Issue No. 3

McClures Beach

August 25, 2019

The next morning I set out early for Tule Elk reserve at the tip of Point Reyes peninsula. The clouds retreated from the land, reminding me of a sardine-can top peeled back to expose its innards. I could finally see the landscape. Sun, a mercurial commodity, warmed my forearms through the windshield.

While I drove I thought about a lot of things. I thought about Marvin. Marvin was a man staying at Point Reyes hostel, but in a different building. He slept in the larger of the co-ed 26-person community rooms, while I slept in the 6-person female-only dorm. Marvin was arresting. He was about my height, 5’6, with a sculpted face. He had high cheekbones, a broad forehead, and voltaic blue eyes. His ethnicity looked Native American, though I suspect he wasn’t.

One of his voltaic eyes was bloodshot. His left, my right. This eye haunted me. His hair was long, straight, brown, a little greasy, and hung just below his throat. Sometimes he pulled it back in a bun. Sometimes he wore it under a traffic-cone-orange beanie. His skin was tanned and thick. He looked like he’d once been traditionally handsome. Because of his earthly weathering I could not tell if he was thirty-two or fifty-seven at this point in our juncture. He wore very baggy jeans and T-shirts that dwarfed him. I was strangely very attracted to Marvin, but also repulsed by him at once. This combination of sensations privately embarrassed me and I didn’t know why. I think it was the eye.

During the time our bookings at Point Reyes hostel had overlapped, I’d taken to dodging him. He’d begun making a habit of showing up during the varied times I used the kitchen to make breakfast in the morning, frequently wanting to carry on prolonged discussions with me, which I couldn’t figure out how to gracefully exit. Also, it was difficult speaking at length to any human being without divulging information about my breakup, as my brain chemicals were imbalanced and compulsive in their current state.

The night before last, Marvin had returned to the building at sunset. I was reclined in the same leather love-seat in the lounge as I was every evening, reading Henry Miller. I was frowning at a racial slur I’d just discovered in the narrative, which I didn’t remember encountering while reading his books at a younger age. Upon his entrance, Marvin let the heavy door of the cabin slam behind him. All heads in the room turned. He took a step forward and bellowed. “HAS ANYONE BEEN OUTSIDE LATELY? HOO-BOY, I JUST DROVE THROUGH HEAVEN. WE’RE IN HEAVEN!” He raised his arms, squared his chest, and grinned a wild grin. Hostel bunkees sprawled on couches looked wide-eyed at him, then at each other. I smirked into my book. His unmethodical behavior undoubtedly amused me. But I didn’t have the capacity to entertain him in both the mornings and in the evenings, so I pulled the book higher over my face as to not be noticed.

Though, driving to the elk sanctuary in the early morning light, I understood the orthodox proclamation he’d made. Elevated at approximately one-thousand feet, with deadly drop-offs alternating on either side of the road, Point Reyes peninsula did feel quite like heaven. “Am I dead?” I asked aloud. The windows were slightly cracked, creating a suction that thieved the utterance from my lips through atmospheric slits. The further I advanced to the elk sanctuary, the mistier it once again became. The sky was heavily overcast, yet somehow glowing while reflecting the upcoming sun. As far as I felt from civilization, the road was freshly paved and wove smartly between lagoons and prairies and ranches. In the confectionary blossom of clouds, I was a little pink sprinkle zooming through the top layer of icing to the tip of a cake slice. To my left and right I could see nothing beyond the cliff edges except a bulk of pink fog and lavender vapor, expanding, filling in the gap between ocean and sky. The atmosphere felt concave, like a bowl of haze. I couldn’t roll my windows down all the way because the air was too icy, but I wanted to finger its viscosity. It amazed me how quickly and dramatically the meteorology of Point Reyes changed through very curt variances of mileage and time.

I passed mills and farms, land with roaming bulls tagged by the ears. Beastly animals seemed out of place, inhabiting this sliver of tall, narrow earth. How did they get up here? Upon arriving in San Francisco, I’d felt surprised at how much this part of California reminded me of Portugal. The rapid oscillation between cold and hot winds, the coloring and porousness of rocks, and the ribbon-like texture and hues of the meadows. During my stay at the hostel in Marin Headlands a week earlier, I’d sipped a cup of coffee while examining a historical poster tacked to the bulletin board hanging in the lobby. It detailed the history of this specific region of the west coast. I was shocked to read that Portuguese ranchers and gauchos had emigrated from Europe, crossed the broad swath of North America, and settled in the headlands. The temperature and behavior of the Northern California weather reminded them of home. The fur of the livestock they’d brought with them had trapped seedlings and biologies of Portuguese grasslands, which then fell to the soil and created a landscape formerly unique to that of Portugal. It gave me goosebumps that my intuition was so specifically acute. These didn’t just feel and look like Portuguese grasses, they were Portuguese grasses.

