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Show Go Love/228 of Michigan retirees, this peaceful look on their faces like they've been sipping wine from the Elysian fields or smoking opium and all manner of things are well. Back at site 7 we break the tmck down, set the tent and make camp. This is our tenth day out. We've stocked up on food and liquor and wine, and have long since put away the camera and video cam and given up on journals. I've yet to crack a book save the tour guide. Lara has one of those etch-a-sketch drawing pads, a magnetic pencil that writes on a grey screen where she makes whales and sea lions and her name. More than one time she's drawn the casket which she quickly erases when she sees me see. By six our makeshift home is put together, we've poured vodka tonics, and walk down the steep road through blue spruce, muddy and washed out in places, a hard road that opens onto three miles of isolated beach. Ancient driftwood-gigantic trees that lived on air that Julius Caesar breathed-has washed ashore in a maze that stretches clear north to Blanco, the great white arm of bluffs that forms the Cape. We see the whales straight away. Looking north and west, their spouts rise rhythmically and we can just make out the chiaroscuro bodies, a lighter shade of silver than the water. Lara walks the waterline where bones scatter in the wash; she picks up a frisbee-sized vertebrae and looks at us through it. "Peek-a-boo," she squeals. A gray whale blows, maybe thirty yards out. We follow it or it follows us-I don't know. We walk abreast, the dark eyes on us. For a quarter mile we're silent. We look at the whale, the whale looks at us. I hear it breathe Each time it rises Lara says, "Daddy?" and I'm hit square between the eyes with how it all works, this sudden deje vous like a veil's lifted; I swear to Jesus, like I've lived my whole life through and am now revisiting with a shot at changing the whole |