Ken McAlpine's Blog: The Hesitant Blogger - Posts Tagged "life"

Hi: I'm not sure if anyone will even read this, but it's part of a book-in-progress about life lessons at the ocean's edge. If you do happen across this, thanks so much for reading.

Sincerely, Ken


When I was nineteen my friend Dennis and I drove to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for Thanksgiving. We were in college at the University of Virginia. We had a few days off from school. We drove past gray cities, then slow moving towns, and finally farms, ice-glazed and still. We drove across the wind-whipped Pamlico Sound. It leapt and churned, the water the color of chocolate milk.

We spent our first hour on the Outer Banks looking for the cheapest motel we could find. We found it in Nags Head. We stood at the front counter. The desk clerk looked out the frosted windows to where snow flurries now danced. His eyes took in our car.

“I hope you have the right gear,” he said.

“We do,” I said, and it was only half a lie.

“If you don’t, you’d be stupid to go,” he said.

We paid with a fistful of wrinkled bills. We had a little left for gas, a little for beer, and a little less for food. Food didn’t matter. We had a whole cooked turkey in the cooler we brought into the room. Dennis had cooked the turkey back at the house we shared with two other friends. Dennis loved to cook and he was good at it. Mostly he improvised. He would rummage through the cabinets, using whatever ingredients struck his fancy, making things up as he went along. He combined ingredients that would raise the hairs on the back of a real chef’s neck. He would shake in a little of this and a lot of that. If he used a cookbook I never saw it. I don’t know what he used to season this particular turkey, but whatever it was it was just right; the entire drive down, otherworldly smells tormented us.

The minute we got in the room, we opened the cooler and pulled out the turkey. Honeymooners don’t get down to business faster. Dennis had remembered to bring a platter for the turkey, but I had forgotten the silverware. It didn’t matter. Dennis had outdone himself. In short order everything, including us, smelled of turkey. Outside the wind roared and the snow moved in circles. Inside the heater clattered, and drafts pushed through the walls.

The motel was on the beach. Our room faced east. Over the tops of the dunes we could see the white-capped ocean.

Dennis rarely hesitated. He didn’t hesitate now.

“Let’s go,” he said.

We pulled on our wetsuits. Outside, the snow bit at our faces. It took us longer than it should have to get the surfboards off the car racks. Our fingers were already half frozen.

A small boardwalk crossed the dunes. The snow made a light dusting on the wood. Dennis walked in front of me. To this day I can still see the enormous prints of his bare feet. My own feet ached as much as my hands. Plenty of people surf in the winter but they are generally prepared, covered from head to toe – neoprene hood for the head, neoprene boots and gloves for the feet and hands - in wetsuit. I had lied to the desk clerk. We had brought what we had.

By the time we stepped on to the frozen beach everything ached, but I didn’t feel right about whining. I had no hood, boots or gloves, but at least my wetsuit extended all the way to my ankles. Dennis’s wetsuit reached only to his knees. His calves were turning a curious red.

Snow had gathered in Dennis’s hair. I knew what he would look like when he got old.

On the exposed beach the wind roared even louder. Brown gobbets of foam quivered on the sand.

Dennis stopped. He looked at the ocean, gray and heaving and then he looked to me because there was no one else to consult.

“What’s the water temperature?” he asked.

“Forty-six.”

“Are we stupid?”

“Yes,” I said.

Dennis watched me for another long moment.

“I hope we have enough turkey,” he said, and then he walked into the ocean.

I can’t recall how long we stayed in the water, but it probably wasn’t more than ten minutes. The waves were angry and roared in from every direction, clobbering us and punching the breath from our lungs and spinning us underwater in an oddly quiet brownish-blackness. But we were nineteen, and Dennis was an All-American swimmer with lungs like a Hoover vacuum and we were both so in love with the thrill of riding a wave that all the clobbering was worth it. You see, I had only half lied to the desk clerk. The right gear isn’t just something you buy.

I don’t remember how many waves we caught, but it was certainly less than we could count on one hand, and then we were running up the beach, half laughing and half weeping, partly because we were deathly cold, partly because Dennis jolted up the beach like a man on stilts, his legs now a nauseating shade of purple. Everything burned, and we were alive.

