Grappling (Big Sur)

Highway 1, Big Sur, early May. Blue-green water and orange poppies are particularly bright this time of year. The road traces a line along the coast, then winds gracefully into the sky.

As I curve along a cliffside, I dangle my hand out the car window, weaving air as it passes. The smooth guitar riff of an indie song sets the ambience, mingling with the smell of the coast, lingering at the edge of my consciousness. Next to me, silhouetted against ocean haze, a pelican soars. When I look at the bird, an optical illusion- we are both suspended above the ground, connected by an invisible thread, locked in perpetual motion. The wind, the water, the sky.

This is what alive feels like, I am thinking. This is all five senses. This is a feast.

If only I were hungry.

---

In early May, I headed out to Big Sur on a solo camping trip. I’d been making a point to explore more of California, to see what my home state so bountifully offers in the springtime. I wanted to practice photography with my new camera in a backdrop of coastal wildflowers and high, rocky bluffs.

I suppose, primarily, that I wanted a break from Los Angeles. I was going to cafes, trying to write, hoping for a spark of creativity. Everywhere I went, I overheard the same conversation. Always a man and a woman, and what they look like isn't relevant, because the people change, but the words remain the same. The man is moaning about the industry, gesticulating over his espresso, and the woman is nodding, passively, not saying much at all. He keeps going: maybe he is pitching something but can’t get funding, or he is talking about a project he worked on, when things were better, and then one day he looked up and he’s 35, can you believe it, 28, 42.

The death of every empire, I write at the cafe table, is thick with the language of nostalgia.

Later, in my room, I stare at my open journal as afternoon light filters through the blinds. For a few hours, everything- the books, the plant, the bed- is wrapped in gold foil. Slowly, though, and then all at once, I notice things have gotten darker. So I reach over, and turn on the desk lamp, and can see again. But it's a poor excuse for the sun.

That’s just it. I can see just fine. But didn’t things used to look different?

And I wonder, sometimes, if anyone else feels it too. That maybe it’s the sign of the times, or a recession, or a war, or a symptom of a city ruled by an industry in decline. Maybe there’s something in the water: a general spiritual malaise.

Before I left for Big Sur, I made dinner with my friend Erika. I hadn’t seen her in a while- she was juggling two jobs, fighting tooth and nail in the rat race of creative work. The catch 22 of doing what you love, but needing to spend all your time doing it. We sat draped over the couch outside, and as we caught up, she said: “There’s a knot inside of me.” She couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was, because really, everything was good. Just something tangled, something pinched, hidden deep below the ribcage.

I caught the feeling, again, after a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. We’d decided to walk to a bar to meet our friends, and as we walked, the cracked concrete sidewalk gave way to a pattern of terrazzo and brass stars. On and on they went, an entire galaxy, and I realized, as we passed, that I didn’t recognize a name on a single star. I looked up from my feet and saw the otherworldly glow of a McDonald’s sign, and the Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum, and a stark white Church of Scientology. Hollywood Boulevard, a flashing neon spectacle.

And all at once, I felt awash with hopelessness. Like the sun had gone down, and I’d only just noticed. I was surrounded by images and symbols that I knew were supposed to mean something, but they must’ve belonged to an alien civilization and not my own. And I think there was a story we were all supposed to believe in, but it was written in a language I can’t read anymore, and I don’t know anyone who does. And maybe I never did, and maybe I just can’t remember.

That same night, I spoke to Adam in line at Desert 5. Him and a few other friends are musicians. They've been playing in the same band since high school. I always thought of him as someone who knew what he was doing. He was an audio engineer, working in the music industry, a rare unicorn who’d managed to make a living at the intersection of passion and career.

As we spoke, he explained that he’d quit his job and instead was going back to school. He wanted to become a therapist. I asked why, and he said: “I want to do something that matters.”

---

At my campsite in Big Sur, I meander down a narrow path framed by poison oak and flowers. A rusted, barbed wire fence clings to the cliffside. I trace my way along it until the path slopes down, below the highway bridge, and hop over a stream into the forest. Calla lilies, purple lupines, rocks and mud cool underfoot. Up ahead, trees and blossoms weave together to form a picture frame, and beyond, a rocky shoreline gasps for air.

