Artist's Date #8 - Pirate's Cove
Continued from Artist's Date #7: Muir Beach
Last week’s installment of The Artist’s Date ended with me ready to eat. Instead of the diner on the map, the one with the vintage colors, which, I felt, had stepped right out of novel I’m always writing, not writing, I ended up at another diner, same stools, much brighter, families galore.
I looked up at my server and admired, for a moment, his brown skin, his dark hair, his wide eyes, and kind face.
Nance, I thought, to my friend who I do not have to call because she receives messages in the fifth dimensional space: A spirit is telling me get a tattoo of a feather on my forearm on the inside of my right side. I thought about the way it would be my writing hand and be like a quill, and then I remembered the image I had pinned for myself at a time when I never made a pin board of any kind. I looked up the word forearm, just to see whether I was thinking of the right word and part of the body. Forearm - does it refer to the inside the outside or both? Is it definitely the lower half of the arm. Then I read the definition: fore - arm, which also means to protect or warm against future harm.
In the bedroom of my parent’s house an eagle feather hung from the lamp in their bedroom, tied with some rawhide or thin leather suede. It’s all already there, I think, and also that bedroom — how my father slept in it late and how I would try to wake him up for the bus and how now I wake up with my daughter every morning for school because I want more for her.
I look up the old tattoo that I pinned and I thought, ok, this is the feather from my parent’s bedroom. It even has the wrap, the leather tie, where it hung from the gold post of the lamp in the corned. Does the devil warm you about himself before his arrival? This just came through.
A whole week passes.
I’m driving back, on a Saturday, and it’s a little wet, and I left my coat in the other car, which I had driven, earlier, to fix up the tire. I find a small running shop that’s open and there are so many half naked men on the outside of the store that I know I’m in the right place.
Take your time, says the woman behind the counter and I say this is something I don’t have in my world, time and the notion of taking it. I bought a thing that I couldn’t afford and wore it, back to the lot with the orange flags waving and back to the sign that read: Pirate’s Cove in just a few miles.
The wild flowers grew in the crevice on the trail made by a stream of water that flowed downward and it misted tiny particles of rain on the tip of my nose. Little birds chirped and an actual rooster crowed in the distance. It was not even that early in the day.
The wide trail became a skinny one that’s winding down on the side of hill, against the waves VERY FAR below. The jagged edge of a rock stood with millennial strength agains the fog and the constant rush of the ocean. In the bushes, a little canopy of a spiders web caught and retained these big droplets or water, like round shards of glass that can never be stored. Or mesh made of flexible silver.
The trail in front of me seems to wind on endlessly and I feel confused about where I’m going. And where I have been. And feel embarrassed that I am again here alone.
I look at the map and it’s only a half a mile to the cove which seems more doable than my wobbly legs would let on.
10 minutes? 10 minutes seems short but we are still very high up and there are a zillion stairs on the other side over canyon
This used to be cake for me, I think, I used to do twice this before breakfast, thinking now of Noah and the sweaty room and the quiet and the breath that was there.
This is boring. I think and I think about Cheryl Strayed and how she wrote a whole best selling Oprah sealed book where nothing happens at all on the outside. I think about Oprah and whether I would say yes or no to an interview about my incredible book that is not yet written. I think no. No not me. I’m a very private person and I wish it to stay that way.
As the path curves down, it becomes quiet and the rushing of the wave sound recedes into the mountains.
I’m there, where there is no there.
The last 100 feet are terrifying and I’m crab crawling my way down. To get to the bottom I have to shut my whole brain totally off. Do not think of things that could happen, I say, even though I do anyway.
The cove is unremarkable and then turning around I see a fucking shelter made of driftwood that is otherwise not to be seen along the rest of the sand. I’m glad I told someone that I was here, I think, in a dramatic way. I feel both alone and not. This, I decide, is an eerie feeling, and so I heed the chill at my back and start up the mountain, almost as soon as I set foot on the sand.
A zillion people come down after me, some of them children. Oh. I see. This path is easy. The message I heard in that moment, load and clear, was not unkind as much as it was the truth. Get. Over. Yourself. And next time bring snacks. I start to make my way back, with only a turkey burger calling my name.