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Show Go Love/233 daughters. Then they hold hands and leap forward, whoop fiercely and come somersaulting down. We've discovered a dead sea lion just downwind. As big as a horse, the mouth grins skyward. The three of us laid flowers on its sunken head and made a prayer for the dead and the living-for everything about to fall. How to pinpoint when one becomes a man who prays? Some mighty transition must occur, shouldn't it? before a man who never prays says a prayer, laces his daughter's blue wild flowers into the stinking fur of a bloated sea lion. When the wind is right, the smell overpowers. To begin to pray over such a thing, swum in to die or killed at sea, why should it matter? Yesterday, or the day before or the day before, I took my daughter's hand in one hand and my wife's in the other, and we stood over a dead sea lion and prayed and offered flowers for the journey home Behind me now,.up on the high sand mountain, Lara and Renee are rolling down and down and down beyond the ancient driftwood that criss-crosses this sliver of earth with no entrance save ours. And this whale, a gray maybe, or a humpback-what do I know about whales?~keeps swimming inside a stone's throw, just out behind the first breaker. I could surfcast a goddamn plug straight out to its face, snag a treble hook and hello Jesus, but instead I start talking Nobody can hear me, save this gray whale that's maybe a humpback; she looks me through with her soulful eye then disappears only to rise again, swimming the other way, pacing the shallows outside the first breaker. Why? I can't know why. The Irishman who operated the lighthouse for forty years is buried up on the hill, not far from the house he built with his sons and wife, all long dead. All that time in this wind-beaten desolation, the company of whales and sea lion, screaming birds and the endless suppers offish and garden greens, wild mushrooms from the forest floor. Out here in true wilderness, barn building with timbers from wrecked ships, the |