I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place (23 page)

I spent the next couple of hours mucking about the tide pools, taking in the sun, not doing much at all, trying not to think, and then in the light of early dusk a western oystercatcher landed on a small rock island and emitted its characteristic piping whistle,
kee-ap kee-ap wee-o.
This bird is dusty black and has pale legs, a bright orange bill, and a rim of orange-red around its eyes. I watched this oystercatcher probe every nook and cranny, concentrate every use of its bill, poking, jabbing, laboring to pry up the most tenaciously adhesive of mollusks.

Slowly the exhaustion of travel and the drowsiness from sun and sea air accumulated and I almost fell asleep standing up. Noting the condition of the tide, I walked back from the water thirty or so yards, lay down on the sand, and dozed off, only to be awoken in late dusk by the riotous noise of at least fifty seagulls. There were three different species of gulls, all drawn to a dead dolphin. The dolphin, now dull-skinned and splotched with sand, must have tumbled in while I was asleep.

At their rapacious scavenging, the gulls were surprisingly unfazed by a rather tall woman dressed in a dark green rain slicker, blue jeans, and laceless hiking boots, her dark blond hair tied at the top of her head in a dreadlocked mop, standing not more than five feet away from the dolphin. She was working a tripod camera. Now and then as I watched through binoculars, I saw a gull feign a skirmish with the photographer, hovering in midair, cough-shrieking like a rusty well pump, yet the woman went on adjusting her lens, taking photographs of the dolphin's carcass, jotting something in her notebook tied by a string to her belt.

I watched this until most of the daylight was out over the sea and the cliffs threw shadows on the beach, and then I set out for the trail back up to the gravel parking lot. At the top of the rise, when I turned to look back, there was just enough light to see that many gulls were taloned to the dolphin, wildly flapping their wings as if trying to carry it away to a secret lair for the night. Their squalls and cries echoed up the beach as the photographer packed up her equipment and lit a cigarette.

I drove back to the Olema Inn, seeing a bobcat scatter across the road into the tall, dry grass and weeds, and hawks perched on fence posts as the night came on fully. I had a mango salad at the inn's restaurant, then sat in jeans, T-shirt, light sweater, and loafers on the side porch, drinking a glass of wine, watching swallows and the occasional bat zigzag and careen after insects. In the cooling night air the fragrance of a nearby stand of eucalyptus was deeply—and familiarly—stirring, and I felt gratified that the day had gone as it had. Then, at around eight-thirty, a rattletrap 1960s Volvo, with two hubcaps missing and a faulty muffler, pulled into the parking area, and when its driver crouched out I saw that it was the photographer. She carried her tripod camera and a leather satchel, her boots slung around her neck, and she was barefoot. When she stepped up to the porch I said, “You were with that dolphin, weren't you?”

“Oh, that was you,” she said. “Yeah, I noticed somebody up the beach. I was annoyed. I prefer to be out there alone. I'm usually out there alone.”

“Join the club.”

She reached out her hand for me to shake and said, “I'm Halley, last name's spelled S-h-a-g-r-a-n—pronounced
chagrin.
”

I laughed and introduced myself. “Does your last name explain why you're drawn to sad sights like that dolphin?”

“Wow, that's pretty funny,” she said. “And pretty personal. But you know what? That dolphin was definitely not a sad sight for me.”

“How so?”

“Because death happens in nature and I like to take pictures of it. The way I look at it, the beaches are always full of such news—natural-history news, I call it. The dolphin was like an obituary from the sea. There's hundreds a day.”

“Interesting how you put things.”

“Interesting or not, that's my thinking. Know what else? I don't mind calling myself a nature photographer. I don't mind if somebody buys a photograph of mine because they enjoy nature. That's cool. Life for me has a spiritual affirmation and so does death. That was quite an earful, huh?”

“I'd like to see some of your work.”

“I only use black-and-white film. And you know what?—and I can't verify this—I only dream in black and white, I'm pretty sure. My husband, Sonam, says that in a past life I was colorblind. He tends to say stuff like that. He's a Buddhist. I mean a Tibetan Buddhist. I mean a born-and-raised-in-Tibet Buddhist.”

“Did you meet in Tibet?”

