Fifteen Years

     The warm wet breeze of the noon-day rolled over the treetops and washed down upon the dock yard. The heavy scent of salt mixed with the acrid scent of rotting fish, beached kelp bleaching in the sun, and palm fronds rotting where they fell. As the tide of air ebbed for a moment, the smell of sealants, paints, and rust rushed up to fill the void, only to be overpowered by the sickly sweet fragrance of tropical flowers in full bloom. Beneath the strong overtones the slightest hint of yesterday’s frozen rum drink spilled across the nearly ceremonially small patch of grass, slightly overgrown, turned into a sugary mass of quickly blackening goo alive with hordes of ants desperately defending this once-in-a-short-lifetime find from the various less identifiable bugs intent on getting theirs before the getting was done. The unwashed dog, wet from a swim in the unnaturally green water of the marina, temporarily invaded the scene as it went sprinting past, toward the direction of his master just rousing from a drunken slumber upon the hard. Stale puddles of water dotting the slightly muddy ground, teemed with life of all minute descriptions, chief among them the clouds of mosquitoes that arose in response to a set of heavy footfalls approaching. With another crash of the wind wave in the tops of the swaying palms, the smells of land were washed over with dreams of the sea.

     It had been fifteen years since the life-weary eyes had last caught a glimpse of the ocean, since last the salt stung the back of the throat and filled the lungs, since the ears had heard the crash of waves on a white sands, since the nostrils were filled with that sweet aroma the man associated not with the sea, but with the beach. Oh, how he had longed to see the land slipping slowly over the horizon, leaving behind an unbroken circle of dark blue below, and light blues and whites above. The point where the sky and the water meet had so thoroughly hypnotized him in his youth that he had never since been able to get the saltwater out of his veins, nor did he ever have any desire to do so. While he might have been born listening to the whistles and warbles of Western Meadowlarks, with the late summer wheat swaying heavy heads, and the land rebelling against the tyranny of gravity, reaching miles toward the white sun, his home had long been the briny deep. The mechanically rhythmic bang, bang, bang of an unseen pile driver punctuated by the warble of a deck grinder, the frothing rolls of the water crashing across the penumbra of land and crackling in retreat, and the billowing clouds of a summer afternoon reaching to blot out the yellow sun itself, long ago these had come to serve as his larks, fields, and mountains. The interrupting chaa of the grackle, defiantly erect cactus shimmering in the waves of heat, and jagged rocks baked clean of life in the Great Desert’s wrathful sun had hardly sufficed. It had been a place to be, but it quickly became a place to be trapped, inside desperately lapping up the meager amount of artificially cooled air, blackout curtains drawn tightly shut to ward off the ceaseless onslaught of radiating heat flowing through the single panes of glass.

     While he still afforded himself the occasional luxury of air conditioning, he sought to live as the natives had, adapting himself and his habits to the ebb and flow of heat across the sun baked ground. The sweat never ceased, as it was the only thing to cool him as the birds took refuge from the burning sky and the lizards pushed their bodies flat into the deepest available shade. Bit by bit, the comforts required by the tourists and the snowbirds became less necessary, but life, out of sheer necessity, slowed to a crawl. Only in the predawn hours and long after the scoring light of day had passed was he free to leave the confines of the same four white walls. His world slowly reduced from endless horizons to a cage of his own making.

     More than once the only defense against the killing heat failed, and he felt his heart drop into an irregular beat, his skin turn cold and clammy before drying to a bright, hot red, the heat of the desert having so completely breached his outer defenses laying siege to his inner most keep in exacting lockstep with the full mercury of the relentless unshaded rays. The heat had possessed him in a deadly race between the respite of the setting sun and the failing of his fortitude. It was nothing personal, everything in the desert tries to kill everything else. If you survive, you do so alone. If you prosper you do so at the expense of others. A more conventional narrator might say it was a cold hard existence, but the sand was always deceptively soft, bogging you down with every step, grinding into every gear, clinging to every crevice, and “cold” would have been a welcomed relief. Conventional words fail the Arizona noon. The closest intelligible description is, a hot-blooded killer, a waster away of flesh and will, a place loved dearly by the hardest of people. But a place that had not seen an ocean for more than 400 million years.

     Even there the ancient song of the tropics still sang from the ghosts of the rocks, the dried lake bed of fertile soil, and prehistoric waters piped up from below the bedrock to make the desert bloom. The Paleozoic evidence of tropical volcanoes and small islands dotting an antediluvian coastline roasted on the desert floor now. His bones as theirs, those old fossils testifying of the lush coral reefs bathed in volcanic nutrients. Footprints cast in mud-turned stone, forever fixed tracing the tack of forgotten times. The sea would not come to these hoary shoals again. He must travel to the sea.

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