Hatred of the Ocean

Affrayed in the old Edmund Spenser sense

I have a confession to make: I dislike large bodies of water. It’s not exactly a phobia, more of a general indifference to aquatic activities—boating, swimming, going to the beach, that sort of thing—a matter of preference rather than antipathy: I’d rather have my feet planted firmly beneath my legs. But there are other times, especially when I look out at the Pacific Ocean, when disinclination turns into a visceral disgust. The sight of breaking surf can overwhelm me, can turn my stomach, even if I’m dry as a desert.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a childhood incident to blame for this. When I was small, no more than five or six, my family visited my paternal grandmother in Sonoma County. We took an outing to the coast, to a beach at the mouth of the Russian River. I remember loving the lush hills as they rolled down steep into the water, imagined seeing dinosaurs there. I ran about when we got to the beach, as kids do. If everything had gone fine back then, I might still have a normal appreciation for the sea and the seashore.

But then a wave—a sweeper wave as they’re called— knocked me off my feet, dragged me into the river, and pinned me against the sandy bank. I couldn’t have been more than a minute or two underwater, but time dilated into a miserable eternity, the flow of the river and surging waves holding me in stasis, which was fortunate, since might otherwise I might have been washed out to sea. It was the first time I felt a helplessness that wasn’t purely infantile.

About ten years later, when I was first reading Big Sur by Jack Kerouac, I found that antipathy towards the Pacific mirrored in the novel. Kerouac’s alter ego, Jack Duluoz, stays alone at a friend’s cabin by the ocean, hoping that solitude will help him cope with his new-found fame and worsening alcoholism. Of course, no such thing happens, and the violent nature Duluoz witnesses around him rasps at his already unsteady nerves:

There's a noise. I know can only grow louder as I sink down and for fear how loud it can grow. I stop and listen, it rises up crashing mysteriously at me from a raging battle among dark things, wood or rock or something cracked, all smashed, all wet black sunken earth danger—I'm afraid to go down there—I am affrayed in the old Edmund Spenser sense of being frayed by a whip, and a wet one at that—A slimy green dragon racket in the bush—An angry war that doesn’t want me pokin’ around—It's been there a million years and it doesn’t want me clashing darkness with it—It comes snarling from a thousand crevasses and monster redwood roots all over the map of creation.

For that passage and others like it, Big Sur remains my favorite Kerouac novel, maybe my favorite piece of Beat writing in general. It captures the terrifying aspect of nature unveiled better than Kerouac’s West Coast compatriots ever could. As much as I vibed—and still vibe—with the Zen-inflected anarchist deep ecology of Gary Snyder, his writing reflects a mind thoroughly habituated to the landscape surrounding him. It takes a conservative French-Canadian from Massachusetts, an alien in that environment, to convey the alien beauty of the Pacific.

A week back, I wasn’t looking for a rapprochement with the ocean, but I think I found it. I was on the West Coast for family business, helping my dad recover from abdominal surgery. Those duties, winter weather, and writing obligations kept me confined to Vancouver, Washington, a medium-sized city adjacent to Portland, Oregon, where I grew up and where my parents still live. But towards the end of my stay, spring suddenly broke, and I wanted to get out and be in a place where the season was even more apparent, where I could hike and enjoy the drama of the earth that’s largely absent on the East Coast.

Against my usual inclinations, I decided, I don’t know why, to head for the coast. Driving through Portland, I headed west on the Sunset Highway—such an evocative name for a road—towards the town of Cannon Beach. Noontime was pleasant there. The temperature had risen into the sixties, but since my outing fell on a weekday, and the proper tourist season was not yet underway, the usual crowds of tourists were cut down to more manageable size, mostly geriatrics with the occasional geriatric Millennial parent, their young children and their geriatric rescue dogs in tow.

I’ll admit to some regional snobbery. The Pacific landscape is so much better in Oregon and Washington than it is in California—fewer people, taller mountains, longer beaches, less of a premium on living, less integration with global popular culture. But I was puzzled by that regional snobbery even as I felt it. I disliked the ocean, right? Snobbery doesn’t require appreciation of its object, only a hierarchy of taste, but on this trip, I felt something novel: an affection for where I was.

I chose to hike Cape Falcon. The trail is easy: 4.5 miles out-and-back from US Hwy 101. It takes you through mature western redcedar and Sitka spruce, hugging the steep shoreline, tender green sword fern and skunk cabbage in the understory. Recent rain and rare coastal snow had made the trail muddy but still passable. I brought along a cassette recorder and was narrating the “Appendix to the Appendix” section of Jean Paul’s The Parson in Jubilee as I walked. The other hikers I encountered were relatively friendly, some even saying hello, a nice contrast to the taciturn type that frequents the trails on weekdays.

I narrated my Jean Paul until the recorder’s batteries were drained; I took time-lapse smartphone movies of the fog rolling in from the ocean. I began to feel at ease in this place. The cliffs below me were several hundred feet high, leading down to huge breakers that crashed against the rocks incessantly. A war of more than a million years was being fought all around me, but as long as I kept myself at a comfortable distance, I could play, temporarily at least, the neutral party.