The Envious Flood

I spent most of the drive thinking about the whale.

Highway 1 North isn’t as busy as I remember. I have my window down just a crack—enough for a breeze, however chilly. The thermometer on the dash reads 54. I assume that’s Fahrenheit. It strikes me as a bit cold for California, even the central coast. Maybe I’m just remembering things being warmer than they actually were. The rain’s been light but constant. Fog hovers over the mountains and drifts in thin meshes across the highway. That much I remember, at least.

And there’s Muriel, head cast in the breeze, fifty years ago in my ’54 Chevy convertible, sticking her tongue out, and I asked her what she’s doing and she says “I want to taste the fog,” and I just leave it at that. Later I asked her what it tastes like, and she never answered, just grew quiet and kept her mouth shut up tight, like she had something in there she was afraid would escape if she opened it.

My manuscripts are all piled in the backseat, alongside Muriel’s letters, all still sealed in the brown paper package I had received so unceremoniously, like the last seeds of memory before sleep. I had written the manuscripts that summer, when the two of us lived on the beach, with my typewriter propped on the hood of the Chevy. Big Sur sings with a cacophony erupting from the season’d mysts, counterpointing ages against ages and the ever-primal call of the sea and the rains, back and forth and back and forth to the quiet soul who will always and forever return to the secret places where such songs are most audible…

The wind seeps through the cracked window and conjures faint recollections from the pages packaged in the backseat, mixing with the damp scent of the fog and the gossamer saltiness of the Pacific.

The package arrived anonymously, during my last semester at the university before retirement. Sometime in the Spring semester, waiting in my university mailbox the day I got the last glimpse of Muriel, while I was standing in front of a half-empty lecture room, trying to get apathetic sophomores to care about Elizabethan poetry.

“One thing we might think about in the 16th century is the superimposition of Christian and pagan imagery. For example…no texting please… for example, in the introductory stanzas of The Faerie Queene, who does Spenser portray as the head of the muses?”

Faces sought their aging desks.

“Second stanza, ladies and gentlemen. First line.”

Silence. The dust from the chalk wisped past my eyes, drifting across the afternoon sunlight through the windows. I catch a side glance of a sea of soft red hair, ruffled and falling down bare shoulders. Almost like a garden. And I could have walked through the sunbeams and waded back fifty years, but instead I blinked, and I saw that the face beneath that hair is dull and uninterested, looking down at the phone hidden beneath her desk, texting something apparently more important than this class.

“So, what’s going on here, ladies and gentlemen?” I said. “Afternoon getting to you? It is a nice day out, you probably want to be elsewhere.” No sympathy from them. “Truth be told, I want to be elsewhere. But I’m contractually obligated to teach you this, so we’re stuck here until further notice. So, going back to my question, Spenser portrays the Virgin Mary as the head of the muses. He writes Helpe then, Holy Virgin chiefe of Nine….the “nine” are the muses, by the way…”

Hours north of Los Angeles I find myself in front of an apathetic gas station clerk, likewise of sophomore age. He glances up from his phone.

“I’m wondering if you could help me,” I say. “I’m looking for a particular beach, and I can’t seem to find the right exit.”

“Nearest beach is Carmel,” he says. “Two exits northbound. I don’t know if it’s open this time of year.”

“No,” I say too quickly. “It’s somewhere before Carmel, I think.”

He looks at me with limited comprehension. “What’s the name?”

“I’m not really sure.”

“Is it a private beach?”

“…possibly?”

“Is it in Los Padres?”

“…not really sure…”

He makes his face look like he’s thinking. I rub my knuckles together. “It’s more of a cove, really. Very white sand. Rocks extending on both sides. One of them looks like a titan felled from the sky, stuck upside-down with his ragged bones reaching towards the clouds from which he is exiled. The other is a cathedral designed with non-Euclidean geometry by a civilization privileging laughter and warm beer over reason. There are enough round, purple stones in the pale sand to build more empires than could be contained in the pages of history.”

And he shrugs and says “I have some maps over here, if you think those will help.” And I buy one just because and find when I walk outside that the fog has surrounded the area and made the route back onto the highway invisible.

Muriel had found the beach, back in ’62, fresh from Cornell, still drunk on our fourth bottle of wine and passing a single joint back and forth for most of the drive. She said “it was born from the fog, like the way mirages become the road.” It went right to a beach, with white sand and even, pulsing tides alight with fragments of the orange sunset perfectly clear contra the foggy mountains behind. Nobody there but us.