Halley sat on the bench beside me; an acrid whiff of what had to be the dolphin snapped in my nostrils, and when Halley noticed me noticing this, she said, “Yeah, well, I was just going up for a bath. But to answer your question, no, we didn't meet in Tibet. But we got married there. No, I'd been teaching a introduction to photography class on the UC Berkeley campus. Sonam was late for a lecture he was giving in physiology, he'd got lost trying to find the lecture room, and he wandered in. I was in the darkroom, and one of my students sent him in to get directions from me, but I didn't know where his lecture room was either. He had the wrong part of campus, I told him that much. But that's how we first met. After that he came to the darkroom, like, twenty days in a row or something.”

“Thanks for telling me. It's a good story.”

“Sonam and I live in Mendocino, but I'm photographing here at Point Reyes so often, it's sort of a home away from home. My husband has a medical practice that keeps him very busy.”

“What kind of medicine does he practice?”

“Regular old general practitioner, though I guess that's kinda rare these days, huh? He went to medical school in London. A lot of people hear that my husband's Tibetan and right away they figure he's into some kind of freaky-deaky medicine. And sure, he tells patients to try alternative medicines of all sorts if they want. Of course he does. And he's even studying serious acupuncture. But he always wanted just to put out a shingle like in a Norman Rockwell painting, you know? Except our little family joke is, Norman Rockwell never painted Tibetans.”

“What does Sonam think of your photographs—that's personal, I know.”

“Why not ask him yourself? You could have dinner with us.”

“That's nice of you, but the restaurant here's a bit pricey.”

“How about that little white clapboard place near the turnoff to Inverness?”

“Pretty late for dinner, isn't it, or not?”

“How's nine o'clock—they serve till nine-thirty. Come on. Sonam will be pleased. He says I'm an antisocial hermit.
Hermitess.
”

With obviously long-practiced dispatch, Halley unraveled her dreadlocks into a waterfall of hair and said, “I'm surprised a seagull didn't fall out.”

I went up to my room to put on a pair of socks and grab a jacket. My notebook was open to that favorite Robert Frost line from “A Servant to Servants,” “the best way out is always through,” which had become a kind of talisman along the journey from Mathilde to the murder-suicide to this moment in room 1 of the Olema Inn.

When I sat down to dinner with Halley and Sonam, every table in the restaurant was occupied. The menu was in French and English, and our waitress alerted us to her limited patience after a long night of waiting tables. “If any of you are in the mood to practice your French,” she said, “I'm not.” Sonam ordered in French and so did Halley, but I did not have the language. Our table was on the slatwood veranda near a eucalyptus tree.

Sonam was fifteen years older than Halley and at least five inches shorter. He was neatly dressed in grey jeans, starched white shirt, penny loafers. He had a handsome face and short-cropped black hair and sported round tortoiseshell glasses. “Halley thinks I look like Mr. Moto in these specs,” he said. We chatted about this and that. Sonam asked what sort of books I wrote, and when our food arrived Halley said, “Sonam, our new friend here asked me what you thought of my photographs.”

Frowning in an exaggerated way, Sonam said, “Well, do you mean my opinion of her technical skill, the aesthetic quality of her pictures? Or what it's like to have a house full of—let's see: seagulls torn to shreds, festering whale carcasses, seals with hollowed-out eye sockets, ummm, what else? Oh, yes, there's an eviscerated bobcat, vultures poking their heads inside a mule deer—and Halley told me you saw her hanging around a dolphin today.”

I set down my fork and stared at my food as if I'd lost my appetite. “Maybe I shouldn't have asked the question,” I said, and there was laughter all around.

“Actually, Halley sees herself as a . . . Darling, how do you say it? A chronicler of transitional states.”

“Meaning,” I said, “you think the dolphin was on its way to being reincarnated.”

“Yep,
transitional
could mean that,” Halley said. “But it could also mean just turning into organic stuff, you know? Food for beetles. Seagulls turning it to shit that drops on your windshield. It's all pretty straightforward, don't you think?”

“As for the artistic part,” Sonam said, “I'm her greatest admirer.”

“By the way, what were you doing out there today?” Halley asked me. “Are you a
birder,
God help us. Probably not the sort I hate, because you had those cheapo field glasses.”

“No, not that sort of birder, if I understand you correctly. Though I'd love a better pair of binoculars, that's for sure.”

