Artist's Date #7: Muir Beach
Continued from #6, Dining Alone
On Saturday morning our boiler was making strange sounds and I pushed my partner person into calling our landlord.
It’s making funny sounds, I said, and you can see at the top - well I don’t know what you can see at the top.
You mean in the closet that is piled with…
I will pull out the stuff, I said. But I think they should know.
I am trying to get out of the house. I am trying to find clean clothes. I am writing a letter to our landlord in my mind:
I think I have reached my limit with our washing machine…details about the mold and that I’ve run it with vinegar and baking soda but still things smell gross.
Parents! Olive shouts, jumping into our bed.
Olive is talking, then, about a dream where she woke up in a tent and her dad was calling to her look at a rainbow with a bright orange ray and she got up and saw an endless one, or one that touched the sky and then jumped from the ground or some version of this animated rainbow that I did not follow and found myself in fear of anyway. It’s terrifying how you have to listen to every single words your kids say. They are all so important.
To be honest, I had no plan. I missed going to the spa, but when I drove straight there and called from the street there were no appointments for the morning. I thought about my previous night, and the question about my process and how the person who sat next to me was off to Muir Beach. So I headed straight there.
Before the parking lot at the beach stood a small white house, called the Pelican Inn, which has a pub that I’ve been to once before. I was hungry and so found my way inside, first through the tiny hallways and cramped doorways that led nowhere, and then through the front door that was locked, but opened when someone came out. It was guests only for breakfast and I knew it, but still there was coffee and those delicate little mugs and I poured myself a cup. I was not supposed to be there, so I sat in the shadows. The inner room was dark, almost religiously so.
When I finished I headed out to the beach. At the entrance there was suddenly a ton of people, all with orange flags, waving them almost frantically, toward the open lot. Out on the water there was a pool of shallow water with a thin silver line that touched the end of the sand. There was a woman running half naked on the shore with bare feet. In my mind were visions of feathers, and healers and vampires too, the last of which was reintroduced to me by Olive, somewhat spontaneously. She replaced a song lyric with the word vampire and had laughed to herself with delight. I didn’t get into it.
As I left, a man walking down the path from the lot seemed to nudge me, with a nod, in the direction of the trail that continued toward the mountain. I walked down the path past the blackberry bushes, which I always fear is poison ivy, and reached a point where the path split in two. One direction continued on - and the other, up, and according to the sign, toward Pirates Cove. 1.7 miles. I stopped in my tracks.
At an industrial loft where I once lived, I recorded a song for my friend I’ll call Steve, a music lover and fellow psychedelic shaman, who sent out an invitation to people to make a collective album along with the date by which we should submit our song. I took up the invitation and recorded something so close to home that I had forgotten about it until now.
In the recording there is the first part made with a digital keyboard and a scratchy violin and it includes the crackles and pops of a very lo-fi microphone. The second part is a wash of layered vocals, recorded spontaneously, with the same technology, and made reference to a place from my childhood, which was either called or named, by me or another child: Pirates Cove. Later, my friend I’ll call Nancy, said that she, too, had a visit to a Pirates Cove on the very same weekend. Perhaps we all, at some point, must heed this call.
I could not go on! I did not have shoes and I did not have water and I had not eaten and I was already tired. I am used to pushing myself beyond the limit but also I knew that if I came back with the same mind and the same body and the same heart and the same spirit, that I would still find what I needed.
In the car, I looked on the map I searched for the word breakfast and found a few spots nearby - including one with a review that read “I would eat breakfast here everyday.” I clicked on it to see more and what came up was a picture of the perfect diner from a time I have never lived, when yellows and greens are more mustard and army then anything bright. And there’s always a red of Christmas tied around the curtains.
The photos of food were all of what everyone exactly wants from breakfast down to the small porcelain pitcher from which to spill syrup. Syrup that goes on the four slices of French toast with powdered white sugar next to a plate of two eggs, perfectly fried, their whites all cooked and their centers still runny. The bacon curved around the edge of the plate and the beans next to the huevos rancheros all yummy and soft. Also the pancake stack that looked just right, and the omelet, large and stuffed, next to triangles of potatoes and layered with thin slices of avocado. Off I went.