 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
It was good to have the hard damp sand underfoot, good to be stepping out with an even
rhythm, giving an order to my body and my thoughts, even though I was hardly conscious
of what that order was, had no idea if order was taking my thoughts and feelings to a
place where they could be organized enough to articulate. I let my mind run on autopilot,
at the same time letting memory in and out of spaces there.
The last time I walked a beach was along the Sea of Cortez, just a year before. With a
good old friend I walked. We spent hours watching pelicans fly just above the smooth
warm water, their flapping wings not quite hitting the surface. We searched the sea-weedy
tidemarks for anything interesting: a shark egg case, a crab claw, a cuttlefish. We tried
not to see the human trash, focusing instead on the rounded bay, a wide river opening
where thousands of birds filled their days among changing sand bars and wild rocky
headlands.
***
My soul mate, Reg, claimed to hate the water, so beaches were not holiday places for us,
but we did once walk on a beach when we lived in England. There were crowds on a warm
summer day, bodies exposed to unaccustomed sun, children running up and down to the
water, a couple embracing on a big towel, elderly men and women up to their waists in the
bobbing sea, laughing, all manner of bathing costumes and hats and rolled up trousers
and tucked up skirts and lifted blouses.
A man with an icebox on wheels sold ice cream, a stand at the top of the beach offered
pink fairy floss and hats. There was a pier busy with entertainments – jukeboxes, penny
poker, throw the hoop, dodgem cars, and stalls selling fish and chips, and ice-lollies,
lemonade. A short walk along the foreshore there was a Punch and Judy puppet show in
progress:
“Oh no you won’t.”
“Oh yes I will.”
“Oh no you won’t.”
“Oh yes I will.”
And Punch picks up an old broomstick in the British folk art parody of a tedious marriage
and beats up Judy to the laughter and clapping of the crowd. And they copy the old clown’
s words, “That’s the way to do it!”
Reg and I walked silently away from the densest crowds to a rocky area. It seemed so
curious to me, an Australian used to the seriousness of wild places, of entertainment
provided by the world of plain water and sand, of people interacting with waves rather
than each other, to see that the seaside here was a place of man-made pleasures.
“This is more of an entertainment place than a real beach.”
“Yes,” he said, “An English seaside.”
I looked around at the homely crowd, from babies to pensioners, and thought that in spite
of everything, there was something nice about the family feel of it, the spending of wages,
the busy holidaying of English people and Punch’s little knockabout drama that has made
them laugh for centuries.
The walk along Limantour Beach in California was more of a rhythm. I was alone and
uninterrupted for the most part, and I kept a steady pace. There was a brief encounter
with an excited German couple; they wanted me to take pictures of them on the sand with
the cliffs of Drake’s Beach in the background. With their little throwaway camera I shot
them holding hands and smiling, and again as they looked at one another with their
bleached hair and sun burnt skin, and laughed. They were both about forty, and seemed
much like young people in love.
I was happy for them to have their pictures that they would look at later and say, “Look at
us on that quiet beach at Pt Reyes, where we got that woman with the big hat to take our
photos.” In love, I thought. But I had been lucky too. Reg and I had been in love for years,
more than most couples, and it came back to me with intensity – a past that ended two
years previously with Reg’s death at home in the rich Sonoran desert where we had lived
for thirteen amazing years. After a while I turned to watch the happy couple walk away,
getting smaller and smaller against the long sandy vista and the distant cliffs.
***
Here at Limantour there were few distractions, the beach so bare, and with few birds. I
frightened a couple of curlews and an American oystercatcher that were working for food
where the waves washed the sand and retreated. When I reached the place, I saw there
were hundreds of little sand crabs that popped appendages out as the waves came in,
and pulled them back into the sand as the water slid away.
I returned to my paced walking on the damp sand. What is it about the rhythm of one foot
in front of the other, over and over for hours? And why does it give a feeling of peace? Is
it related to our feeling for other rhythms, of music and drums, of horses’ hooves, of
waves on the shore? Every culture has its dances, beats, rhythms. Or is it an extension of
our other body rhythms, heartbeats extending down our every artery and the pulse of
them in wrist and neck, or the actions of our lungs, the breathings in and out. Or the less
known rhythms of our brain waves, waves we can’t detect. No other activity resembles
walking, which seems to have the natural ease, the enjoyment of rhythm, the stimulation
of something different in one’s head, the sense of being able to look about and at the
same time to think while left right left right movement goes on and on.
