Oklahoma is only minutes away.
Thursday, August 10, 2006 at 9:18PM Author's note: This is a short story I've recently been working on. Obviously, as noted below, it's a bit longer than the usual posts, but I think it's worth a read. This is what I would consider a "first draft"; there's some work and editing that definately needs to be done. However, it is somewhat similar to the whole Field Notes arc, so I hope you enjoy it.!
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The two plastic five foot dual bladed paddles were probably about three pounds of total non-menacing mass. Dual seat sea kayak. It weighed, at most seventy pounds. Our combined weight couldn’t have topped more than three hundred, three hundred and five pounds. Total, it was a good quarter short of four hundred pounds. Four hundred pounds was a good hundred pounds under five hundred, which was only half a ton. It was clear. We were a puny, nearly weightless speck floating insignificantly on the dark blue swells of the ocean. That was the key. Insignificant, meaning of no concern whatsoever to the larger greater whole.
I tried to put those thoughts out of my mind as I looked down to the invisible seafloor, dreading what I might see in the intervening distance. As I tried to calm myself, I heard my step-father’s voice. It was a conversation we had a month before. In my head, I could hear that distinctive tone saying, “When I’m close to death, I want you to take me to Oklahoma.” Sure, at the time I had laughed like mad. It was a hell of a thing to say. After all, he didn’t mean it in the traditional way, as in “I want to see Oklahoma before I die”.
What he meant in his very blast-all-untested/unproven-cultural-mores way was that he wanted to be the lone buffalo at that time. He wanted to be the one who left the herd in its green verdant valley somewhere in Wyoming, and rather than be a burden, wandered off to some place desolate to make his peace. What he wanted was to be off on his own on some great adventure, and even if that place was hot, blasted, and ugly, at least he would meet the final adventure on his own terms. Sure, we had laughed at the time. There had been all sorts of banter then, sure, in the comfort of a living room, with all sorts of bad things said about Oklahoma and the whole general concept. That was easy. That made perfect sense, and even sounded slightly ridiculous, which it probably was. As I looked and stared, the words didn’t seem so amusing.
Two days ago it had began. I had been pestering my wife to go kayaking with me. And when I say pestering, anyone that’s been in any sort of relationship knows what I mean. There’s always one party that wants to do something the other party finds absolutely abhorrent. I’m not going to say its always men who want to do something that women find awful, because everyone knows that’s a patent distortion of real, actual life. In any case, the other party always puts the “wanting” party off. There’s a variety of excuses, ranging from, “I have a headache” to the plain and simple “no”. Eventually, the second, resistant party caves, and even though they totally loathe what they’re going to do, they bite their tongue, and go along reluctantly.
This was how it was. I wanted to go kayaking, and three days later, after cleaning the house, and losing all plausible excuses, my wife was forced to grudgingly sigh, and go along for the ride. I knew I could have gone solo at any time, however, I was certain that we would have a much better time on our own. It would have been easiest if we could have just dropped our kayak on the car, and headed to the launch, but as it was a titanic battle of wills each time I wanted to go kayaking, it looked to be another five years before I would prevail on that front.
The idea of kayaking had come to me when the sun was shining in a perfect blue sky and the temperature was an even seventy-six perfect non-humid degrees. The water had been sparkling enticingly, and it looked to be no trouble whatsoever to launch into non-existent breakers. That had been the climate delight of three days ago. When we arrived at the rental locale that we frequented, it was a partly-cloudy somewhat gloomy day with a brisk, moist breeze. Moreover, my wife secretly delighted in hearing the water temperature, a reasonable sixty. She didn’t say anything, but I saw her look when she saw the numbers on the condition board, and I could hear her tone when she questioned the clerk briskly.
With oversized and water logged lifejackets in one hand, and kayak paddles in the other, I finally heard the complaints that she had been aching to state from the moment we left the house. I turned one ear in her direction, and half-listened, just in case there would be something substantive in the litany that I needed to respond to. There wasn’t. All that was established was that I would push her, and the kayak through the breakers, so that she wouldn’t have to wade out. My personal opinion was that she had a greater chance of getting soaked staying in the boat, as it could capsize, flounder, overturn, or simply cut through the breakers ineptly, but since I was a dutiful husband, I decided to abide by her wishes.
At the beach, we placed the ridiculous neon vests, and I dragged the kayak to the water’s edge. Daintily, my wife stepped into the boat. Packhorse that I am, I grabbed the towline complete with handy bit on the end, and lugged the boat into the water. The two inches of salty brine that touched my toes as I took the first step was frigid. It was hair raising feels-like-hypothermia-in five-minutes water. I clenched my jaw shut. No admission about being cold was going to seep through my lips. Two steps into the miniscule breakers, all hair on my body stood on end, and my feet felt like they were encased in ice.