I followed the water stained road for over an hour to the very tip of the peninsula, where it came to a finite end, capped by a parking lot. Every spot in the lot was empty, except for one, and I parked exactly next to that car, which I thought was annoying of me. I stepped out of the vehicle, stretched my legs, and felt the dampness of the cool mist on my neck. I rolled my head around on my shoulders and stared down at my feet. They were shroud in wool grey socks, laced over with the straps from rubber camp sandals. I’d discovered the sandals by chance two years ago in a bin marked “free” on the sidewalk of a rich neighborhood in Washington DC. I’d wished I’d brought along my Doc Martens to change into, because of the chill, but they were abandoned inside my suitcase under my bunk an hour away. I wrestled my backpack out of the back seat, tossed a spare granola bar inside, along with a small paper bag containing a grilled cheese, an amorphous grease stain on the front and back of the bag. I added a water bottle to the cache of items and slung the bag over my shoulders, clipping it securely across my chest. 

There were several worn paths departing from the parking lot. I wasn’t clear which would take me to the elk preserve. The parking lot was situated beside a squat, abandoned, historic village with plaques beside timeworn structures, each of which was peeling with white paint along its wooden beams. The windows of each building were vessels to black, hollow insides devoid of light. There were picnic tables amuck. Everything looked wet. A few footpaths led through the village. Some led around it. Some led in the opposite direction. I consulted a signpost with a hiker’s map, but the shoddy illustration only confused me more. I grew impatient from indecision and selected the foot-path leading away from the parking lot, emptying onto an older, crumbling street. The asphalt stretched down a slope, and I had to deviate around a closed metal gate which was blocking off a second parking lot, which was comically gargantuan and apparently unnecessary as I was seemingly the only person at the elk preserve. But then I remembered that it might be 8AM on a weekday. I tried to remember what day it was. I couldn’t recall.

The fog was still so thick that I could see at most ten feet ahead of me. I heard a reverberation from beyond the mist that sounded unlike anything I’d ever heard before. I was unsure if it was ahead of or behind me. It sounded like the scream of a metal door swinging on rusty hinges, but also as though it erupted from warm lungs. I turned to see if the gate had opened behind me, though I knew in my gut it’d be closed, which it was. Up ahead, at the center of the parking lot, was an enormous sink-hole. Crushed chips of pavement, two to four feet in diameter, dangled inside dejectedly from their seams along the edge. Something about this vision gave me anxiety. At the tip of the peninsula, in a time-lapsed place, the earth had swallowed itself, taking fresh gulps of air, and it made no difference to anyone. This land felt like a degree of comatose.

I stepped around the perimeter of the hole, my fingertips turning pink, thumbing the shoulder straps of my backpack. It was heavier than I thought it should be. I then realized I’d forgotten to remove my laptop from it the night before. It seemed very silly all of the sudden to be carrying a dead laptop around a purgatorial elk preserve. Technology was very out of context here; a cutting edge, revolutionary advancement: totally useless. Sixty miles south in San Francisco was the laptop life. The machine contained precious data; my airline tickets, the photographic records of my personal life history, work projects, timelines, access to many of my social communities, and yet it felt as ineffectual as the concrete slabs which leaned into the sinkhole. I imagined the liberation of tossing it in there, and my cellphone too, my sweet beloved, listening to them clatter all the way down to the bottom of the hole. I imagined the devices bursting from a geyser on the opposite side of the earth, or maybe in China, like in an old-timey cartoon, which would be exceptionally ironic because they would quite literally meet their maker.

At the border of parking-lot number two I reached a sandy trail that dipped and rolled between lumpy knolls. I consulted a paper map I remembered that I’d grabbed from the front desk and jammed in my pants pocket that morning. I discovered that I’d taken the wrong route and was heading not to the elk preserve proper, but descending via switchbacks to the base of the peninsula, arriving at McClures Beach. I noticed, however, there were no clear demarcation lines for where the elk preserve started and stopped. The elk, I imagined, ruled the entire tip of the island. I was frustrated, but figured I may as well continue onward, as McClures Beach was only a half mile out and back hike at this point.

Each of my downward steps were short and abbreviated and the souls of my sandals dug into the sand, catapulting it all across the tops of my woolly socks. My knees locked and I balanced the weight of the backpack which tilted forward on my shoulder blades. The palette of McClures trail was mixed with rust, and slate, and rich deep greens, and beiges. Petite yellow flowers decorated long needle grasses in the dense banks on either side.

I almost fell forward from an abrupt halt when I noticed a snake meditating in a coil in the sand a few steps ahead. I knew what I thought of the snake, what all of human history has stigmatized over the reputation of snakes, but as we remained poised, studying one another’s frames, I wondered what the snake thought of me. When I was a child I loved snakes. And I loved dinosaurs, and I loved every living reptilian thing with scales. But I especially loved snakes. I was a snake freak. I romped the forested plots beside my childhood home—we lived far from the center of town—and would retrieve critter skeletons and snakeskins and hides from the Florida backwoods to bring home and present to my horrified mother. She was humorously respectful and graceful in her careful reception, but suggested routinely that I wash my hands. Snakes hadn’t changed much in format since my childhood, but I had. I gathered the courage to side step it. As soon as I lifted an ankle, it sensed the vibration in the earth and slithered into the coastal scrub. 