We surfed again the next day.

As I write this it seems like yesterday, but it isn’t. My friend Dennis died yesterday. His lungs killed him. That’s where the cancer started.

It’s stupid not to do the things you can.

Tucked within the protected confines of Nantucket Sound, Quohog Beach is a beach for young children. As if attempting to make things pleasant for its primary patrons, everything about Quohog Beach is small, from its wee crescent of sand to the pint-size jetty jutting like a blunt thumb into the Sound.
At the moment we are consumed with the beach. We scour the sand, buckets swinging, poking through a tangle of seaweed, broken bits of whelk and moon snail, searching beneath a cloudless blue July sky for pieces of horseshoe crab. These prehistoric creatures once littered Cape Cod in such numbers that they were ground up and used as fertilizer by farmers. From what we observe on the sand their numbers haven’t decreased much, though each crab appears to have been placed atop a firecracker and then scattered by a schizophrenic wind.
No matter. Our plan remains straightforward. We will piece together a horseshoe crab, whole and complete. Cullen and Graham raptly pluck cracker-thin crab bits, placing them gently in their bucket. I follow their example, but with slightly less enthusiasm. I understand the odds. I glance at other parents, flat on their backs in the hot sun.
At six, Cullen runs things. He waves a magisterial hand at his four-year-old brother.
“If we don’t get enough pieces to put together the crab now,” he decrees, “we’ll get the rest later.”
“Uh-huh,” grunts Graham, possibly because he mildly resents being bossed around, possibly because he is sorely bent to one side under the weight of a bucket spilling over with pretty much everything he could pick up.
Cullen strides over to his brother’s bucket, peers in and scowls.
“Crabs aren’t made out of beer cans!”
I wish the beer can was full. My head has been cocked to the sand for two hours. The back of my neck feels like it’s been kicked by a Clydesdale.
Perhaps I slip into sudsy daydream. Cullen looks at us both and harrumphs.
“Am I going to have to do this all by myself?”
We collect jigsaw pieces for another thirty minutes. Not thirty-one minutes, not thirty-two. Any parent of small children understands exactitude. I can’t go a minute longer. I find an excuse called lunch.
The three of us walk up the path to the cottage where we are staying for the week, buckets bumping.
“I think we have the pieces we need,” says Cullen.
“Right,” says Graham.
He is too young for sarcasm.
We march through the front door and continue, as quickly as possible, on through the kitchen, where Kathy is fixing everyone lunch. We are not quick enough.
“You’d better wash whatever that is off their hands,” says Kathy.
I stand in the bathroom, watching Cullen turn a white hand towel black. I may be less attentive the second son around. Eating lunch I notice Graham has something shiny and snail-like on his index finger. I say a silent prayer and he answers it by licking it off.
That night Kathy and I lay in bed. Our sliding screen door opens to the porch. Occasionally a puff of wind brings a smell that makes me wonder if Stephen King is cooking something just outside. Beneath the stars dark shells lay methodically sorted, according to what I don’t know.
“Phew,” I say.
“Maybe you could put them in the yard,” Kathy says, but I know she doesn’t really mean it because she’s smiling as if we’re lying downwind from a potpourri factory.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “Another six months and it’ll be a wrap.”
“Anything is possible,” my beautiful bride says to me, and I know why I married her.