With my chest heaving from more the cold than the actual exertion, at least I was plowing through the water in such a way as to generate as much heat as I lost. A quick three foot swell broke across my neck. I looked up to the kayak, to see the wave pass over the prow, and over the open seats indiscriminately, turning my motionless and seated and now soaked wife into a popsicle. A couple steps more, and we were past the breakers, and away from the joker who kept telling people that there were sharks in the shallows. I levered myself into the boat, and we began paddling furiously to get warm.
After ten minutes, I privately admitted to myself that it was a bad day for kayaking. The low hanging, unmoving grey slate clouds prevented the yellow warmth of the sun from baking and heating us as we paddled. There was a vigorous five mile per hour intermittent breeze that came out of the horizon. On dry land, it would be nothing but an unnoticed inconvenience. But since I was damp, it felt like a raw, howeling gale force wind. Again, I said nothing of these facts. The more my shoulders strained to move the boat over miles of liquid, the less I felt the cold. I chose to say nothing, because I knew that if I was slightly uncomfortable, my wife was miserable, and one or two words away from demanding an immediate return to shore, despite the fact we had only been out for fifteen minutes.
We paddled around the cove. Pelicans arced in neat parabolas along the border between water and sky. Black Cormorants plunged from the sky into the inky and inscrutable depths of the water searching for fish. Portside, waves pounded uneven caves with laughing malice. I was then directed to bear hard, well, what I would call “starboard” or “North”, but my wife called “Right”.
Over and over, I kept hearing that I needed to turn right. Finally, once the perceived threat had passed, I asked why we had to go right. I was empathetically told that we were too close to the caves, and that we could get borne into a rock and crushed. I quickly glanced over, and saw six or seven boats darting and skimming in easy motions, apparently unaware of the grim peril they were in. I said nothing again, because my sixth sense told me that an argument was lurking close to the surface.
Out off the cove we paddled, and the swells rolled in easy, driving motions, casting us up and flushing us down in a fashion that any roller-coaster rider would appreciate. Just as I was leaning back, watching our wake down the last hump of water, frantic directives once again issued from the front of the boat. I was told to paddle firmly out of the current, because she was becoming seasick. I obliged, and in easy strokes we were soon striking out for the blue depths. Out away from the cliffs, past the undulating swells of the inlet, the water was smooth. It was a perfect glass cover which our boat sliced and cut through leaving a fading straight line behind. Occasionally, seals popped their heads out in camouflaged motions, leaving no ripples whatsoever. With quizzical glances they stared in our direction, before slipping away in mirage fashion.
In the front of the boat, something was said about resting that was mostly obscured by the salt silence. I shipped my oar and watched. Distantly, a yellow buoy bobbed and shook. Eventually, the shore stretched across the horizon, dotted with multicolored umbrellas and grains of movement. Practically, blotches of color speckled the hillsides as residences. Beneath me, the undulating liquid fell off into a deep eternity. As I stared blankly down, a shadow cruised slowly through my field of vision.
Uneasily, I had shifted my weight. It was cloudy. There was little light to pierce the crystal depths. Refraction, reflection, and all sorts of shearing associated with light were most likely playing tricks on my eyes. It was a seal. A fish. A dolphin. A pod of dolphins. It was nothing but idle swaying kelp. Better yet, it was nothing, an overactive imagination. Something was wrong. My breath caught in the net of my throat, my pupils dilated and contracted, my muscles shifted uneasily. Then I had started thinking about things, like size and weight, and traveling to a distant land.
I rattled my head back and forth angrily. Thinking about such items was downright morbid, not to mention downright stupid. Yet I couldn’t stop looking down. I was hypnotized. I glanced away. Then it was there. In that intermediate medium of five to six feet of depth, two feet away and closing. It was big. Nothing crested the surface yet, but I saw its cartilage razor edge. Effortlessly it came on. Its tiny uncaring blank eyes stared inscrutably. It was evenly shaded, smooth tones of grey fading off into distorted white. From its perfect pointed snout, to its broad back and fading tail, I measured by invisible hands and wide eyes. Ten feet. It was at least ten feet, minimum, and that was a conservative estimate, because it was probably much larger, twelve feet realistically, and maybe even a foot past that. It had vanished again.
There was no head shaking. My eyes flicked to land and groaned at the empty expanse in between. Ever so gingerly, I moistened my suddenly parched tongue. As calmly as I could, I suggested to my wife that for the next several minutes, paddling was probably a bad idea. Absent in the middle of my sentence was the monstrosity I had viewed. She reacted predictably. Stridently, she half-turned toward me, rocking the boat in a regrettable fashion, and demanded to know if my comments were some sort of a practical joke. Earnestly, I falsely reassured her that everything was alright, and that I was not unnecessarily creating apprehension.
After the exchange, I kept uneasily scanning about the boat. I had no doubts that the first shadowy pass-through and the second were related. Nor was I going to deny the feasibility of what it most likely was. The seafloor dropped off dramatically off the cove into a large trench. And the water was cold – not very cold to things like that, but cold enough. Cold enough. There was experience and memory too. It had been a long time ago – at the moment, almost a different life ago, but it had been geographically close, not five miles away off a similar beach, watching something smaller, but similar, yes, very similar pass by as I had floated among a flotilla of others. I could not blindly refuse the simple truth of what I knew it was, not with every fact stripped bare in the fast minutes after my mind gasped at the translated image.
