The Beach

This is a creative non-fiction piece I wrote in May 2012 following a visit to the place of my youth. It received some high praise, and so has been submitted to Canada Writes for consideration in the Creative Non-Fiction category.

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We spent the early afternoon there, exploring the low tide, myself being tour-master to my spouse and three children. Until a few days ago, when an illness in my family had prompted an unplanned visit to Victoria, my children had never even seen the ocean outside the context of media. My sons were born in the mountains, and my daughter in the prairies.

Now here we were, turning over rocks and catching crabs, explaining how barnacles feed and having profound conversations regarding the cycles of life as only a beach can truly illustrate.

I realize with wry sadness how much I still remember, how much I really knew and understood even at the tender age when I left this place, and how little my own children understand for lack of having the daily lessons of life’s struggles that I had witnessed on these distant shores.

The beach – this beach… the place of my youth.

Did I realize in the fleeting moments of those idyllic days of yore what the beach really represented, or would come to represent to me? To a child, the days stretch out like honey from a dipping spoon, seemingly connected yet in truth flowing, dwindling.

Perhaps I’m getting old, I tell myself as I watch my own boys’ curiosity and apprehension at the strangeness of what the tide had uncovered, their faces contorted in moues of distaste at the stench of drying seaweed and the various discarded organic matter to have washed up on the shore.

On the beach nothing stays the same. Sands and driftwood come and go, creatures are born, live and die in a flash only for their remains to be gobbled up by the next vie du jour.

Circle of life, and all that.

We walked down farther than I had ever dared as a child, my younger son scrambling up the rocks and leaping with joy to the next. They are each different aspects of my younger self. My oldest son hangs back, complaining quietly but insistently of his boredom and of his wishes to return to playing video games, while my daughter follows awkwardly in the wake of her brothers, crying “look what I found daddy!” every time she finds a broken clamshell, crab, or dead thing.

Dead things are everywhere here; it is the way of the beach. My own father was deposited here at this very beach some ten years prior.

His ashes had gotten caught in the bag as my mother and sister tried to pour them carefully over the gunwale of the boat and a sudden breeze had blown some of his remains into our mouths while the rest plopped into the dark bay waters unceremoniously.

Though the dead are plenty, it is life which abounds upon the shoreline. Everywhere you find another stinking carcass, you find another colony thriving in its abundance. There is no time to hum a dirge for the passed… the rhythm of my breath, the beating of my heart, the lapping of waves upon these changed sands. Next breath. Next beat. Next wave... new life arises.

***

There is an involuntary pause at the top of the property while I gathered my nerve. Each step down the hill towards my old home is surreal, the ancient walkway my father had treaded in his own youth, and his father before him, familiar again under my feet.

I find myself at the front door, through which I can see a stained glass window my mother had made in the door of what had been my bedroom. Memories of laying awake, staring at the strange light as it shifted and danced through shadows and across the ripples of the colored glass.

I ring the doorbell of the house where I grew up, clutching two framed pictures under my left arm. Presently a man appears across the lawn, having emerged from the door at the other end. “Hi?” he asks.

These lines I had rehearsed ceaselessly over the past few days – I had been planning on doing this for years. For the past twenty years since leaving this place I had imagined what it would be like returning here as a man, my children down the road playing in the park where I had played and me… a stranger on my own doorstep.

“Hi, sorry to disturb you… um, this is going to seem out of the blue to you but I have been planning this for years. So.. Ahem.” I clear my throat. “My name is James Bethell, I grew up here. I brought you a gift,” I motion to the pictures under my arm.

There was only a slight pause before his eyes brightened. “Oh! I have been expecting you. Just a minute!” he says and disappears back into the house.

He had been expecting me?

Dumbfounded, I stand there. I had prepared myself for “that’s nice, now get lost” but not for “I’ve been expecting you.”

The man appears at the door with his wife. They invite me in with an unexpected warmth.

I had imagined it like this, but never expected it.

They regard the paintings, watercolors some ancestor had contracted when this house had been a beachside cottage and the neighborhood property values hadn’t amounted to the millions they do today.

Doug, his name is, explains that he had been waiting for this day for twenty years. He beams, “I knew you’d come!” I wonder if that’s why I was compelled.

They convince me to remove my shoes and have a tour. I look at what had been the kitchen – it is now a hallway room – and see where my grandfather died, but I don’t tell them.

His ghost is only visible through my eyes.

Doug tells me of some dark secrets he’d uncovered - empty liquor bottles hidden in the walls discovered during renovation. “Your father had a drinking problem, didn’t he?” he asks. I nod. “Ron Bacardi white rum.” I whisper, and he nods too.

Everything has changed. As the tour continues I come to realize that this is not my home anymore. His teenage daughter appears, and we are introduced.

“This is the only home she has ever known,” he tells me.

I smile, fighting back emotion. “It’s a great place to grow up, isn’t it?”

The teenager disappears back downstairs, grimacing at the stranger in her midst, and I am led in her wake.

What had been a dark and terrifying place as a child has been finished. My grandfather had been a butcher and there had been power saws and meat hooks hanging from the ceiling. The menacing glint of bare incandescent bulbs off rusting saw blades sent a child’s imagination asunder.

The door to the basement was still sliding and weighted to close unless hooked. Standing in this spot I am eight years old again, grabbing a box of macaroni off the shelf of the pantry with a forced calm, timing my steps to catch the door before it slams shut behind me.

By the third step back up to the kitchen I am flailing as if all the demons in hell are grasping at my ankles. Today it is a nice place, drywall and tiles conceal the holy terror which had gripped this child’s mind.

Doug shows me a life-sized cardboard cutout of the tin man, a relic of my youth still pinned to pantry door. “I’ve been saving it for you,” he tells me. It is like the face of a distant relative in a photograph, smiling as the last day I saw him, frozen in time.

My gut says to leave him, so I decline. He isn’t mine anymore. The little girl in the next room has as much claim to him as I do.

I am the ghost here.

As we stand at the top of the driveway, I shake Doug’s hand. “Thank you for this,” I say, and I feel like he understands.

We share a moment, the kind that linger forever in memory and are backlit by sunsets over the waves on the beach.

The beach is a place of life and death, and of life’s new arisings. We share a branch on our genealogical tree now, this home is interwoven into our families and in some small way it makes us family too. But it is their branch now, not mine – mine waits for me down the road, oblivious to what has just happened to my psyche, and their inherited family tree.

As I gather my family and climb into the minivan I can’t help but reflect on their daughter, perturbed at her parents openness with what amounts to a complete stranger.

I smile as I wonder if she will raise her children here, as my father had, or if she too will one day find herself on the step at that house on Cordova Bay Road, a stranger at her own front door.

Everyone is aboard now, and we cast off – chattering children, ghosts and all. 

^ The house I grew up in