The following morning we redirect slightly.
“I want to crab,” says Graham.
Cullen gives a magisterial nod.
“Let’s,” he says.
We have become fascinated with crabbing because frankly nothing, with the possible exception of King Henry VIII, eats with more gusto than crabs do. Also live crabs do more interesting things than dead ones. The small jetty pronging off Quohog Beach is loaded with crabs. We know this because on this, the fourth day of our vacation, we have already been crabbing roughly two thousand times.
We retrieve our buckets from the porch. Before we go, Cullen crouches to arrange a few promising horseshoe pieces.
“Hmmm,” he says, moving the pieces in circles like a centrifugal chess master.
“Hmmm,” says his brother, who at this juncture in time still admires him greatly.
Cullen finishes placing the bits in their proper places. There is something resembling a horseshoe crab body, but there are still great gaps occupied by cedar composite decking.
“There,” says Cullen.
What I see resembles a horse dropping after the Kentucky Derby field has run through it.
Cullen looks to Graham.
“Just a few more pieces,” he says.
“Hmmmm,” says Graham.
Small children wake well before the most conscientious rooster and even earlier on vacation. The world is gray. The light isn’t even up yet. The air is still damp with sea. The beach is empty.
We each carry our own bucket, chicken bits and string inside. I step gingerly along the jetty. The enormous rocks, sectioned in some distant quarry, are liberally colonized by barnacles that jab at the soles of my feet.
Cullen and Graham walk as if strolling across shag carpet. When I reach the end of the jetty Cullen is already crouched, peering into his chosen crevice.
“Breakfast time,” says Cullen, “but not for us.”
Graham is flat on his stomach, his face and the majority of his torso in his crevice of choice.
“What do you see?” I ask.
“I dropped my string.”
After I retrieve it, I tie a chicken piece to each string. The boys accept their strings, solemnly lowering the sacrificial chicken into the dark rift. I spread out the newspaper I brought, and put the remaining chicken pieces on it. Past experience has shown us we’ll quickly need room in our buckets for crabs.
When I finish I squat and watch our sons. They peer into the dark, brows furrowed.
“Come awwwwwwwn,” says Cullen.
Graham’s string jerks.
“Whaaaaaat!” he shrieks. “Caught one! Caught one!”
I have coached them thoroughly in the craft of crabbing. Wait for the crab to latch firmly to the chicken. Bring the string up slowly so the crab doesn’t know it’s being reeled in.
Graham stands straight up. The crab swings to and fro in front of his belly button, a dark pendulum oblivious to its change in circumstance. One claw affixed to the chicken bit, the other claw greedily spoons meat into its wet maw.
Reaching behind the crab, I pinch its body between my thumb and forefinger and pry it, with considerable force, from the now shredded chicken wing. I put it in Graham’s bucket where it makes a mad scrabbling.
“I was careful,” says Graham proudly.
Cullen pretends to ignore all this. His string is limp.
“I caught a crab,” says Graham, who is not yet schooled in subterfuge either.
“You pick up beer cans,” says Cullen.
Just when I start believing that the crabs in Cullen’s crevice have evolved into something wiser, they start leaping at his string as if they’ve suddenly realized they’re aboard the Titanic. They rise from their dark places furiously stuffing down chicken bits, exhibiting not a whiff of self-preservation.
There’s always opportunity for imparting parental wisdom.
“Crabs are called crustaceans,” I say. “Even though their shells are hard, you still need to be really careful. If you break off their claws they won’t be able to eat.”
“If their claw breaks off, a new one grows on,” says Cullen.
“It does?”
“I dropped my string,” says Graham.
The crabs now pour from the jetty like a locust horde, striking wantonly at the chicken bits and each other with harsh clicks. There is a parable here, the downfall wrought by selfishness and greed, but the boys are too young for that. Crabs are also distantly related to insects, but I keep this to myself too because I’m afraid Cullen will correct me.
In short order all three buckets are brimming with clacking crabs.
“We need to empty the buckets,” I say.
“I’ll do it,” says Cullen.
“Pour them out in the water,” I tell him. “You don’t want them cracking their shells on the rocks. You’ll have to lean out a little. Take one bucket at a time, and be careful.”
Perhaps I should be reported to Childhood Protective Services, but the water here is only a few feet deep and I want our boys to stretch.
Cullen inches carefully down the side of the jetty feet first, crab-like himself. When they are young, they follow your directions to the letter. He settles easily on a broad rock washed with a thin skein of surge. The spilling crabs make a sound like a fistful of rocks flung into the water.
I know what to look for next. I grab Graham before he can slide down.
“Your job is to get the buckets when Cullen passes them up,” I say.
His solemn nod assures me this is responsibility enough. But something in his eyes tells me he’s solemn for a different reason.
He looks toward the beach.
“We’re not going to find enough horseshoe crab pieces,” he says.
“We might,” I say.
“Maybe not,” he says.
I want them to believe anything is possible, but I want them to prepare for disappointment too.
“We might not find enough pieces,” I say and I feel something stick in my throat.
We return to crabbing. Cullen stays where he is, but Graham wordlessly moves close to me, sharing my crevice. It is quiet. I hear his small breaths. I feel the butterfly press of his hand on my thigh.
The sun breaks through the dawn clouds, striking the water in three gauzy silver shafts. Together we breathe.
Sometimes life’s pieces fit together in ways you don’t expect.

