The man I turned to was a doctor. Not a psychiatrist, just a doctor. He was older than I, and under his surface gruffness lay great wisdom and experience. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” I told him miserably, “but I just seem to have come to a dead end. Can you help me?”
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. He made a tent of his fingers and gazed at me thoughtfully for a long while. Then, abruptly, he asked, “Where were you happiest as a child?”
“As a child?” I echoed. “At the beach, I suppose. We had a summer cottage there. We all loved it.”
He looked out the window and watched the October leaves sifting down. “Are you capable of following instructions for a single day?”
“I think so,” I said, ready to try anything.
“All right. Here’s what I want you to do.”
He told me to drive to the beach alone the following morning, arriving not later than nine o’clock. I could take some lunch, but I was not to read, write, listen to the radio or talk to anyone. “In addition,” he said, “I’ll give you a prescription to be taken every three hours.”
He tore off four prescription blanks, wrote a few words on each, folded them, numbered them and handed them to me. “Take these at nine, twelve, three and six.”
“Are you serious?” I asked.
He gave me a short honk of laughter. “You won’t think I’m joking when you get my bill!”
The next morning, with little faith, I drove to the beach. It was lonely, all right. A northeaster was blowing; the sea looked gray and angry. I sat in the car, the whole day stretching emptily before me. Then I took out the first of the folded slips of paper. On it was written: Listen carefully.
I stared at the two words. I thought, The man must be crazy. He had ruled out music and newscasts and human conversation. What else was there?
I raised my head and listened. There were no sounds but the steady roar of the sea, the croaking cry of a gull, the drone of some aircraft overhead. All these sounds were familiar.
I got out of the car. A gust of wind slammed the door with a sudden clap of sound. Am I supposed to listen carefully to things like that? I asked myself.
I climbed a dune and looked out over the deserted beach. Here the sea bellowed so loudly that all other sounds were lost. And yet, I thought suddenly, there must be sounds beneath sounds—the soft rasp of drifting sand, the tiny wind-whisperings in the dune grasses—if the listener gets close enough to hear them.
Impulsively, I ducked down and, feeling fairly ridiculous, thrust my head into a clump of seaweed. Here I made a discovery: If you listen intently, there is a fractional moment in which everything pauses, waiting. In that instant of stillness, the racing thoughts halt. The mind rests.
I went back to the car and slid behind the wheel. Listen carefully. As I listened again to the deep growl of the sea, I found myself thinking about the white-fanged fury of its storms. Then I realized I was thinking of things bigger than myself—and there was relief in that.
Even so, the morning passed slowly. The habit of hurling myself at a problem was so strong that I felt lost without it.
By noon the wind had swept the clouds out of the sky, and the sea had a hard, polished and merry sparkle. I unfolded the second “prescription.” And again I sat there, half-amused and half-exasperated. Three words this time: Try reaching back.
Back to what? To the past, obviously. But why, when all my worries concerned the present or the future?
I left the car and started tramping reflectively along the dunes. The doctor had sent me to the beach because it was a place of happy memories. Maybe that was what I was supposed to reach for—the wealth of happiness that lay half-forgotten behind me.
I decided to work on these vague impressions as a painter would, retouching the colors, strengthening the outlines. I would choose specific incidents and recapture as many details as possible. I would visualize people complete with dress and gestures. I would listen (carefully) for the exact sound of their voices, the echo of their laughter.
The tide was going out now, but there was still thunder in the surf. So I chose to go back twenty years to the last fishing trip I made with my younger brother. He had died during World War II, but I found that if I closed my eyes and really tried, I could see him with amazing vividness, even the humor and eagerness in his eyes.
In fact, I saw it all: the ivory scimitar of beach where we fished, the eastern sky smeared with sunrise, the great rollers creaming in, stately and slow. I felt the backwash swirl warm around my knees, saw the sudden arc of my brother’s rod as he struck a fish, heard his exultant yell. Piece by piece I rebuilt it, clear and unchanged under the transparent varnish of time. Then it was gone.
I sat up slowly. Try reaching back. Happy people are usually assured, confident people. If, then, you deliberately reached back and touched happiness, might there not be released little flashes of power, tiny sources of strength?
This second period of the day went more quickly. As the sun began its long slant down the sky, my mind ranged eagerly through the past, reliving some episodes, uncovering others that had been completely forgotten. Across all the years, I remembered events and knew from the sudden glow of warmth that no kindness is ever wasted or completely lost.
By three o’clock the tide was out, and the sound of the waves was only a rhythmic whisper, like a giant breathing. I stayed in my sandy nest, feeling relaxed and content— and a little complacent. The doctor’s prescriptions, I thought, were easy to take.
But I was not prepared for the next one. This time the three words were not a gentle suggestion. They sounded more like a command. Reexamine your motives.
My first reaction was purely defensive. There’s nothing wrong with my motives, I said to myself. I want to be successful— who doesn’t? I want to have a certain amount of recognition, but so does everybody. I want more security than I’ve got—and why not?
Maybe, said a small voice somewhere inside my head, those motives aren’t good enough. Maybe that’s the reason the wheels have stopped going around.