I suppose I could have delicately alluded, in a way that might honestly address Halley's question but at the same time indicate my discomfort in dwelling on the subject, to the haunting incident that had occurred in my house. In turn I could have said that I'd come out to Point Reyes to lose myself among shore birds, to walk every trail until I could hardly walk another step, to empty out physically and mentally, then get filled again. But for goodness sake, if the best way out was always through, it didn't mean one couldn't afford to take a moment away from the effort. Besides, I thought that to foist all of that bleakness on these kind, engaging folks at our candlelit table, with a full moon rising, during such a get-to-know-each-other meal, would be, as we used to say in the sixties, too heavy.

But I'd had a little too much wine and said, “Out at McClures Beach I wanted to be invisible for a few hours, go out there on the rocks, all that sun and big waves, and sit right next to an oystercatcher, and it would look up every so often, sensing something was there, but then go about being an oystercatcher again.” And I don't know what got into me, but I added, “Amen.”

My existential riff had the effect that is sometimes the case when something of staggering pretentiousness or insufferable sentimentality, however genuine, is spoken: it caused an eyes-cast-to-table silence for a moment. Then Sonam ordered espresso for himself and Halley.

“You know,” Halley said, “I might have two or three photographs of oystercatchers. Sonam, would you mind looking in my studio when you get home tomorrow? You know, the photographs are filed away in alphabetical order. If you find oystercatchers, bring them back Friday so our friend here can have a look.”

After dinner I sat again on the porch of the inn; the late-night air drew out the fragrance of eucalyptus even more intensely. I thought of Nabokov's phrase “memory perfume.” The inn's resident, almost lynx-sized cat, Truffle, bounded up onto my lap, a very well-fed animal, and settled in nicely. She allowed me to comb her back with my fingers, and whenever I made the effort to lift and set her down, she dug in with her claws. I quickly understood that this cat would decide when she was through with me.

Mulling it over, I was not so sure I wanted to see photographs of dead oystercatchers just when I was becoming so engaged with the lively oystercatcher I'd seen at McClures Beach and hoped to see much of during the next ten days. Perhaps Sonam wouldn't find the photographs. I hoped he wouldn't.

But sitting in the eucalyptus breeze, feeling Truffle's growl-purr roll in a kind of gentle, seismic wave from head to tail, with nothing to do but wait for the familiar, advanced signs of insomnia, I thought hard and with some uneasiness about why I had been so willing to subscribe to Halley's reductionist philosophy of life and death. Why couldn't I muster up a response that was more natural to my character, something caustic, or at least probing? Why didn't I confirm, if only in my private thoughts, that death in fact is not “all pretty straightforward”? Of course we'd really just met, but that was not it. Maybe Halley's platitudes offered solace, in the way a beautiful landscape can offer solace. If you are fortunate and willing, you can live inside it with perfect equanimity.

At dinner I'd been impressed by Halley's phrase “eddies of wet feathers” to describe what she was reminded of when she looked at her photograph of a dead crow she'd recently developed in a darkroom in Point Reyes Station. When I went up to my room at about two
A.M.
, that photograph was leaning against my door. Taped to it was a note:

See the moon? It's
about 1:30
A.M.
now and in an hour I'm heading out to McClures Beach. Sonam may or may
not go with me. Nobody's supposed to be out there at night but you can only see certain
things at night. So that's where I'll be—since you seem interested in my work. By the way,
oystercatchers sometimes are active at night, if there's a big moon and so on, little known
fact. But I've seen that. Halley.

Generous invitation, I thought, and sat down on the overstuffed chair in my room, switched on the floor lamp, and looked at the photograph. I saw the eddies: three stilled whorls of black feathers on the crow's mangled body, and each appeared to be sculpted by a water spout. Studying the picture, I went from being almost repelled by the eerie vortexes to imagining what a mercy it must have been for the bird to blink out of consciousness, to perish, all evidence indicating (“Almost every bone was broken,” Halley had said) that the crow had been tumultuously storm-tossed, spun, and plummeted to the ground. In other words, I was beginning to see things from Halley's point of view, and in that I found a reprieve, because I was sick and tired of my own morbid distress about life and death and what felt like my painful dislocation of soul.