It is a pity to be so superficial, especially regarding a literary icon, but one of the things I remember most about my first encounter with Ray Bradbury was the man’s hair. The first time I saw him speak was in Oxnard some 25 year ago. He was electric. The crowd was transfixed, bewitched, beguiled and stunned. He laughed. He shouted. He raised his hands to the fluorescent lighting. His passions ran far and wide, although apparently they did not include a comb. His snow white hair ran in every direction too, as if, immediately before arriving, he had flunked an electrical re-wiring final. He may have actually been electric.

Bradbury, who sadly (but maybe not for him – new and greater adventures await!) passed away this past June at 91, is back in the news again, which is definitely a good thing because the author of, most famously, “Fahrenheit 451”, reminds us of how we might live.

He is in the news because Ventura filmmaker and artist Michael O’Kelly has made the documentary film called “Live Forever – The Ray Bradbury Odyssey”. The full-length feature film covers Bradbury’s remarkable creative career and, equally exciting, offers a personal look at a charming, witty and wholly unique man. O’Kelly, a personal friend of Bradbury’s, made the film for all the right reasons. “I wanted to make a film that would inspire other people, especially kids, to read and write,” he told a reporter. “The message is if you don’t read and write, it’s very hard to think. If you can’t think clearly, it’s hard to find who you are and how you fit into the world.” I should also mention that the November 11th screening at the Century 10 Theater in downtown Ventura is a pre-release benefit for, among other good causes, local libraries. Ray Bradbury loved libraries. I can already see him waving his hands (tickets are available at the Ventura Visitors & Convention Bureau, 420 East Santa Clara Street or from www.venturafilmsociety.com).

Ray Bradbury waved his hands a lot. I know this because I saw him speak numerous times. He slowed down as he grew old, but in his younger days, standing somewhere in the vicinity of the speaker’s dais (the rest of him didn’t stay still either), he exhorted and waved his hands about as if conducting some madcap symphony only he could hear. On one unforgettable occasion he waved his hands right in my face, dispensing advice that became one of the pillars of my own life.

But this column is about a greater man. Ray Bradbury was the author of “Fahrenheit 451”, yes. He also (take a deep breath) wrote “The Martian Chronicles” and “The Illustrated Man”, penned episodes for “The Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, co-wrote the screenplay for the film “Moby Dick”, wrote plays, headed the Pandemonium Theatre Company in Los Angeles, consulted on the American Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and the original exhibit housed in Epcot’s Spaceship Earth geosphere at Walt Disney World and read poetry every day. The man had creative ADHD and forty-eight hours in his day.

I provide this resume because I am hoping you might pass this column on to your kids, or maybe read it to them – or if you don’t have kids, find some -- and there’s a chance they don’t know who Ray Bradbury is, in the same way young people don’t know the Beatles or how to ride in a car and look at the scenery. I don’t mean this as an insult. It’s just that nowadays things move very, very fast – faster, possibly, than even Ray Bradbury could have imagined – and in that rapid passing, priceless things dissipate in the vapor trail.

Ray Bradbury wrote lots of great stories, and if they haven’t already, your kids should read some of them. His mind, like his hair, went everywhere. What if? Why? Why the hell not? A keen observation, a twist and a turn, and stories leapt from his mind to the page. Once, infuriated by a fashion shoot he saw in Harper’s Bazaar in which emaciated runway models posed and postured in front of poor natives in a Puerto Rican backstreet, he whipped off “Sun and Shadow”, the story of an old Puerto Rican who ruins a Bazaar photographer’s afternoon by sidling into every picture and dropping his pants. How fun is that?

But Ray Bradbury also dispensed an equal amount of wonderful advice. About writing, yes, but just as often, about life. For Bradbury the two were inextricably intertwined. Self-consciousness, he said, is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all. Read poetry every day of your life (If your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him, he fetchingly wrote). Run. Seize your time. Stuff your senses with it, touch it, smell it, taste it. That we are alive is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it is awarded us.