In 1788, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote:
Never did I think so much, exist so vividly, experience so much, never have I been so
much myself as in the journeys I have taken alone and on foot. There is something about
walking that stimulates and enlivens my thoughts. The sight of the countryside, the
pleasant succession of views, the open air…..all serve to free my spirit, to lend a greater
boldness to my thinking, so that I can combine them, select them and make them mine as
I will, without fear or restraint.
He was among the first of the nature walkers, the start of the passion for walking in the
open simply for the pleasure of it, though others before him had written of walking in
gardens and parks, along city streets and of course of walking for lack of other transport.
He particularly enjoyed the varied scene and the refreshing experience of new sights and
sounds. Most famous walker of all, Henry David Thoreau, also found walking an
inspiration for the wildness of nature, the glory of all that is not man-made. I wonder what
these writers would have felt on a long beach with so little change of scene and whether
they would have discovered something more about walking.
***
On Limantour Beach I discovered that walking in an unchanging environment has its own
enjoyment. It concentrates one on rhythm, that movement of legs and feet, swaying body,
swinging arms. As the baby is rocked in its cradle for comfort, so the regular and
unhurried swinging of our limbs gives harmony for our consciousness. Here is not the
changing scene, the varied prospects, corners turned and hills conquered, surprising
valleys and glistening streams, diverse plants with unknown flowers, insects flying, and
people calling, “Hi.” No, here one becomes aware of an eternal facet of the world, an
almost monotony that, like deserts, gives some feeling of constancy.
***
The seawater here is an upwelling of deep cold ocean currents, and the wind blows cold
even in June. The only other people to be seen on the beach were four that I took to be a
family. A man and a boy of about six were building a sandcastle, occasional waves coming
over and smoothing the top of it. Fifty yards on a woman and a small girl were doing the
same. The boy wore bathing trunks and short-sleeved cotton shirt seemingly impervious
to the cold, but the others wore windcheaters. All of them were barefoot though, in the
cold wet sand. They didn’t seem to be talking and they didn’t look up when I passed. I didn’
t mind because my pace could remain unchanged, though it seemed unusual not to
acknowledge others in so lonely a place. Perhaps, I reasoned, they were in the midst of a
family argument, a dispute between the man and woman that silenced the children. I knew
about those kinds of disputes and in my childhood I would go for walks in the bush that
surrounded our house, walks that comforted and calmed. That was where my walking
really began.
And I have walked. I walked in the Australian bush, walking off that youthful misery,
walking in my imagination along a landscape of excited growth. Later, I walked in the
English countryside, thrilled with the paths of poets and the harmony of mixing thoughts
and arrivals, absorbing the history of an ancient land. In the Swiss Alps I shared the glory
of white peaks and alpine flowers with someone loved, and felt the hum of the natural
world, and the rhythm of my life. In California and Arizona, walking to work things out, to
think of learning a new country, to become part of a place.
Rebecca Solnit, in Wanderlust, writes:
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as
though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly
making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being
made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.
***
Alone now in my Tucson home, I wake often in the night. If it is two or three in the morning,
I close my eyes. If it is after five, I get up. That is the rule. I need rules to get through each
day and night. I walk through the living room and dining room to the kitchen, where I fill the
old red kettle and turn on the stove. I warm the teapot and put in the leaves of tea. I need
liquid, caffeine, flavonoids, or whatever, and I sip the hot stuff in darkness in the Arizona
room, while peering out through big glass sliding doors. Maybe a bobcat or a javelina –
something in the starlight.
With the first eastern awakening I dress quickly. I hurry so that I don’t even think about
crawling back into bed, shuttering my mind. The rule is not to hesitate for fear of giving
up. Shoes last. No one to say goodbye to, I pick up my key and start on my three-mile
walk. It is automatic. I must have this ritual in case I do nothing.
And the walk I know I must do. That the dawn may open something in me, that the rabbit
running away from me will tell me something, that the hawk on the power pole will tell of
vigilance, that the early cactus wren arguing on a cholla branch will engage me, that Al
with his husky or Nancy with her corgi will show me some new way to talk, that the rising
sun will promise brilliance, that the rhythm of my legs will swing me into safe havens.
My walk on Limantour Beach brought respite from grief as the incessant waves swished.
Without Reg now, the mourning relieved by the regular stepping of my feet, the swinging
of my arms, onward and onward on the long lonely beach in the cold sea wind, as I
realized that for me there are no answers to the big questions, but there is poetry, and
there is walking.
rhythm, giving an order to my body and my thoughts, even though I was hardly conscious
of what that order was, had no idea if order was taking my thoughts and feelings to a
place where they could be organized enough to articulate. I let my mind run on autopilot,
at the same time letting memory in and out of spaces there.