I pulled the crumpled paper map back out of my pocket and studied the minutiae of the printed decimal point and five and impatiently stuffed it back into my jeans. The trail was only listed as a half mile distance, but the steepness and the sand strained my calves. The course ahead mingled into a valley of sorts, between two tall bluffs, as if a line had been drawn between the pinched shoulders of a shrugging giant. I trudged further and further down the slope, watching my sandals, but couldn’t help feeling as though I was pressed under the weight of a gaze. I tilted my head upward and was alarmed by a harem of elk flushed against the sky, looking down at me from the bluff. Their bottom halves were obscured by shrubbery, but there was no mistaking the artistry in the slenderness of their necks and the thickness of their coats. I had never experienced this genre of raptness. Their horns combed sheets of steam and I wondered for how long they’d been observing me from above, clumsily plodding through the sand on dumb bi-pedaling legs. Had they witnessed my stand-off with the snake? 

I tenderly slid my phone out of my jacket pocket and cautiously raised it to eyebrow-level to take their picture. Their grandiose forms dissolved into puny silhouettes through the manufactured iPhone screen. It just wasn’t enough, wasn’t at all accurate. The biggest elk in the gang rocked its head backward and released a noise that cut through the air like shards of oxidized minerals. It was exactly the noise I’d heard earlier in the parking lot. (I would get used to this noise during my stay in Point Reyes—as used to it as one can get—and would hear it days later in the marshes, again on a hike, buried under swampy canopies near Limantour beach). At this, the elk migrated lazily over the edge of the bluff, one by one, out of sight, grazing still, but keeping their gazes fastened to my face while departing.

I continued walking, thinking this time of Karen. I thought about our conversation in the kitchen yesterday and how it had a sweet stillness to it, discussing the epic cycles of whale decomposition, as hungry omnivores had bustled around us attending to their hunger, ingestion, and all the life they still possessed.  

Finally, reaching the end of the trail, a stream rushed to its base and spilled into a pool. I dipped my hand in the clear, cool water to feel the temperature—something humans are frequently inclined to do, though the results are consistently similar. My suspicions were correct. The water felt chilly. I stepped out onto the flat plateau of the beach and squinted. It was vast. The distance from the base of the bluffs to the water’s edge was approximately seventy five feet. The landscape was fairly monotone, which accentuated the vastness. The maps of Point Reyes spoke in foreboding language about the beaches in this region of the peninsula. I was scared to inch any closer to the jawline of the surf. Little characters in italics, which had been printed over the ocean portions of the maps, had read “check tide tables before walking on beaches.” And “rising water can trap you against a cliff with no possibility of escape.” That one was particularly horrifying. And “the pounding surf, rip currents, and severe undertow are treacherous, especially at McClures Beach, Kehoe Beach, and Point Reyes Beaches north and south.” Oh, and “stay away from the water.” I crept a few more steps in the direction of the sea, fearing every judicious stride a reckless beckon to a rogue tsunami wave to steal my puny human form away. I investigated the packed, damp, sands of the ground for more of nature’s miscreants. No snakes, but I examined some leftover charred wood bits from a bonfire and also relics that appeared to be byproducts of merriment, which I strongly interpreted as having been from a birthday party. I tried to imagine a birthday party, or any effervescent celebration, here in this grey, in this barrenness, on this stainless steal beach.

The ocean spray pounding the shore created a translucent static that pulsed into the air, kind of like heat waves rising from pavement in the summertime. It obscured the edges of my breadth of view, like white sheets had been draped over the edges of a panorama by God hands. Continuing to scan the ground, there were vibrant fragments of plastic and pithy ribbons of orange peel. And then there was a coyote. 

It looked at me and I looked at it. For a long moment it held a bored expression. And then it turned toward the water. I stood both afraid and entranced, observing as it trotted toward the waves and away from me. I willed it to return. It stood silhouetted by a paper-white background, framed by a static wall of crashing sea-foam, and looked back at me. Had anyone warned it about the sneaker waves? About the undertow? Had anyone educated it on the printed log of timetables for the surf cycles? I thought I’d read somewhere that birds and other animals, but especially birds, are so present and sensitive that they can synthesize tremors across the atmosphere moments before a tsunami strike, fleeing to safety. I speculated whether or not the coyote possessed these intuitive gifts. Could it smell my grilled cheese?

I hung out on the beach for a while, not particularly because I wanted to, but because I felt like I should. McClures Beach felt spooky to me. It was nothing like the beaches I grew up beside in Florida, which felt juvenile, silly, pastel in comparison to these beaches; like comparing a baby-shower to an austere Scythian quest. In Point Reyes all things were exaggerated. If the sky could be described as overcast, it felt more like an everlastingness of bleak. I went for a short walk along the base of the bluffs, casually debating the odds of which would kill me first: a snake, a rogue wave, or a coyote. I wobbled around the corner of an undulating cliff wall and found a crude collage of black feathers artfully framing the carcass of a carrion bird at my feet.