Wise counsel, every word, and Bradbury had tons more, making it difficult to pick a favorite, but not for me.

Be a child of one’s time.

When your kids start reading Ray Bradbury, perhaps they should start with this. It’s taken from one of my favorite Bradbury books, called “Zen in the Art of Writing”; no surprise now, a book of writing advice that seamlessly transfers to life.

By the time many people are fourteen or fifteen, they have been divested of their loves, their ancient and intuitive tastes, one by one, until when they reach maturity there is no fun left, no zest, no gusto, no flavor… When the circus pulls in at five of a dark cold summer morn, and the calliope sounds, they do not rise and run, they turn in their sleep, and life passes by.

Ray Bradbury got up and bolted. He plunged smack dab into the wellspring of life. I don’t have to close my eyes to see him away from the podium, hopping about like a flea at the gates of a boarding kennel.

It was after that first talk-cum-jitterbug that Ray Bradbury waved his hands in my face. I was a young reporter for a weekly newspaper in Ventura, sent to cover Bradbury’s talk. With an ink stain blossoming in one pant pocket where a pen had exploded and a shirt I had obviously ironed by hand I was lucky just to get in. Compounding my luck, someone in charge of the event took pity on me. When the talk was over and Bradbury finished speaking with the knot of admirers who rushed the stage, this kind man signaled to him.

And then Ray Bradbury was moving through the crowd to talk to me, and my heart was doing back flips while my tongue affixed itself gummily to the roof of my mouth. When Bradbury’s eyes found me he didn’t look right through me, he looked right into me. In the last instant before he pulled up barely a nose length away, I remember thinking, ‘What does this man have to teach me?’, a queer thought in retrospect as I would later find out that Bradbury was likely thinking the same thing. He was curious about everyone, even dumbstruck reporters who would never ever appear in a fashion shoot in Harper’s Bazaar.

Since it was clear I was not going to speak, he did.

“Well young man, obviously you’re a writer.” I think he glanced at my pocket, but I’m not sure. “Good for you.”

I knew I should ask him what his next project was – a short story, a new book, lunch with Ronald Reagan -- I was a newspaper reporter after all, a slave to breaking news. But I also knew how long he had been pinned against the stage by his admirers and I saw how his eyes, though kind, went to the exit. There was something else in his eyes too. In that nervous instant I couldn’t quite grasp it, although I know what it is now

“If you had one word of advice, what would it be?”

His eyes left the exit. They fixed on mine and he smiled at me as if we had just both received the first one-way ticket to Mars.

“One word?” he asked.

“Yes sir.”

“Follow your dreams with delightful passion,” he said, waving his hands, “like a child,” and then he was gone, his hair nearly dusting both sides of the door jamb.

On November 11th I will stand in line to see “Live Forever – The Ray Bradbury Odyssey”, my heart racing. I will seize it, breath it, stuff my senses with it, embrace it with passion.

Chronologically I am not so young anymore. But thanks in part to Ray Bradbury, the calendar no longer matters to me.

Recently I met a woman. She was friendly and pleasant, with a warm smile. I listened to her closely when she spoke. I did this, in part, to return the favor. She had listened closely, and even asked questions, during the book talk I had just given.

“I want to go away and see things,” she told me.

Many people say this sort of thing. Not so many have Stage 3 cancer. She had a bucket list, she said. Ambling around the country, going nowhere in particular, was on it.

As a travel writer, and someone with a talent for getting lost, I have considerable experience with aimless ambling. Wittingly and unwittingly, I have seen my share of back alleys and back roads. Partly because she was so obviously sincere in her desire to travel, partly because talking with people with cancer produces in me a sort of hyper enthusiasm, as if a loopy smile and a lot of hand waving can wipe the disease away, I prattled on and on about the joys of travel. The chance to find hidden corners. The chance to meet people. The chance to see the sunrise in an unfamiliar place. The chance for so many chances. Here I may have paused.