On the beach, I hop from boulder to boulder until I find a slope worth scrambling. There, perched on a grassy ledge, a scene unfolds beneath me:

Two large rocks, like small islands, frame a relentless, rushing tide. Tangled between whitewash and sun-sparkled ripples, lines of kelp sway rhythmically in the current. And all of it, in the evening light, is outlined in white and gold.

As I listen to the boom of swell against stone, I am taken aback by an unfamiliar noise: A loud, metronomic cracking. I look around, instinctually, thinking that the noise couldn't possibly come from nature, robotic as it is, and then, in the water, I notice: an otter, like a lifeboat, like a surfboard, floating in the waves, tapping a clam against a rock. The longer I look, more small creatures reveal themselves to me- diving in and out of the wash, playing amongst each other, cracking shells against their chests. Each time a new one emerges, I gasp.

It’s an image, I imagine, like staring into an eclipse: so dazzling, it might just burn my retinas. It’s meant to be filtered through a silver screen, I’m thinking, but I’m looking at it directly.

If I were better at meditation, I might have sat there for hours, feeling the wind snake through the grasses and up my arms, listening to the rhythm of the waves and the sharp tap-tapping of the otters. I could have closed my eyes and inhaled sunlight.

But there is a thought like a needle prick in my side. That thousands of years have led to this: the ocean beating against the cliff, peeling rocks away, those islands two soldiers making a last, brave stand against the relentless continuity of water. And thousands of years will pass, and the beach may disappear, or the boulders may crush into sand, and it won’t have mattered one bit if I was there to witness it. An overwhelming indifference in that cosmic, transcendent beauty.

As the thought crystallizes, it takes a heavier shape: The only thing I’ve ever been good at is seeing, and even that doesn’t matter. The world exists in spite of me, I think, and will exist long after I’ve left it.

---

In LA, a few months ago, I grabbed drinks with an actor friend named Jack. He showed up with hands stained black from his job at the motorcycle shop, helmet and jacket in tow. He had a beard now- a big one. “It’s for a play,” he explained. We sat on the Venice boardwalk sipping club soda and non-alcoholic beer and watching skaters slip by into golden hour.

I hadn’t seen Jack in quite some time, and as such, we played an obligatory game of “what-have-you-been-up-to?” Projects and plays and relationships: shifting, cyclical, and elusive.

When my turn came around, I felt the need to preface: “A lot has happened. And I’m fine.” A fire, an illness, quitting a job.

Overshadowing everything else, I explained, is a feeling that nothing matters- not in a bad way, per se. In a way that leaves me feeling a bit like sitting on the bank of a river. I dip my hands in, feel the rush of water between my fingers, but I know that if I close my fist, I’ll never grasp the current. I didn’t say: “I’m finding it hard to care about things knowing they can so easily be taken away.”

Jack listened, thoughtfully, and responded, “It sounds like you are living in a state of profound detachment.”

I nodded.

“That's very Buddhist of you.”

I wondered, later, if my delivery sounded cold and nonchalant. The truth was that I’d been making an enormous effort, actually, testing and probing perpetually, trying, earnestly, to find what matters. Mostly, I’d felt as though I were grappling in the dark.

The conversation shifted back to the theatre, about making it as creative in Los Angeles. “You know,” Jack said, “Sometimes, maybe most times, I wonder if I’m any good at this. But every once in a while when I’m on stage, I get a feeling so clear, and so pure, I know that this is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.”

I found myself smiling as he said it, at his faraway, wistful expression. And I smiled, too, because I knew that feeling well. It’s the way I feel when I write. Most days, I find that all I do is stare at a cursor, flickering on a screen, or scribble something in a journal for no one to see. But every once in a while I feel the pins falling into place, and a lock springs open, and that foreign language I’d been struggling to understand suddenly makes perfect sense to me.

At the table, I opened my notes app and added “What gets you high?” to my ever growing list of “questions to ask people.”

I wrote high because it’s the best way to explain the feeling. The rush- true, pure, cutting through static noise, a single note of clarity. And it feels better than any drug possibly could because I didn’t consume it, I created it. It came from within me: overwhelming proof that I am alive. I know with certainty, during those moments, that I exist in spite of the world. In spite of the transience, the impermanence, the indifference: I am here, I am here, I am here.