In her letters I found in the package, Muriel asked if I remembered the whale. The one we woke up one morning, washed up on the beach. It was massive, but even then, decomposition was unraveling its dark, dense body in the relentlessness of the Pacific sun. The ocean deposited it on the shore while we slept, but when we first saw it that morning the sand had already sunk in a grove beneath it, and the waves found crevices and gorges around and inside it into which they could wash and retreat, as if it had sat here for millions of years, and the Big Sur tides had always known its vast but fragile contours.

I get a cheap motel room that night. The next day I drive up and down that stretch of highway, taking every exit I can find between San Simeon and Carmel. The fog holds steady up in the blunted peaks of the California highlands. I find a beach and watch the few surfers dart into the water, their hair waving with winds and locomotion. The waves roll in and out, gathering strength far offshore and paling as they approach the brown line of sand. They fall forward with hunger, but soon lose momentum and retreat back into the ocean or disperse into innocuous tidal pools. I think of a line from Richard III.

Had you such leisure in the time of death

To gaze upon the secrets of the deep?

A seagull lands on my rental car, looking at me with strange dark eyes. I shoo it away and sit down for a while inside the car with my eyes closed. Through my rolled-up windows I can barely hear the rolling of the waves against the grainy sand. The grey, cloudy light across the shimmering canvas rolling onto the edge of the world.

Methought I had, and often did I strive

To yield the ghost, but still the envious flood

Stopped in my soul, and would not let it forth

To seek the empty, vast and wandering air…

In her letter Muriel asked if I could remember the smell as the whale decomposed. The smell that eventually permeated into everything we had. She said she wrote that letter on paper she had taken from my beach manuscripts. She asked if I could smell it, years and thousands of miles later. She ended with that question, like people do when they don’t know that what they’ve just said will be the last they ever say to that person.

That night I tear open the brown paper package, go over the letters individually, try to sense among their aged, wrinkled fabric a smell to remind me of her, or a fifty-year old sea breeze riding on the back of a warm summer day. But I smell nothing.

The fog strangles me. The towns and enclaves plastered along the hidden places in the Santa Lucia Mountains drift along with the whims of the soft white clouds where the sea and the sky meet.

The next day I take Highway 1 South towards San Simeon. The road is deserted. Blowing through the window the fog rips through the papers in the back, and the smell ascends to my nostrils, into my brain. I wallow backward, drifting into something warm and bright and sweetly-scented, and the fog seems to take the smell out of the car and carry it up into the hills and off into the sea.

Through the thick mesh, I see an exit sign, its number worn off, slanted at an angle on bent posts. Rust overtaking the original white paint. But I remember the arrow pointing to a road meandering off to the right. I take the exit and the fog disperses and the cold, overcast day shifts on its axis somewhere.

I pull down a back road between thickets of pine trees. The cold wind stirs everything in the back seat until I can smell the faint odor of decay emanating from the papers. The road is where I remember it, at least, materializing from the fog and the same straight row of dense pine trees The faint hum of the waves just beyond the bend. There’s still no signpost. I turn down the road and the white beach appears with little fanfare in the overcast day. Across the western horizon the clouds hold unbroken and the grey daylight only seeps along the dark blue of the ocean.

Can you still smell the whale, Horace? And, really, her package just smelled like booze. Just like all of my manuscripts she had kept God knows where. I park and get out of the car. Arthritis and age deform my tracks in the sand. I remember the two young people running out, stripping naked right there and diving into the warm waters as the sun sets, still smelling of wine and pot and then the sea and each other.

At the bottom of the package, under the letters and manuscripts, I found a single newspaper clipping. A middle-aged woman was found dead in a dorm at Cornell. Nobody knew how she got in. No ID or anything on her. They called her “Jane Doe.” Coroner said it was an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. Might be suicide, though no one cared enough to find out. Someone was quoted as saying she had a paper in her hand, full of unintelligible gibberish, that smelled faintly like the sea.

The whale is still on the beach. Its bones, at least. They stick up fanged out of the sand and the waves wash in and out around them. It must have sat here undisturbed for half a century. Bones isolated at the end of the world. Muriel said the place was only for us. The fog had let us find it, when we were young and the world was too beautiful to waste places like this on anyone else.

In truth, we might have just conjured it out of all those pages, and the haze of alcohol and pot, till we found at last a source for our own putrid smell, something we could see rotting that wasn’t us. And now here’s an old man who can only smell himself.

I step in between the skeleton and thread an uneven path through each bone, the ocean sending washes of cold seawater through my shoes as I go. The bones don’t smell like anything.