PEOPLE WHO LIVE BY THE SEA: NOW I LIVE BY THE MOUNTAINS

People Who Live

by Erica Jong

People who live by the sea
understand eternity.
They copy the curves of the waves,
their hearts beat with the tides,
& the saltiness of their blood
corresponds with the sea.

They know that the house of flesh
is only a sandcastle
built on the shore,
that skin breaks
under the waves
like sand under the soles
of the first walker on the beach
when the tide recedes.

Each of us walks there once,
watching the bubbles
rise up through the sand
like ascending souls,
tracing the line of the foam,
drawing our index fingers
along the horizon
pointing home.

"People Who Live" by Erica Jong, from Becoming Light. © Harper Perennial, 1981. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

I love this poem by Erica Jong. I confess to an off-on relation with her because she was a early and fairly strident feminist who often made me angry and uncomfortable mostly because I was not ready for the rhetoric, maybe because of the guilt she made me feel--perhaps this was her self-appointed role!  Whatever! Enough said about that because this poem is impressive.

The sentiments and ideas really touched me in lots of ways.  I lived many years at or near the Connecticut shoreline. And, yes, the sea did help me better understand the concept of eternity. Every time I was on the beach or in a boat, my mind expanded to contemplative thoughts--ponderings--about what all the earth's seas must contain: living things like whales and krill and manta rays and dolphins and tuna and starfish; the inanimate contents like newly formed structures where tectonic plates meet and clash and slide over or under each other; fortunes in precious metals and gems that have been formed miles below the bottom of the sea and erupted out; or sunken U-boats and galleons, the bones of millions of sailors and swimmers and suicide and murder victims, the currents of fresh water mixing with the brine.  What stories the sea would tell, if it could, of what was hidden there, dissolved there, floating there.  I would love to ask it where its water came from originally and why it maintains its salinity, its buoyancy, its clarity, its softness when poked with my finger and its rock hardness when I misjudge the entry angle of my  "showing-off-jack-knife-dive" and hit the surface  flat.

Exposing "sore-wisdom," Jong teaches that I will learn that the "house of flesh is only a sandcastle." What a wonderful image.  And it complements the knowledge I gained from Professor Renton  who teaches my video geology class ("The Nature of the Earth: An Introduction to Geology" available from The Great Courses). The mountains I see out my windows are, of course, subject to the same wasting forces as the sand castle, except that the process is infinitely slower--bringing to mind at least another hint about the nature of eternity--a concept that takes on meaning for me when I consider the 14,000 ft. peaks I can see out my window and know that over endless time, natural processes (frost, thaw, wind, rain, snow, heat. plant roots, etc.) will eventually flatten them out and eventually wash their rock, now fragments of sand, into the sea.  And my own "house of flesh." Well if rock turns to sand and mountains are flattened, then...Eternity begins.

The processes of creation and destruction on the shore are generally more observable than here in the hard rock mountains because the changes are comparatively rapid. But in both cases, mountains and shoreline, the primary agents of change are the same--water as liquid and solid, temperature, wind, vegetation, aging or the passage of time. All of which  calls to mind the people I know best, including myself, in whose bodies and lives and relationships, (as well as biological processes), change is constant as well--some of which is observable, some less so; some slow, some rapid, some creating and sustaining, some destroying.

Finally, the recognition that we only "walk t/here once" has come to me with blunt force only in my later years.  I heard and understood this truth as a young man when it really had little existential meaning for me; but now, as I look in the mirror or see old photographs, it does; and I wonder if it is too late, if I have traveled  too far down the beach, to make constructive use of my a-ha moment. Those who love me say it's not too late, and they urge me on.

In any case, I marvel at the tenacity and fragility and mutability of all the seen and unseen forces that have made--and continues to make me...Me, and you...You.

PS:  Just read the final column written by Marina Keegan,  a '12 graduate of Yale, and published by the Yale Daily News just after she was killed in an automobile wreck. Here's the except I read. And I feel shamed to have felt that "it might be too late for me..."

"What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it's too late to do anything is comical. It's hilarious. We're graduating college. We're so young. We can't, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it's all we have."[my emphasis]

I confess that it's hard for me at 75 to keep and nourish my "sense of possibility."  However, I do stand corrected by this wise young woman, and will try again.

MEMORIAL DAY: DULCE ET DECORUM EST PRO PATRIA MORI

Memorial Day is always a sad weekend for me, especially so since I moved to Colorado--away from my Connecticut family--in 1997.  For more than 30 years, Memorial Day weekends were a time for family gatherings, usually at Sachems Head, Guilford, Connecticut,  at my wife's family's homestead on Long Island Sound. What a beautiful, idyllic site--the wide expanse of the Sound dotted with sailboats, whitecaps, gulls diving and shrieking, the smell of clams roasting on the beach mixing with the salty aroma of hot dogs and hamburgers smoking on the charcoal grill. My wife's extended  family attended in droves, so so this was a time to laugh, tell tall tales, show off new babies and spouses and "dates,"  and do lots of catching up on general family happenings.

Presiding over the event were two formidable women, sisters, Millie and Winnie,  nee Gustafson (full blooded Swedes),  who had married Harrison Stevens and Carleton Winslow, consummate New Englanders and first cousins. These women, like their mother Ida Carleson Gustafson (a former premier "presider" at these events with her husband Art), were born with "food prep for mass gatherings" as part of their DNA. They and their female children (same DNA) covered the tables with endless supplies of deviled eggs, fruit salads, potato salads, cold cuts, sliced onions, olives, mustards and mayonnaise, catsup and chili sauce, pickles, relishes, grilled burgers and dogs with all the fixin's, pies and cakes and cookies, iced tea, soda, beer and as much bourbon and scotch as the occasion demanded.

