beaches. why I don’t care for them
by Trinity Herr
after Wanda Coleman
associations: linguistically, no beach at all, only coasts. unending
grey drizzle. violent winds. windbreaker swish curdling my ears,
a nails-on-chalkboard cringe. lewis and clark manifesting
destiny in a blurring horizon. driving over the narrows, replaying the video
of galloping gertie’s collapse every time we visited the woman
who abandoned my father, her expensive home on the sound,
somehow shocked at how disposable a dollar was to her. the cousin she raised
snorting cocaine in the basement beside a brown recluse the size of my palm.
escape contingent on the tides, on the far side of the sea wall I’d poke in pools,
press the smallest red rock crabs into defense then stomp. hand dig clams.
pry open a fat oyster. someone lied about the prevalence of pearls.
and always the tide swallowing the beach, reclaiming itself and abandoning me
to uncozy houses, strange rooms. sand following me like a bad itch.
I never learned to swim, not really. just coasted on my uncanny ability to float.
the article about the really big one came out, and juan de fuca
and cascadian subduction zone entered my vernacular overnight.
emergency drill after emergency drill at the hospital where I worked.
suddenly: every home on the coast for sale. mama saying, wry:
now would be the right time to buy a beach house, and me imagining
my entire family floating through a ghost forest like the one out of neskowin,
growing barnacles in the creases of our crow’s feet. we’re all gonna drown
in that tidal backflow. why plan for anything else? one night, after
I fucked my ex-husband on a beach, we sat on a blanket wind-whipped
and watching lights on the waves, distant boats blinking into existence
then blinking away again. I’ve never been sure which is more expansive —
the horizon or the ocean itself. I’ve been lost in it. but once I followed a map
down 101, pilgrimage to visit my grandfather and the battleship he served on
decades ago in korea. slept the first night in the jump seats of my little pickup
somewhere at a beach access in brookings. shit surreptitiously in a state park.
just south of a place called pigeon point, famous california beach without beach,
I ended up on an unmarked road of sand and sat on the tailgate in pinking twilight.
watched the ocean break like a mirror into one thousand echoes and seven years
bad luck. I was lost in it. some shards fell in the ocean and some in my eyes.
sometime after midnight, I undressed myself and pressed into the slow current.
felt the water move around me, instead of moving around the water.