The day Eryn and I decided to have a kid we had, it’s true, been drinking quite a lot of gin. Gin, the product of fermented juniper berries; juniper, the wild trees that surround our home in the high desert—Juniperus osteosperma, the seminal one. This is not to say that ours was an uninformed decision. On the contrary, the limes were especially fresh, and we were drinking that vacation gin in the blue bottle, so superior to the bargain hooch we hardly bother to drink back home. So it was under conditions of extreme lucidity that we resolved to procreate. As any transcendentalist or gin drinker will attest, these are the proper circumstances under which to make a sober determination about something as weighty as the eternal fate of one’s sperm or eggs.
After a decade removed from my home in the South—instead floating around in the glaring sun and desiccating wind of the Great Basin desert—I had come, as we all eventually must, back to the sea, to the cradle that Walt Whitman rightly called endlessly rocking. The sea here was the late-winter Atlantic, gray-green and rolling along the delicate strand of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where I caught my first running bluefish at age nine. If you could see the Banks from the point of view of a cloud, they would look like an attenuated brushstroke of bone-white, pencil-thin sweeps modulating with graceful doglegs and bottleneck passes—a calligraphy of sand levitating off the big island of North America, and all of it changing with every storm. My main objective in coming here was to sit on the chilly beach and stare at the world. Maybe study the tip of a surf rod stuck in a sand spike by the cooler. Maybe unwrap a C harp from a green bandana and bend a few blues lines around the booming G-ish bass of surf on sand. Maybe decide, once and for all, who would take the National League pennant in the upcoming season. Maybe resolve to have a child. It was a modest agenda, but I have always believed that with gin and time enough all problems are solvable. Or soluble: capable of being diluted with equal parts distilled juniper berries and seawater.
Hiking on an exposed expanse of bare beach in March, squinting into the wind, pelted by flying sand, buried beneath the sound of roaring waves—this is surprisingly comforting to a desert dweller. If you can excuse there being water present, the rest is keenly familiar: leaning into the gust-driven gyre that lifts surging blasts of sand, you tilt toward a deep, gray horizon of dusty green swells that rise like shiny billows of mountain mahogany and creosote bush and bitterbrush—breakers undulating like shimmering waves of Artemisa tridentata, big sage, each three-lobed, succulent leaf reminiscent of Neptune’s trident. Even the distant battleship clouds rise in broken, serrated ridgelines like desert mountains, low ranges lipping an almost overflowing world-round cup that holds both bluefish and pronghorn.
It is best to visit visited places when they are unvisited, not only to avoid the throng of fellow apes who shatter the mystic solitude necessary for problem solving—and questions of pennant races and child bearing promise to be close calls this year—but precisely because we most enjoy people’s presence in registering their absence. I’m no misanthrope, but the best kind of solitude is created when other people leave. Even in praising the beauty of a “deserted” beach we reveal the awareness that it was once inhabited—betray the recognition that its charm is created not by its beauty alone, but also by the people who might be there but aren’t, who once were there but have now deserted, blown away, moved on to crowd somebody else’s beach where the folks there won’t be able to solve a damned thing.
Melville observed that all paths lead to water—that an irresistible force constantly and silently pulls us, benighted terrestrialites, back to our watery home. Even in the desert it is true that all paths end either at a glistening spring or a pile of powdery bones. Like everything else in life, it’s a simple matter of choosing the correct fork in the canyon’s sandy, wash-bottom game trail. But there is something ineffably compelling about this limitless mass of life-filled water, roiling around the globe, pulled by moon and pushed by wind. It is a truism that we carry the ocean in our veins and tears, but that seems a thinly clinical way to measure the affiliation. My body is a gin-powered carbon-based flesh-satchel that is essentially saltwater—so far so good. But think of the wildness of the sea, with its innumerable underwater canyons and mountain peaks, its turreted and gabled reefs, its fissures and crypts, vents and vaults. Think of a myriad of minute life forms spiraling around towering spires of kelp, of the high-pressure, frigid, eternal darkness above which bright, fish-filled rivers of animated current run. Think of the battle between sperm whale and giant squid that is raging in the depths somewhere at this moment, the giant cephalopod frenetically twining its eighty-foot tentacles around the snapping jaws of a hundred-foot cetacean that is glaring, coldly, out of its tiny, bad-ass eye.
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