I now hated looking down at those black swirls of endless motion. I wanted to gaze, no stare eternally at the sun and risk blindness rather than continue to search for something that I hoped had finally left. I wondered if the lack of motion was a good decision. Granted, paddling was like splashing, which was caused huge rents in the even fabric of the sea, large gashes of motion that spread out in even concentric circles and alerted every creature of our exact position. But, perhaps a quick burst of speed that carried us in rapidly would be more prudent, placing us closer to the shore, further away from the deep. I dithered. It seemed more discreet to wait, and let it move off, continue on to places unknown and unseen, and then, like strangers in the night, pass, and not look back.
My eye glimpsed something in the three foot radius. Lazily, it drifted in again in that hazy medium, casually propelling itself past shallowly before diving out of my view. There was no doubt in my mind. There were three words that fit and described it perfectly. It was a great white shark. Identification was not the issue. I had been in many tight spots, and a definition never stopped the inevitable. My mind surged with suppressed energy. I knew that one glimpse was a supposition.
A solid, staring identification and disappearance was two viewings. Two solid stares confirmed my sanity. Three different looks at the issue was a different problem. Three was enough to lock eyes. Three was enough to confirm the worst fears, and make a solid identification. Three was a type of odd, different disturbing behavior. Three passes seemed to portend some sort of premeditation, some sort of malevolent depravity to follow on the fourth. And the water suddenly sparkled less, and seemed to look very chill.
The words were suddenly in my mouth and out like exhaled carbon dioxide. “Paddle! Paddle!” They were simple, flat syllables and emotionless tones of emergency directions that needed to be executed in a matter of seconds. I wrenched my paddle into the uncaring water and tried to shift the very ocean to move the boat. In a blind panic the boat shot forward. It wasn’t the even, rhythmic dual-dipping smooth riding wave shearing movement. It was bicep tearing shoulder ripping constant pressure. A dull burn radiated out from my shoulders, my chest began to heave, and still the paddles flashed and flew in my hands, water droplets shearing off into mid-air with each stroke.
Not a word was spoken. The boat continued on inexorably. Sweat and water pooled under my seat. Through the roar of constant motion, something nagged and tugged at my mind. I needed to know. I had to look back. It went against all common sense. The laughing cries of beachgoers were only fractionally closer. The slanting slope of solid land still seemed miles away. I needed to bear down and continue to concentrate on my paddling, because in reality, it didn’t matter if the Devil himself was chasing us. I didn’t need to see it. I could be willfully ignorant for once. Ignorance should was bliss. There was no point in turning around. There was no rational reason to look back. To my dying breath, I was not going to turn and see what lurked in the past.
As these thoughts ran through adrenaline poisoned neurons my head instinctively whipped around. Every aspect of my consciousness groaned in a cacophony of regrets. My breath came out quickly. A large, frothy dissipating swath followed our boat, a flat-line of acceleration from the zero point. My eyes danced frantically over that line, rambling left, right, and below. With iris widening deliberateness, one lone solid fin mockingly sliced the surface of the starting point of our flight before sliding away. Horrified, I swung back around and kept paddling, exerting each fatigued stroke to be faster than the last.
Past screeching gulls we came on. In between laughing inept fellow kayakers we streaked relentlessly, crashing through the breakers until we were beached on the sand. Only then did we get out listlessly, as the manic energy that had possessed us fled. I didn’t make my usual jokes. I didn’t say a single letter. My wife moved up the sand quickly, placing more distance between herself and the water. I turned to grab the bit of the boat, facing the deep blue expanse, and began to drag the carcass of the kayak onto shore, while realizing, once again, that Oklahoma was everywhere. Fortunately, I had made it back to California. With as much vitality I could muster, I turned my back on the sea, and half swaggered and stumbled up the beach back to my insignificant, but great life.
Reader Comments (23)
1) The post was long. Yes, at 3Kish words, some would say that is long. Was it "War and Peace"? No. Did you know the piece would be long up front? Yes. If you didn't understand/heed the warning, then I see no basis to complain as it was obvious and apparent.
2) Talent. Sure, its debateable. But that is a subjective thing. Person to person. Again, not worth whining about.
3) Posting favoring the author. Well, it is his site. obviously, most people that post are repeat readers that like his stuff. I'm not sure how that's a critique either.
4) Entitlement. Sure, the author & his characters, be sure to note that distinction has an ego. But to brag, demand something? I don't see that here, and I haven't yet. I think you're a little off base on this one too.
Bottom line: Voice your opinion. But try to be accurate!
Re: Your post sub-point #3. I don't see why that has to be the case. More democratic, balanced reporting is neeeded.
I liked the piece, could use some work. I also see nothing wrong with declaring you like someone's work. After all, once that hutrle is crossed, its subjective.
Toodle-oo!