The last time I walked a beach was along the Sea of Cortez, just a year before. With a
good old friend I walked. We spent hours watching pelicans fly just above the smooth
warm water, their flapping wings not quite hitting the surface. We searched the sea-weedy
tidemarks for anything interesting: a shark egg case, a crab claw, a cuttlefish. We tried
not to see the human trash, focusing instead on the rounded bay, a wide river opening
where thousands of birds filled their days among changing sand bars and wild rocky
headlands.
***
My soul mate, Reg, claimed to hate the water, so beaches were not holiday places for us,
but we did once walk on a beach when we lived in England. There were crowds on a warm
summer day, bodies exposed to unaccustomed sun, children running up and down to the
water, a couple embracing on a big towel, elderly men and women up to their waists in the
bobbing sea, laughing, all manner of bathing costumes and hats and rolled up trousers
and tucked up skirts and lifted blouses.
A man with an icebox on wheels sold ice cream, a stand at the top of the beach offered
pink fairy floss and hats. There was a pier busy with entertainments – jukeboxes, penny
poker, throw the hoop, dodgem cars, and stalls selling fish and chips, and ice-lollies,
lemonade. A short walk along the foreshore there was a Punch and Judy puppet show in
progress:
“Oh no you won’t.”
“Oh yes I will.”
“Oh no you won’t.”
“Oh yes I will.”
And Punch picks up an old broomstick in the British folk art parody of a tedious marriage
and beats up Judy to the laughter and clapping of the crowd. And they copy the old clown’
s words, “That’s the way to do it!”
Reg and I walked silently away from the densest crowds to a rocky area. It seemed so
curious to me, an Australian used to the seriousness of wild places, of entertainment
provided by the world of plain water and sand, of people interacting with waves rather
than each other, to see that the seaside here was a place of man-made pleasures.
“This is more of an entertainment place than a real beach.”
“Yes,” he said, “An English seaside.”
I looked around at the homely crowd, from babies to pensioners, and thought that in spite
of everything, there was something nice about the family feel of it, the spending of wages,
the busy holidaying of English people and Punch’s little knockabout drama that has made
them laugh for centuries.
The walk along Limantour Beach in California was more of a rhythm. I was alone and
uninterrupted for the most part, and I kept a steady pace. There was a brief encounter
with an excited German couple; they wanted me to take pictures of them on the sand with
the cliffs of Drake’s Beach in the background. With their little throwaway camera I shot
them holding hands and smiling, and again as they looked at one another with their
bleached hair and sun burnt skin, and laughed. They were both about forty, and seemed
much like young people in love.
I was happy for them to have their pictures that they would look at later and say, “Look at
us on that quiet beach at Pt Reyes, where we got that woman with the big hat to take our
photos.” In love, I thought. But I had been lucky too. Reg and I had been in love for years,
more than most couples, and it came back to me with intensity – a past that ended two
years previously with Reg’s death at home in the rich Sonoran desert where we had lived
for thirteen amazing years. After a while I turned to watch the happy couple walk away,
getting smaller and smaller against the long sandy vista and the distant cliffs.
***
Here at Limantour there were few distractions, the beach so bare, and with few birds. I
frightened a couple of curlews and an American oystercatcher that were working for food
where the waves washed the sand and retreated. When I reached the place, I saw there
were hundreds of little sand crabs that popped appendages out as the waves came in,
and pulled them back into the sand as the water slid away.
I returned to my paced walking on the damp sand. What is it about the rhythm of one foot
in front of the other, over and over for hours? And why does it give a feeling of peace? Is
it related to our feeling for other rhythms, of music and drums, of horses’ hooves, of
waves on the shore? Every culture has its dances, beats, rhythms. Or is it an extension of
our other body rhythms, heartbeats extending down our every artery and the pulse of
them in wrist and neck, or the actions of our lungs, the breathings in and out. Or the less
known rhythms of our brain waves, waves we can’t detect. No other activity resembles
walking, which seems to have the natural ease, the enjoyment of rhythm, the stimulation
of something different in one’s head, the sense of being able to look about and at the
same time to think while left right left right movement goes on and on.