I picked up a handful of sand and let it stream between my fingers. In the past, whenever my work went well, there had always been something spontaneous about it, something uncontrived, something free. Lately, it had been calculated, competent—and dead. Why? Because I had been looking past the job itself to the rewards I hoped it would bring. The work had ceased to be an end in itself; it had become a means to make money and pay bills. The sense of giving something, of helping people, of making a contribution, had been lost in a frantic clutch of security.
In a flash of certainty, I saw that if one’s motives are wrong, nothing can be right. It makes no difference whether you are a mailman, a hairdresser, an insurance salesman, a stay-at-home mom or dad—whatever. As long as you feel you are serving others, you do the job well. When you are concerned only with helping yourself, you do it less well. This is a law as inexorable as gravity.
For a long time, I sat there. Far out on the sandbar I heard the murmur of the surf change to a hollow roar as the tide turned. Behind me the spears of light were almost horizontal. My time at the beach had almost run out, and I felt a grudging admiration for the doctor and the “prescriptions” he had so casually and cunningly devised. I saw, now, that in them was a therapeutic progression that might be valuable to anyone facing any difficulty.
Listen carefully: To calm a frantic mind, slow it down, shift the focus from inner problems to outer things.
Try reaching back: Since the human mind can hold but one idea at a time, you blot out present worry when you touch the happiness of the past.
Reexamine your motives: This was the core of the “treatment.” This challenge was to reappraise, to bring one’s motives into alignment with one’s capabilities and conscience. But the mind must be clear and receptive to do this—hence the six hours of quiet that went before.
The western sky was a blaze of crimson as I took out the last slip of paper. Six words this time. I walke
d slowly out on the beach. A few yards below the high-water mark, I stopped and read the words again: Write your troubles on the sand.
I reached down and picked up a fragment of shell. Kneeling there under the vault of the sky, I wrote several words on the sand, one above the other. Then I walked away, and I did not look back. I had written my troubles on the sand. And the tide was coming in.
Arthur Gordon
Submitted by Wayne W. Hinckley
© The New Yorker Collection 1989 Warren Miller from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
Octopus Odyssey
The inhabitants of the sea have much to teach us.
Wyland
I had a lung removed nine years ago. The doctors told me that the survival rate for the first year for my type of carcinoma was about five percent. After the initial shock subsided, I realized that I could not just sit around and wait. I had to do something. I had been a scuba diver for many years—and I wondered if that remained a possibility. Medically, I was told, there were no restrictions. Still, I was hesitant when I submerged that first time at a reef on a remote Bahamian cay. One lung, sixty years old, I kept thinking. Following the bubbles, I touched bottom and took short breaths. The good lung was working overtime, but it worked.
At the end of the dive, I surfaced in shallow water and switched over to snorkel. I caught an incoming current and was skimming over the sandy bottom when something in the water caught my eye. I switched direction and, to my surprise, spied a small octopus. The little creature, so far from the safety of the reef, appeared vulnerable to any predator that happened along. Intrigued, I dropped down to investigate. His large eyes immediately registered me as a threat. The small cephalopod brain seemed to be computing the danger in a series of signals. His soft, streamlined body convulsed in flushes of color that mutated rapidly from red to pink to green and then blue. Now he was a mottled brown that blended perfectly with the surrounding sand.
If protective camouflage wouldn’t lose me, he apparently figured speed might work. He flew away from me in a jetlike motion, pumping water from front to back. I continued to follow, hovering above him. Again he tried hiding, burrowing into a small clump of sea grass. Now he was virtually invisible. So far he had tried camouflage, speed and his own sort of guile, and I wondered whether he had played out his entire repertoire of evasive tactics.
Minutes later his body shuddered with color shifts. Only this time I wasn’t the object of his terror. Streaking by was a school of young barracuda on the prowl for a tasty morsel like him. He quickly turned a mossy green, and the fish passed him by.
Ever so cautiously he moved off the grass and onto the sand. He was on very dangerous ground. The first to come and investigate were purple and green triggerfish. Then came a group of iridescent angelfish a foot in diameter, and finally a school of striped clownfish. They seemed to sniff and stare, but drifted away once their curiosity was satisfied. My new friend was safe once again. His color cycle was again in motion and, in a triumphant burst of scarlet that could be seen by any creature nearby, he trumpeted his return to the reef. In the blink of an eye, he dissolved into a safe network of protective corals. The drama was over. The episode took only a few minutes, but I had seen a wonderful display of fireworks and an innate desire for life.
Later on the beach, as I stripped the tank off my back and sat down, I couldn’t stop thinking of that wonderful little fellow. I could see his narrow escapes, his confusion at being off the reef with barracudas searching for his flesh. His odds for survival were probably worse than mine, but he had prevailed. In a way, the encounter had brought me back to life. It’s been years since my surgery, and I still go back for checkups. The doctors marvel, and I smile. How could they know about the strange and wonderful therapy that I had received on a reef on a small Bahama island?