She listened quietly through my babble. When I finished she said, “That’s exactly what I want to do.” The woman’s name is Hope.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Here in Ventura County there are events everywhere. An open house at the new Rolling Oaks Radiology Women's Imaging Center in Thousand Oaks. A “Relay for Life” event on the track at Camarillo High School, honoring cancer survivors and raising money to fight the disease. A cancer symposium, "Surviving and Thriving", at the Ventura Beach Marriott. Another symposium, "How to Cheat, Treat and Beat Breast Cancer", at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. On the first day of October our local paper the Ventura County Star printed the day’s edition in pink.

If I was a newspaper journalist I would have written this column at the beginning of the month. But I’m not. I’m writing this at the end of the month, hoping it carries into November and maybe on. Cancer will carry on. Procrastination too.

I don’t know if Hope has breast cancer. She didn’t say. She might have breast cancer, she might not. Sadly, there are many cancer options.

I may have been frenetically enthusiastic in my delivery, but I told my new friend Hope the truth. The greatest joy of travel is the people you meet. Travel has seen me to breathtaking places and moments -- lightning forking over the snowy Andes, mantas swooping through blue Hawaiian waters, evening shadows purpling the Grand Canyon’s deeps – but even these moments pale in comparison with the people I’ve met. They have surprised me. They have bewitched me. They have welcomed me into their towns, and sometimes their homes. Sometimes they have cheated me, or stolen from me or just been rude and cold. People come in many packages. But most of the people have been good, and many of them have given me a gift, a little piece of them I will carry with me forever. Lessons in living.

Once, kayaking off Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, I met a man named David. It was Thanksgiving and brutally cold, a hard, damp wind producing an uncountable army of whitecaps on Pamlico Sound. When I met David, he was bobbing at the mouth of Ocracoke’s tiny harbor. I saw him before he saw me. His head was down, consulting the navigational chart spread across the deck of his kayak. He had a compass too.

It is bad form to paddle silently past the only other kayaker for miles.

“Beautiful out here, isn’t it?” I said.

It was, in a frozen, gray, victory-at-sea fashion.

David’s head came up slowly, as if reluctant to leave the chart. He appeared to be in his fifties, though it was hard to tell, as only a small portion of his face emerged from the bubble-wrap of protective gear. I was wearing nothing but a wetsuit, and perhaps a bluish complexion.

David looked at me like the idiot I was.

“It’s a little cold,” he said.

We bobbed in the water, the wind beating between us, and exchanged pleasantries. David had come to Ocracoke for the long Thanksgiving weekend.

He didn’t smile as we talked, but his tone was amiable. I had drifted close enough to see that he had a small plastic orb affixed to the shoulder of his jacket. Technologically speaking, it resembled one of those Christmas snow globes, only instead of swirling snowflakes, it contained a winking light.

His eyes followed mine. “GPS,” he said. “I’m one of those people who like to plan.”

David asked where I was from, and when I told him California, he said his wife’s family lived in California. “My wife died about a year and a half ago,” he said. “Of cancer.”

The wind whistled.

“I was just paddling in a sluice back there,” David said, more to himself than me. “There were herons and egrets. It probably goes back two miles. I was paddling back there and I’m thinking, ‘This is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.’”

I paddled to David’s sluice, a ribbon of gin clear water little more than paddle-length wide in most places, snaking into the interior of the island. I floated over its mirror surface to the whisper of marsh grass. Out of the wind it was warm. Birds sang, and egrets, snow-white and silent, swooped low, dropping below the grass line to their own secrets.

David was right, it was beautiful, but now, ten years later, it is David I remember, bobbing quietly beneath the marled sky, a meticulous man who couldn’t plan for everything.

“You know, she loved to kayak,” he said. “She really wanted to come here, but we just kept putting it off.”

You don’t have to travel far to meet people with cancer or bucket lists. I met Hope ten minutes from home. I’m glad I did.

Before we parted Hope gave me another warm smile, but there was something harder in her eyes.

“I mean it,” she said. “I’m really going to do this.”

If Hope reads this, I hope she doesn’t mind that I wrote about her. But I hope she doesn’t read it. I hope she’s miles from the internet, sitting on a weathered dock in the Florida Keys, watching baitfish ripple the surface as the sun rises.

By then it probably won’t be October. Not that it matters. Any month is as good for cancer as it is for following through on a bucket list.