“You ever been to the LACMA?” Jack said. “They’ve got a Buddhist exhibition right now. We should go.”

---

Driving back from Big Sur, I stop everywhere I feel called. Every viewpoint, highway turnout, and flower field. I lean over a fence post in San Simeon to wave at the elephant seals. They scream back. Another corner of the road reveals to me a quaint diorama: a towering cliff, topped with Monterey cypresses- the perfect tree, I think, whimsically Dr. Seuss as they are- overlooking a crescent moon beach, turquoise water frothing below.

In Los Osos, where the cliffs flatten, I catch sight of four colorful sails and pull into a gravel parking lot. There I find a tawny field, dotted with pink wildflowers, parted perfectly, like Moses and the Red Sea, by a straight path to the shoreline. As I walk, a voice catches me by surprise: “Are you here for the water or the wind?”

I turn to find two older gentlemen, grey hair, hunched over, in wetsuits. I explain that I’m driving back to Los Angeles and wanted to check out the beach. One of the men tells me that he and his brother have been windsurfing together for 35 years. He’d been introduced 40 years ago by his wife. Once retired, they moved here because of the weather. “‘Why would you move to Los Osos?’ my friends asked,” and he laughs, and there is so much pride as he says it: “Because it’s windy!”

“And this beach is special,” he continues, “because it has side shore wind.” He plucks a piece of grass from the ground and tosses it in the air to demonstrate. “It blows along the beach, not to it, and feels like you can ride it forever.”

So I sit on the side swept beach, on a lone piece of driftwood, arms wrapped around my knees, sand stinging my legs, and watch a dance between elements: the air and the water and the people a bridge between both. It occurs to me that I’m witnessing a most purely human phenomenon. Someone, somewhere along the line, invented a board and a kite to harness two untamable forces. To feel, for a moment, like they are flying.

As the kites curve and arc across the blue, I think of Jack, and of that visceral, clutched-in-hand feeling. For the first time in a while, I feel, perhaps, at peace. I make it so complicated in my head, trying to find a thread to follow, grappling with what to believe in. There, on the beach, it’s so, laughably, simple.

---

Erika and I made steak that night. We cooked with my sister and her friend Lynne. I made potatoes with rosemary and shallots, Erika baked the asparagus, and my sister and I spent the grilling process yelling about things like “searing” and “resting” and “how hot a griddle needs to be.” As we waited for the steak to finish, we sat cross legged on the tiled floor of the kitchen, talking about I-can’t-remember, but I do remember that Erika leaned her head on my shoulder, and I leaned my head on hers, and it felt like a moment you could hold in two hands.

At the Hollywood Bowl, my friends and I giggled to the wail-warble-gurgle of Bob Dylan banging around on a piano. And then Willie Nelson came on, strumming an ancient guitar, and as I left to use the restroom, he began to sing a song about friendship. Halfway down the stadium steps, I ran back to wrap my friends in a hug.

And sometimes I think about how I’ve known Adam forever, but I never really knew him very well. But that conversation, lit by a shifting neon boulevard, felt more real, to me, than any fading brass star.

Some of these things- and I hold this thought in my palm, delicately, like a seashell- exist because of me. Because I am here. Because I made a call, or answered one.

Adam is in training, now, to operate a crisis hotline. If we ever get around to it, Jack and I might go to that Buddhist exhibition.

And I do think the world exists in spite of us. Even if we can’t see it, if we’ve been facing the wrong direction, looking at shadows on the wall of a cave, or for meaning in someone else’s myth.

So I write this in my journal, a reminder, just for me:

The world exists in spite of you. It will be here when you come back.

---

Early June, Highway 5, driving back from Mt. Shasta. The road opens up to farms and fields, just pavement and trucks and grain. Not much to see but the sky, and a lot of it. Driving home to LA.

I fly down the 5 listening to “This Year” by The Mountain Goats, singing along to the chorus, and maybe I’m screaming it, actually, like they’re my lyrics, pounding the steering wheel with each word:

I am gonna make it

Through this year

IF IT KILLS ME!