There were Frisbees to be spun, rocks to be thrown at imaginary targets on nearby tree trunks  or hurled with shoulder-dislocating strength to see who could hit the water just off the distant beach, occasional footballs and baseballs to be tossed around, and a homespun, competitive family contest that involved  a racket-hit tennis ball soaring skyward, almost out of sight, and then its return to earth in the spotty fickle breezes testing even the most keen-eyed "catcher" below--especially toward dusk when tennis balls were easily confused with darting bats.  These were emotionally warm and memorable halcyon days indeed.

So now, living in Colorado, away from all that family, on Memorial Days I feel mostly empty and alone, a little sad as I reminisce about those "good old days." I try to put them in their place among other memorabilia on my mental shelves. As balm, I slip easily back to a trip that I took on my fiftieth birthday with my brother in law, Tom, who was turning forty the same week. I had been reading a lot of history about World War I, so I planned a European trip for us to view some battlefields of the Great War (an oxymoron if I ever heard one).

From Paris we drove East to Verdun, stopping at military cemeteries along the way. We saw the final resting places of hundreds of young men, most of whom were less than twenty when their lives were cut off, boys who were adolescents really, the age of the students I taught in prep schools. The kids in these graves (because we were touring the Western Front) came mostly from America, England and her colonies, France, Germany, Russia, and Italy. We saw only a minute part of evidence (what could be found at least)  of the carnage that produced the detritus of war.

The total figures for war deaths in that conflict are staggering, mind-boggling.

To wit:

"The 'Great War', which began on 28 July 1914 with Austria-Hungary's declaration of war with Serbia, and which ended with the German armistice of 11 November 1918, produced a vast number of casualties and deaths - and similarly vast numbers of missing soldiers.

The precise numbers remain shrouded in the passing of time compounded by the incompleteness of available records.  In the heat of action accurate records were not always kept, and where they were, these were not uncommonly lost in subsequent actions, such were the conditions of trench warfare.
Thus the figures reproduced below cannot be regarded as definitive but are a fair reflection of the scale of losses country by country.

Note too that these statistics reflect military casualties only; no reliable figures are available for civilian casualties throughout the world.  Attributing civilian casualties to the effects of war is a subjective process at best; the scale of the First World War certainly resulted in an absence of even the most approximate figures for affected nations.
Caveats aside - on to the figures:

Country	Dead	Wounded	Missing	Total
Africa	10,000	-	-	10,000
Australia	58,150	152,170	-	210,320
Austria-Hungary	922,000	3,600,000	855,283	5,377,283
Belgium	44,000	450,000	-	494,000
Britain	658,700	2,032,150	359,150	3,050,000
Bulgaria	87,500	152,390	27,029	266,919
Canada	56,500	149,700	-	206,200
Caribbean	1,000	3,000	-	4,000
France	1,359,000	4,200,000	361,650	5,920,650
Germany	1,600,000	4,065,000	103,000	5,768,000
Greece	5,000	21,000	1,000	27,000
India	43,200	65,175	5,875	114,250
Italy	689,000	959,100	-	1,424,660
Japan	300	907	3	1,210
Montenegro	3,000	10,000	7,000	20,000
New Zealand	16,130	40,750	-	56,880
Portugal	7,222	13,751	12,318	33,291
Romania	335,706	120,000	80,000	535,706
Russia	1,700,000	5,000,000	-	6,700,000
Serbia	45,000	133,148	152,958	331,106
South Africa	7,000	12,000	-	19,000
Turkey	250,000	400,000	-	650,000
USA	58,480	189,955	14,290	262,72"

Tom and I finally staggered into Verdun and took the measure of what had transpired there. It was even more grotesque than I remembered, more horrifying than the accounts in my history books:

"Verdun resulted in 698,000 battlefield deaths (362,000 French and 336,000 German combatants), an average of 70,000 deaths for each of the ten months of the battle.^[5] It was the longest and one of the most devastating battles in the First World War and the history of warfare."

Returning West along the trench lines from Verdun to the English Channel, Tom and I stopped to view the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge, the resting place of more than 10,000 Canadian boys and men who were killed in three days fighting over a relatively miniscule parcel of barely-elevated land. Their deaths had been preceded months before by the demise of several hundred thousand French and British boys and men. None of these people would ever whistle a tune, or see their homes again. We were on sacred ground, once killing fields.

When we began our European adventure, Tom and I were both feeling a little glum and depressed about our birthdays which were blatant indicators of our advancing ages, our "over-the-hill-ness" as it were. We were feeling on the edge of being put out to pasture. After the trip, and having confronted the brute reality of the millions of deaths--and in only one war-- deaths of men and boys much younger than ourselves, we both were humbled and eternally grateful that we were still alive, that we had been given the years that we had already lived (old farts though we might be becoming), and that we still had futures to contemplate and savor. So many of those graves contained the remains of kids who did not even make it to legal voting age. I can't exchange joy of any sort about being alive for the deep sorrow I feel for those countless kids whose memory is marked only by white or gray gravestones.

So, I'm not surprised that now, in 2012,  pathos and sadness return to me; and  involuntarily my thoughts expand to include visions of other times and places, of the countless millions of men and women all over the world whose lives were cut short by other wars, and the attendant disasters they brought on; men and women who will never again able to read a book, or taste sweet milk or smell a broiling  steak, bite into a crisp apple, or to go on a picnic with their families;  and who will never have a chance to feel the ocean breezes, or see the yachts with their colorful spinnakers billowing, as they surge downwind toward finish line, hoping to hear only the report of the race committee's innocuous cannon signifying the end of the first competition of the season.