In 1788, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote:
Never did I think so much, exist so vividly, experience so much, never have I been so
much myself as in the journeys I have taken alone and on foot. There is something about
walking that stimulates and enlivens my thoughts. The sight of the countryside, the
pleasant succession of views, the open air…..all serve to free my spirit, to lend a greater
boldness to my thinking, so that I can combine them, select them and make them mine as
I will, without fear or restraint.
He was among the first of the nature walkers, the start of the passion for walking in the
open simply for the pleasure of it, though others before him had written of walking in
gardens and parks, along city streets and of course of walking for lack of other transport.
He particularly enjoyed the varied scene and the refreshing experience of new sights and
sounds. Most famous walker of all, Henry David Thoreau, also found walking an
inspiration for the wildness of nature, the glory of all that is not man-made. I wonder what
these writers would have felt on a long beach with so little change of scene and whether
they would have discovered something more about walking.
***
On Limantour Beach I discovered that walking in an unchanging environment has its own
enjoyment. It concentrates one on rhythm, that movement of legs and feet, swaying body,
swinging arms. As the baby is rocked in its cradle for comfort, so the regular and
unhurried swinging of our limbs gives harmony for our consciousness. Here is not the
changing scene, the varied prospects, corners turned and hills conquered, surprising
valleys and glistening streams, diverse plants with unknown flowers, insects flying, and
people calling, “Hi.” No, here one becomes aware of an eternal facet of the world, an
almost monotony that, like deserts, gives some feeling of constancy.
***
The seawater here is an upwelling of deep cold ocean currents, and the wind blows cold
even in June. The only other people to be seen on the beach were four that I took to be a
family. A man and a boy of about six were building a sandcastle, occasional waves coming
over and smoothing the top of it. Fifty yards on a woman and a small girl were doing the
same. The boy wore bathing trunks and short-sleeved cotton shirt seemingly impervious
to the cold, but the others wore windcheaters. All of them were barefoot though, in the
cold wet sand. They didn’t seem to be talking and they didn’t look up when I passed. I didn’
t mind because my pace could remain unchanged, though it seemed unusual not to
acknowledge others in so lonely a place. Perhaps, I reasoned, they were in the midst of a
family argument, a dispute between the man and woman that silenced the children. I knew
about those kinds of disputes and in my childhood I would go for walks in the bush that
surrounded our house, walks that comforted and calmed. That was where my walking
really began.
And I have walked. I walked in the Australian bush, walking off that youthful misery,
walking in my imagination along a landscape of excited growth. Later, I walked in the
English countryside, thrilled with the paths of poets and the harmony of mixing thoughts
and arrivals, absorbing the history of an ancient land. In the Swiss Alps I shared the glory
of white peaks and alpine flowers with someone loved, and felt the hum of the natural
world, and the rhythm of my life. In California and Arizona, walking to work things out, to
think of learning a new country, to become part of a place.
Rebecca Solnit, in Wanderlust, writes:
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as
though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly
making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being
made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.
***
Alone now in my Tucson home, I wake often in the night. If it is two or three in the morning,
I close my eyes. If it is after five, I get up. That is the rule. I need rules to get through each
day and night. I walk through the living room and dining room to the kitchen, where I fill the
old red kettle and turn on the stove. I warm the teapot and put in the leaves of tea. I need
liquid, caffeine, flavonoids, or whatever, and I sip the hot stuff in darkness in the Arizona
room, while peering out through big glass sliding doors. Maybe a bobcat or a javelina –
something in the starlight.
With the first eastern awakening I dress quickly. I hurry so that I don’t even think about
crawling back into bed, shuttering my mind. The rule is not to hesitate for fear of giving
up. Shoes last. No one to say goodbye to, I pick up my key and start on my three-mile
walk. It is automatic. I must have this ritual in case I do nothing.
And the walk I know I must do. That the dawn may open something in me, that the rabbit
running away from me will tell me something, that the hawk on the power pole will tell of
vigilance, that the early cactus wren arguing on a cholla branch will engage me, that Al
with his husky or Nancy with her corgi will show me some new way to talk, that the rising
sun will promise brilliance, that the rhythm of my legs will swing me into safe havens.
My walk on Limantour Beach brought respite from grief as the incessant waves swished.
Without Reg now, the mourning relieved by the regular stepping of my feet, the swinging
of my arms, onward and onward on the long lonely beach in the cold sea wind, as I
realized that for me there are no answers to the big questions, but there is poetry, and
there is walking.
| A Walk at Limantour Beach By Elizabeth Bernays |
All files © Copyright 2008 The Sylvan Echo