pissing in public

COLD WALK

/ janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment
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Sand dollars are covered in short, deep purple spines when they are alive. It is rare to find one still covered in prickles—this one is dead but still faintly violet.

We walk most every morning, usually for an hour or longer north or south or north and then south. We waved at Tammy when she came out n the sand.

Gary spotted limpets. I often think through blog posts as I search the sand for plastic trash and pretty shells. I consider politics and friends and weather and projects. What I really want to find on the sand is seaglass. Lately I have been picking up cigarette butts. I would like to get within shouting distance of the man who walks out in the afternoon and tosses his filter tips on the beach. I would like to visit with friends struggling with illness, I would like not to think about the 400,000 fewer kids who had health coverage last year than in 2016. I would like to find a pattern to make the dress I have promised my granddaughter. Her birthday is next week and she will be eight.

The beach was very cold this morning. Wind blew less hard than yesterday, temperatures were up a degree or two, but it was still cold, the moon a sliver in the pale but sunless sky. I found two pieces of glass and many “ugly clams” (Pododesmus macrochisma) which are not the lest bit ugly when you pick them up and turn them over. Portland Review published my poem a year or so ago. I have not been able to figure out how to make WordPress single-space. Never mind.

Pododesmus macrochisma: Metaphor for Girls 

Each morning I walk the sand, searching 

for what my grandmother misnamed 

the “ugly clams” caught in foam left behind 

by a retreating wave or stranded high on shore 

from last night’s tide. Smaller than my thumb 

or filling my palm, they might come to rest 

among seaweeds torn from their beds, 

half buried by wind-driven grains. Often 

when I find a shell, there is another nearby. 

Is it too fanciful to think they gather to die?

Perhaps because the first makes me alert 

to the next. Every one I have seen lies 

face down, resembling nothing much of note. 

Some thinner than drawing paper, sometimes 

thick, calloused like my toes. They lived wild

in depths to three hundred feet, here adrift 

and dead, their softer life dissolved in the sea. 

Only rarely are the unequal halves complete, 

shaped back shell still attached to the round. 

Sometimes only shards remain, wholeness 

crushed by the careless heel of an earlier walker

passing by, oblivious to the gift underfoot. 

One reason to search at dawn. Turn one

over, see what hides—that nacre, sometimes 

scarred, dark glimmering, pearly sheen—alive

amber and green, holding captive light. 

These days, most of the shells show a black stain inside. There have been black stains on the sand, too. Diesel from watercraft or leaking from shore? I do not know, but I think it kills them.

We are careful not to disturb resting seagulls. Sometimes dozens gather, usually at the edges of a creek north or south. My neighbor Barbara used to yell at tourists to leash their dogs around the gulls. Visiting dogs chase them, and most people do not mind seeing them or even seem to enjoy seeing them flee into the air. It made Barbara wild.

The sun had not yet risen when I headed back. The house next door is getting a new roof. As I turned up the path to my home, a dog suddenly rushed at me, growling and with his shoulder ruff raised. A man on the roof called him off. A job dog. He bumped by me as if I were a post. Such dogs used always to be some sort of retriever, thick tail wagging. I know people love their pits, I get that. But the breed was created to fight and kill other dogs, an “unnatural” behavior for a domestic animal. Behavior like pointing or scenting or sighting prey is automatic. People want to say it’s the owner, not the breed, but what many owners have said they most appreciate about their pits is how loyal they are, how protective. Wishful thinking. I wish they were all sterile and gone before my great grandchildren must walk past one.

The ocean’s surface seems shivered, broken into blue static, the waves smaller today. Yesterday huge breakers bent over backwards and flew up in the stiff east wind. Today they seem tamed by the cold, three breakers at a time heading in white rolls onshore.

VISIT the WC

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

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Each of our sons has brought his family for a visit this summer. For several summers we have hosted everyone at once, including cousins. After last year’s reunion, we acknowledged to one another that we were just too old (too tired, too house-proud?) to have thirteen people in our home. We are sorry to let that long weekend go but relieved too.

Friday, our younger son and daughter-in-law brought their two. Ruby has been in the ocean a dozen times, never wearing a bathing suit. She told me she only wears her suit in a pool or “a lake or something.” There has been one dress or another hanging on the line since Friday afternoon. Logan is content digging in sand and collecting crab claws. He is a preschooler and pissed at the cape, well below the high tide line. There is an excuse for little children the better part of half a mile from a toilet.

Last evening, before the sun set and well before darkness, fourteen people and three dogs staying in a local rental house partied on the beach. They were loud and drinking and put an entire log on their fire. One very drunk woman walked up our path and deliberately used our sitting log as a partial screen while she pissed. From my window I watched her reveal her pale butt and simply could not believe it. I walked out to tell them that I lived here and my grandchildren played where she pissed. She said she was sorry. Sorry? “What were you thinking?” I said. “What do you want us to do?”

In November this might not be such an issue. In late fall and winter, the tide washes up high into the rocks above where this woman squatted. But this is August. The tide mostly leaves fifty or a hundred yards of dry sand, with the occasional sneaker not coming anywhere near that spot. Which is to say: We should not be expected to live with her drunken blunder for months.

People on vacation. People out of the city. People to whom the rules of common decency do not apply. They were, perhaps unsurprisingly, a youngish, affluent, white group. Fourteen adults, one of whom could not be bothered to walk back to the rental house to take a leak. People who think it’s okay to piss in public if there is not so much of the public around.

In past summers children have built rock castles in our path, adults have accidentally kicked rocks into it. A man once built a fire in a wind-sheltered spot in our path through our hedge (which is not actually public property). People have come into our yard to take wood for their own beach fire and routinely dismantle laid fires we have set up on the beach.

Clearing our path and setting the log with stones to make it steady was the work of several days. That log has been used by many people this summer. Old couples have rested there. Young couples have sat and watched the sun go down. We have sat on the log ourselves, of course. Gary vows that this is the last year he will build a “fort” for our use. It’s too bad.