Mike Lipstock
The Sea and the Wind That Blows
I liked to sail alone. The sea was the same as a girl to me—I did not want anyone else along. Lacking instruction, I invented ways of getting things done, and I usually ended by doing them in a rather queer fashion, and so did not learn to sail properly, and still I cannot sail well, although I have been at it all my life. I was twenty before I discovered that charts existed; all my navigating up to that time was done with the wariness and the ignorance of the early explorers. I was thirty before I learned to hang a coiled halyard on its cleat as it should be done. Until then I simply coiled it down on deck and dumped the coil. I was always in trouble and always returned, seeking more trouble. Sailing became a compulsion: There lay the boat, swinging to her mooring, there blew the wind; I had no choice but to go. My earliest boats were so small that when the wind failed, or when I failed, I could switch to manual control—I could paddle or row home. But then I graduated to boats that only the wind was strong enough to move. When I first dropped off my mooring in such a boat, I was an hour getting up the nerve to cast off the pennant. Even now, with a thousand little voyages notched in my belt, I still feel a memorial chill on casting off, as the gulls jeer and the empty mainsail claps.
Of late years, I have noticed that my sailing has increasingly become a compulsive activity rather than a simple source of pleasure. There lies the boat, there blows the morning breeze—it is a point of honor, now, to go. I am like an alcoholic who cannot put his bottle out of his life. With me, I cannot not sail. Yet I know well enough that I have lost touch with the wind and, in fact, do not like the wind anymore. It jiggles me up, the wind does, and what I really love are windless days, when all is peace. There is a great question in my mind whether a man who is against wind should longer try to sail a boat. But this is an intellectual response—the old yearning is still in me, belonging to the past, to youth, and so I am torn between past and present, a common disease of later life.
When does a man quit the sea? How dizzy, how bumbling must he be? Does he quit while he’s ahead, or wait till he makes some major mistake, like falling overboard or being flattened by an accidental jibe? This past winter I spent hours arguing the question with myself. Finally, deciding that I had come to the end of the road, I wrote a note to the boatyard, putting my boat up for sale. I said I was “coming off the water.” But as I typed that sentence, I doubted that I meant a word of it.
If no buyer turns up, I know what will happen: I will instruct the yard to put her in again—“just till somebody comes along.” And then there will be the old uneasiness, the old uncertainty, as the mild southeast breeze ruffles the cove, a gentle, steady, morning breeze bringing the taint of the distant wet world, the smell that takes a man back to the very beginning of time, linking him to all that has gone before. There will lie the sloop, there will blow the wind, once more I will get under way. And as I reach across to the red nun off the Torry Islands, dodging the trap buoys and toggles, the shags gathered on the ledge will note my passage. “There goes the old boy again,” they will say. “One more rounding of his little Horn, one more conquest of his Roaring Forties.” And with the tiller in my hand, I’ll feel again the wind imparting life to a boat, will smell again the old menace, the one that imparts life to me: the cruel beauty of the salt world, the barnacle’s tiny knives, the sharp spine of the urchin, the stinger of the sun jelly, the claw of the crab.
E. B. White
The Sea and the Wind That Blows, 1977
The Driftwood Queen
My life is like a stroll upon the beach, As near the ocean’s edge as I can go.
The Fisher’s Boy
The ocean is, was and always will be a big part of my life. My parents were ocean aficionados, and I was introduced to its beauty and serenity at an early age. I learned to swim before I walked, had a fishing pole placed in my hands at age two and was taught how to pilot a small craft by age five—thanks to my father, who allowed me to “assist” in rowing home.
My fascination with the ocean escalated as the family spent the summer on the eastern end of Long Island on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. I was an early riser, and by a
ge ten I was permitted to go down to the beach in the morning to collect shells on my own. Every day I would dress quickly, grab my bucket and head for the beach. I would climb the sand dunes that hid the ocean from view and sit quietly at the top and watch the waves tumble onto the shore as I ate my breakfast roll.
One morning I noticed an older, shabbily dressed woman walking along the beach pulling, of all things, a sled. Now and then, she would stop, pick up a piece of driftwood, examine it carefully and either discard it or place it on the sled.
I called out to her.
“Hello,” I said.
She didn’t acknowledge me. As only a child can, I took this as an open invitation to join the search. I looked for any driftwood that she had missed and retrieved it for her inspection. She said nothing, but seemed pleased with my company.
After a half-hour, I tapped her on the shoulder, said good-bye and started for home.
After telling my parents about my new acquaintance, my mother explained that I had met, as the town folk called her, The Driftwood Queen, or “Queenie” for short. Dad said she was a poor soul who lived in a rundown cottage near the bay. The community left food packages on her doorstep once a week, and the church collected clothing on her behalf. No one knew her real name, and many stories had circulated about where she had come from and why she collected the driftwood. Everyone had a different slant on the story, but the exact truth had never surfaced. She had become the town enigma, known only by her nickname.
My parents were kind and loving people and saw no problem with my association with Queenie. So each morning I would wait for her to appear and was always delighted at the smile on her face when she spotted me. I now carried an extra breakfast roll with me, and Queenie devoured it with gusto.
We scoured the beach, enjoying the cool ocean breeze and the feel of the ocean mist on our bodies. Although we still exchanged no words, we became friends through our daily enterprise.