by Kimdotdammit 22 Aug., 2007

   Reflections

    by Kimdotdammit

Tom Millea, The Wave, 1985

It’s like this. I’m sitting on plane. I’m plugged into music because music takes my body away from the bodies closing in on me. That fat man with his morning can of beer or the flight attendant passing out black coffee and brushing against my leg. I stare out the window and watch the desert slide under the belly of the plane. It’s a patchwork of dirt out there. Dry rivers slice through the grid like veins. But there is no blood in this landscape, no water. Mountains of rock rip the scene ragged, suture this piece of brown with that piece of a darker brown. Sometimes something under the surface shifts. Things collide. Mountains rise out of nowhere.

Tom Baril, Jones Beach (463A), 1995

On the beach, I feel myself unravel. I watch my toes dig into the sand and feel each grain on my skin. I dive under waves, and the ocean swallows me. Water collides above my body. I am below the surface, feel the tumult, the violence, taste a minute of infinity. Sometimes I float far from shore, past the breaking waves. I close my eyes. My body rides on an endless undulating ripple. The ocean heaves its body under mine, laps at my sides. I lose my body in this body. Let everything go. I reach down my foot and can’t touch bottom.

Far over the mountains and across the desert my daughter sits in her classroom, learns the art of punctuation and division. Her father will pick her up from school. At 4 o’clock I will call her and tell her I love her. At 8 o’clock, I will call her and kiss her goodnight. In between I will lose myself in the body, the water, the edge.

I spend two days, sometimes three in this place where solid ground disappears. Then I fly home. Three months later, I will do it again. My life depends on it.

Hiroshi Yamazaki, The Sun Is Longing for the Sea 3,1978

It’s 1970, Pacifica, California. I am eight years old and have a new bike. After school I ride to the ocean. I throw the bike on the sand and climb the jagged rocks at the end of the beach. I dig for things between rocks, poke around in the tide pools. Sea anemones suck at my fingers like little mouths. A crab scuttles between my feet. I pick it up and hold it over the ocean. It snaps its pinchers at me like some kind of prehistoric monster. Its back legs flail and kick as it snaps at me. Its mouth opens and closes from its underbelly. I stare into that little ragged hole, imagine my finger being chewed inside it, wonder how much of my body the crab can eat.

A giant wave crashes into the rocks, knocks me over. I’m soaking wet when I scramble back to my feet. The crab is still in my hand. I throw it into the bubbling white crest of a wave. Its pinchers grab at the sky before it sinks below the surface.

Michael O’Brien, Untitled, 1995

On Saturday afternoon my mom decides to take us to the beach for a picnic. Our house is two miles from the beach, yet this is the first and only time my mom takes us to the beach. The sky hangs heavy, gray, and wet. Everything is thick with fog and drizzle. Mom packs me and my brothers into the station wagon, and we drive the two miles to the beach.

The wind whips across the sand as my mom fights with the blanket. The wind catches it and twists it into knots. I sit by the edge of the ocean and dig out sand crabs with my fingers. My brothers haul rocks across the beach to hold the blanket down.

Mom is excited to have this picnic with her kids. She gets out salami sandwiches and potato chips. Sand blows into the food, sticks to the pink slabs of meat, mixes with the salt on the chips. Mom spends the entire time trying to light a cigarette. She goes through three books of matches and gives up.

I go climb the rocks at the edge of the beach, find a crab, poke at its mouth with a toothpick.

Doug and Mike Starn, Ocean in Fog, 1996

Things happen on that beach. A torso of a man is found. He was eaten by a shark. A boy in school loses his arm in a dune buggy accident. Another one is crushed and dies. A girl is raped. Me and my friends are drunk. We hear her screams and think she’s laughing. She stumbles back up to the parking lot in her bra and jeans. Spends the rest of the night crying in a corner by the bathroom. These are the kinds of things that happen.

Rockaway Beach is on the other side of the rocks, a little stretch of sand between piles of rocks. I never go to Rockaway Beach because I know that I will see my Aunt Lois’s dead body, a frantic poodle, and a fisherman screaming. No one was with Aunt Lois the day she swallowed a bottle of downers and took a swim. If it wasn’t for the poodle running and barking on the beach and the fisherman watching her body get swallowed by the ocean, no one would have known that my aunt drowned herself at that beach. I don’t go to Rockaway Beach because I know my Aunt’s body is in the water, waiting to pull me in with her.

Roni Horn, Untitled (A Brink of Infinity), 1997

When I grow up, I don’t live two miles from the beach anymore, but I always make it to the ocean. I get drunk and drive to the beach in the middle of the night. I find the most violent corner of the beach and watch waves break onto rocks. I scream with the waves, like the feel of the sound getting sucked right out of me. I climb down to the edge, know the ocean can take me at any minute. It doesn’t.

1992 and my brother has been dead for ten years. I sit at home downing beer and ballads and call a friend to go to the beach. My friend doesn’t know what I’m doing when we’re on the beach that dark night just south of Pacifica. She is lying on the sand when I walk down to the edge and into the water. I don’t take off my jeans, my shirt, or my jacket when I dive below the surface. The night is pitch black when I go under. The ocean sucks me out. I let it pull me. I empty my body, let it go limp. A wave crashes in on me, turns me over and I am tumbling inside its mouth. My lungs begin to fill. I open my eyes and see nothing but the opaque wet body of the ocean pressing down on me. I think of my cat waiting for me at home. That’s when I break free. I stumble onto the beach. My wet clothes hang off my body like some kind of wretched rags. My friend laughs. “You’re so funny, swimming with your clothes on.”

The fog drops thick and turns into rain. The windshield wipers are busted on my car, so I stretch my left arm out the window and drag them across the glass trying to see my way through all the wet on the long drive home.

Iain Stewart, Rhythm iii, 1997

My daughter is born in 1998. I do not get drunk and drive to the beach anymore. I have left my family’s ghosts behind me. I don’t poke crabs with toothpicks.

My daughter is six months old when I first take her camping on the beach. I watch her take on the ocean with no fear. She learns to walk and tackles waves with ferocity and life. We stand on the edge together and feel the ocean suck at our feet.

Now my daughter is eight. I am 45. We do not live two miles from the beach. We live in the desert, but I bring my daughter to the beach every chance I get. She knows the ocean. She understands that that there are no limits, that infinity can happen, that the earth is not bound by speed limits and Do Not Enter signs. The ocean tells her this. It tells her that there are things inside her that are so deep, so strong, so powerful that no one can ever take them away from her.

In two weeks, I will climb on a plane and fly back to the ocean again. I will take myself to the edge because I have to. I cannot survive without windows of utter abandon and freedom. The ocean is my gateway to infinity. It's a monstrous thing. A wild thing. It covers 2/3 of the earth’s surface, and when it decides to take over the last third of the planet, I will welcome it in open arms. I have no problem with that. It’s where I belong.

Lynn Davis, Evening/Northumberland Strait, #IV, 1993

Random reflections inspired by Sea Change: The Seascape in Contemporary Photography 

KimDotDammit (KDD) lives in Arizona and uses her journal as her writing project. "This is a place where I put my words. Sometimes it's about sex. Sometimes it's about my kid. It's about movies, poetry, art. It's about weird people I see. My garden. My house. My cats. My family. My life. It's my screen test. It's my trailer. I don't know what the fuck it is. It's mine though, and I pretty much limit the content to me. It's about me, by me, for me. It's narcissitic masturbation. It's My Big Experiment. It's whatever. But I love everyone who reads it."

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