up. I wasn’t supposed to row today. I wasn’t supposed to cook today. And I’m certainly not supposed to be writing this. I can’t believe I’m losing track of days like that. It’s bad. I need to stop writing.
July 27
This business of rowing close into shore, on the border of the chop, is beginning to wear thin. I ask myself when the hell I’m going to start heading a little further out again. When am I going to head out to the smooth water where I don’t have to paddle around every minor contour change the shore makes? I lost time today. And I couldn’t use the sail, even though there was more wind, because in the chop, the outriggers I finished don’t ride very well and keep pushing me sideways. I can see more of the shore, though, it’s very beautiful. After a while, the rippling of green tundra, the seeming endlessness of same, takes on individual shape and structure. The distinct edges of willow leaves, grass blades, of infinite flower stems, come into focus. You can see all of them, sameness becomes unique. And then suddenly, something breaks the spell. Because you’re concentrating on edges, you almost don’t notice the irregularity. Today, it was a bleached whale skeleton on a shell beach. It must have been at least one winter old because it was past being picked clean; the bones had the dull softness of driftwood. I beached the kayak alongside it and walked over, shells crunching under my bare feet, making me think suddenly of Marie’s parents’ house in Florida, whose driveway also crunches.
Its ribs came about level with my shoulders. I grabbed two and shook. They were firm, warm; they fit my hands well. I wondered what kind of a paddle they’d make. It was a bit early for lunch, but I went back to my boat anyway, grabbed two power bars and a bag of dried apricots, and returned to the whale. I climbed into its rib cage and sat on a piece of driftwood that had lodged in there during some distant high tide, and carefully leaned back against the spine. I was looking out at the mountains, south towards the sun, which danced along the edge of my vision. The view was like sitting in the very first row at the Met, the stage just above eyelevel, slightly disconcerting. But looking out at that plain of tundra, that field of green and brown broken by tall yellow flowers that waved ever so gently when wind whisked by, suddenly soothed me. For the first time since I’d been out here, I felt a sense of ownership of self. A rightness. I noticed I was smiling. I heard gulls in the air and looked up, blocking the sun with my left hand, and in a cloudless blue sky saw streaks of white dip and dive. I felt free. I exhaled, then inhaled salt and amazingly pure air, totally fresh. The wind whispered by again, and I shivered through my light polypro top. I could feel every millimeter of my skin. Everything was distant but this awesome and empty landscape.
I ate both my power bars, chewing slowly, sipping from my Nalgene in between bites and trying to keep the smile on my face. But for some reason, Marie’s voice began to echo out of the wind. She kept asking me over and over whether my move to Israel meant that this was it, that we weren’t going to be friends anymore, that I was going to only have Jewish friends from now on. I told her we could stay friends, that my embrace of my culture, of my religion, was not a rejection of anything else. “Not a rejection? Please. Every time I asked if you wanted to go out anywhere during our senior year you gave me that bullshit half-shy look and mumbled some fucking excuse about studying. But I know you were just going to the Hillel House and hanging out with the uber-dorks. Apparently, I was only your friend up until dusk.” Marie continued on about how it was only because we’d been friends so long, since summer camp, that she put up with my veto on boys spending nights in our room. She pointed out all of her attempts to save me from the fate I seemed to be choosing. “From having a shitty life living with some stuck-up pretentious Jew who kept you cloaked like a sheik’s wife,” was what she said exactly. I hung up on her. And though I knew that she wasn’t genuinely anti-Semitic, it was convenient to view her that way; and so I broke off contact.
Marie faded from the wind. The vastness before me retained its beauty, and yet, I couldn’t hold the ends of my mouth up; I couldn’t force a smile, and my eyes twitched with tears. The ocean grew louder at my back. I remembered the phrase: never turn your back on the ocean. I think it refers to wading at the beach. But despite that, my scalp began to tingle with the knowledge of it back there, like being watched, like being stalked. The sea called me. I felt its pull, its inexorable pull, and part of me was tempted to race out across it in the kayak, head straight north, sail up, no outriggers; race away from hope until, inevitably, I capsized, and then not attempt an Eskimo roll, but simply absorb the comfortable numb of frigid, saline water, drown.
But I am too afraid. I keep picturing myself stumbling onto a beach after a capsize, pulling myself out of the water and the constant breeze shocking my system into a quivering parable of painful recovery.
And so, while I sat there, trying to resist the ocean’s pull, I thought about Udi’s sorrow, the way his eyes welled over tea, thought he didn’t confess to Sara right then that it was his son who’d died. I thought about how Sara, for the first time since being ba’al t’shuvah, really wanted to touch someone, not sexually, but kindly. She wanted to reach under the table, and grasp, beneath there, hidden, his rough left hand from his lap. Though she would be taking his hand, feeling the strength in it contrast with his soft, protruding veins, he would capture hers, rub his thumb in circles over her knuckles. Though Sara would not yet know the depths of Udi’s sorrow while she fantasized about him soothing her hand, I, of course, already did; and that knowledge triggered the surging sadness lunch had threatened all along. I grabbed the ribs on either side of my log and unleashed my tears’ current, my body rigid.
After I had collected myself, blowing snot-rockets onto the shells, rubbing my eyes with my palms, I walked out onto the tundra, careful not twist an ankle, the rough material harsh on my still bare feet, and peed, which made me feel infinitely better somehow. I faced the Arctic Ocean. Blue sky faded across it into a vermillion in the north at the horizon’s crest. The sea washed thin teal water and foam over the shells. I stood up and returned to the skeleton. On the ground, near the head, I found a small bone, triangular, white and pitted by the ocean. It squeezed well in my hand. I comforted myself by knowing I would one day give it to Udi, and he would wear it on a strip of leather around his neck next to his dog tags.
I’m tired, I feel the loss of a rest day, and that I totally missed Shabbat like that wears at me. It doesn’t surprise me that I feel myself drifting further from people, from civilization, from their constructs out here. But I am disturbed to think I’m drifting further from Hashem. I would have thought that the one thing if anything I would find is my God again, out here. These are meant to be my forty days on the mountain. Instead, I’m finding images and memories, new fears.
I was feeling so devout before I left for Puget Sound. I was learning with Rebitzin Shulman in Midwood twice a week, driving in from Northport to see her. Sure, out on the San Juan Islands I spent a lot more time concentrating on my training than on my Yiddeshkeit, but I da’avened every day. I was a little shook up while there. But that’s understandable. I’d just gotten back from the unveiling in Jerusalem. It was the first time I had been back there since I left Israel late last August to finish physical rehab in New York. Marie went with me. She’d heard about my parents, and though I didn’t take her phone calls while I was in the hospital in Jerusalem, after I came back, she insisted on taking the LIRR out from the City every weekend and showing up at my porch. I couldn’t hold a grudge forever. When I went back for the unveiling, I needed her with me.
Not many people showed up. Funerals are depressing, and there are too many of them in Israel these days, all for people who shouldn’t be dead. Yet people usually do attend them, both those with a point to make and those who hope shovelfuls of dirt will cover the new holes blasted into their hearts, their psyches, their security. But few come to the unveilings eleven months later. No one wants to count the funerals they have been to during the mourning period, and so it is usually only family who show up. My grandparents, Abba’s parents, wanted to come, but Israel is a long trip. Eema’s parents died when I was much younger. I showed up, my chavrusah from the yeshiva, Chana, came, and Ari from the office, and, of course, Marie. Ari was too nice to Marie; he’s not religious. Chana distrusted her. I tried not to imagine that I’d brought my parents out here and turned them into a stone over a grave. I tried not to think that if they died on a visit to Jerusalem, I could die on