floating in its atmosphere.
In reality out front is not at your doorstep but five hundred yards of steaming asphalt from the three-bedroom, two-bath bungalow in which your parents have raised seven children. You walk it blind, having learned the way of each and every pebble donated to the asphalt mix, and the pebbles in turn have learned the feel of your leathering skin. Out front beyond the cut-through, first through the dunes and later as trespass walking under the stilts of houses that block your cutthrough over dwindling and eroded dunes.
Hide and seek suffers these erosions. Pickle under the street light. Kick the can through the back yards. Eroded too, the presence of so many people in the house: brothers and a sister who each leave you there. Then you leave them, your parents, there. The erosions of time follow.
In truth out front is also a piece of language, one of the first phrases you learn, an idiom you share with the two hundred people (an estimate) who know what it means: the patch of the Atlantic Ocean directly in front of 219 Robinson Road, the house with all the surfboards in the back room, the one where the rocket scientist and his wife and their five sons and two daughters live. Later, it will be the spot of beach in front of the house where the widow lives, boards still there if you want to paddle out out front, catch a dawn patrol, use all of it as an excuse to check on her. You are a son home for a quick visit, a nephew crashing in a back bedroom, a boy who knew her daughter, a friend of someone who loved someone who lived here.
By the time you are writing this the very house you ran home to as the rain followed you in sheets from the beach is not gone but gutted, remodeled. Whoever remodeled it has not changed the pitch of the roof, and as you walk barefoot from out front down the street you recognize that pitch. Like a music it sings to you.
Out front is two hundred yards of beach in front of a side street on a barrier island seventeen miles long and half a mile wide. Driving, take the south causeway to reach it if you are worried the drawbridge on the north causeway will stop you. Swimming from Crawford Approach, the Atlantic’s northerly current takes you quickly past it. Blink and you’re halfway to the inlet, already approaching Beachway. You’ll have a long walk back.
Though is simply the ocean in front of a phantom house, these decades later you still have the habitual stroke that you developed there. Rarely do you have an expanse of water big enough to use it. Its memory dwarfs a house pool, makes you restless in the lap pools of, depending on the current, is about 80 breaths. The lifeguards know you can handle yourself far out so they don’t call you back. They also know how deep it is out there and know you know it, too.
