sinkingcity.as.miami.edu
Fall Behind – sinking city
I sit on a splintered wooden bench next to J on our yearly trip, overlooking the sand of the Oregon coast. All the wood in the town is always damp even in summer, and this bench will leave a mark on our pants when we get up. The bench is at a recline, one that requires trust before sitting. The bench itself is slowly leaning into the loose ground over time, so I am forced back into perspective, my stomach rounded in front of me. I wonder if I look pregnant with my middle-aged belly. I struggle now physically to traverse the beach in a way I didn’t years prior. Hips painful, tingling so I’m no longer able to bend haphazardly as I did on prior trips, to palm a flat pebble deposited at my feet by the sea, or take a photo of a bundle of daisies washed ashore in the aftermath of a celebration or a funeral. How many homecomings and goodbyes on this beach. First plunges, baptisms, and endings. Earlier in the trip, we came upon a theater down in the sand, rows made from rocks and driftwood with a clear front for the stage. For a wedding, maybe. A performance. In three months, I’ll have met the doctor’s condescending requirement for menopause. I think I’m menopausal, I told her. What makes you think that? Think? Feel. Talk to me when it’s been a year since my last period, she had said. I waddle. Cradling nothing. Years ago, I watched from a nearby hotel window on this same beach as an elk nudged a calf down the inland stream, which feeds the ocean on one end and the town on the other. Two figures behind the pack. The beach had been empty save for the elk, the hanging clump of Western gulls and brown pelicans, and a wisp of dawn fog. I noticed as they ambled that the calf had an injured leg, limping. It’d never make it, never keep up, but still the—I’m assuming—mother tried. A young lover and I once danced in the concrete flumes of water runoff north of Phoenix, in the desert off the freeway. The desert a free space, unregulated. The flumes, a man-made stream in parallel to the concrete stacks of I-17. I stumbled, drunk, and we were helped from the water by a friend who pulled each of us out in turn, an arm to yank us from the isolated swell of water, almost enough in which to drown. Now, I see the danger, though I didn’t then. I had laughed, the situation funny to me, to drown in inches of water in what looked like a water slide, not unlike the ambling structure we flung ourselves down in the Phoenix summers at the water park. Tunnels on stilts. There were so many ways to not have made it, some of them beyond measure. Now I’m looking on, from a distance, so far back from the water’s edge that I can step backward into the parking lot. Feel with my heel the line where the sand turns to asphalt. What became of that elk calf—did she grow old?
