Author: Judy Hanawalt (Page 11 of 23)

The Bay Area. That’s where we live, and that body of water, the San Francisco Bay, defines us by where we live in relation to it–East Bay, South Bay, the sunny side of the bay, or through the tunnel. Some say you don’t live in the Bay Area unless you can see the bay, others contend that as long as you have a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station nearby, you’re in. San Franciscans would gladly disown all but those who live between San Francisco State University and the Golden Gate Bridge, I suspect. It’s a big bay, and there are many communities perched around it claiming it as their own.

I love looking at the bay. It changes constantly, reflecting the sky in blue or gray or orange, sometimes choppy and sometimes glassy, always alive with activity. The ocean just beyond the Golden Gate Bridge sends cooling fog over the hills and through the gate. It never gets old, it never fades into the background. It owns this area.

When someone is talking about being here, they often refer to their location as “in the bay.” Not literally in the water, but in the area defined by this body of water that is home to Angel and Alcatraz and Treasure/Yerba Buena Islands, is spanned by six bridges, and is host to cruise ships, sail boats, whales, sharks, kayakers, dolphins, Dungeness crabs, tour boats, ferries, and container ships, to name a few.

I’ve lived most of my time here on the edges of the bay: throwing a ball in for my dog to fetch, walking out on the pier, sharing a sunset drink at a bayside bar, walking on the Bay Trail, or simply enjoying the scent of the sea from a distance. The Target parking lot always has a brisk, salty breeze that reminds me how close the water is.

Recently, I actually got in the bay. Really in it–hair wet, salt in my mouth, all the way in the bay.

After a guided kayaking adventure in the Monterey Bay over the summer, I decided I wanted to do it more often. Kayaking is a relatively easy entry to water sports; there’s not much set-up or clean-up, and you don’t have to be at the peak of conditioning to enjoy it.

In order to feel safe kayaking without a guide in the future, I signed my husband and I up for a class at the Berkeley Marina. I thought later that a little less thorough introduction to the sport would have been sufficient, but since we signed up and paid, we went ahead with it. I had an idea that there might be some instruction about what to do if you became separated from your kayak, but I tucked the thought away, not really wanting to engage with that possibility.

Our instructor was kind and easy-going, talking us through the basics on land, helping us find the right wetsuits and personal flotation devices, and giving us straps to keep our sunglasses on. I really should have headed for the hills then.

We lugged our kayaks to the pier, got in to the wobbly vessels without incident, and headed out to paddle around the marina. I was just getting comfortable when our leader called us to circle up and he told us how to get back into our kayaks if we capsized when we were with a partner. Fine. Then he said we would all do it. My stomach began to churn. I knew there was no way I could haul myself out of the water into a rocking boat with my weak arms.

The moment of truth came. I had to do it. The instructor seemed confident that I could. I took a breath, rocked to the left, my mind screaming, “Really?!? You’re doing this?!?” and next thing I knew I was sputtering in the cold water, flipping my kayak, and following the steps with my partner to return to my seat in the boat. Somehow, I did it. Relief.

We got out of the water for lunch, and I was feeling pretty good. I had done the thing I dreaded. There was one more thing I dreaded more, but I was trying not to think about it. Looking back on it, I can’t believe I didn’t bolt then. I’m sure everyone would have understood.

Back in the water, we paddled around some more. We circled up, and this time learned how to put what looked like an inflatable pool toy on the end of our paddle to use in a “self rescue” if we capsized alone. I promised the instructor that I would never kayak alone. I confessed that this time, there really was no way my tired arms would get me out of the water and into a rocking kayak. He laughed. “You can do it–visualize it,” he said. My husband had taken the plunge first, and called out encouragement to me.

Once again, against every instinct, I rocked my kayak hard and held my breath, kicked out of the seat, came to the surface and flipped my boat over. This time, I paused for a moment, caught my breath, dipped my head back in the water to get my hair out of my face, and started the self-rescue procedure.

It involves throwing a leg over the paddle, which is floating in the water on one end and on top of the kayak on the other end, heaving up onto the kayak, and carefully spinning around to slide your legs into the boat, then somehow balancing while you get your bottom into the seat. I got to the spinning part once, lost my balance and went into the water again and had to start over. The second time, somehow, I did it.

The sense of relief was complete this time. It was over.

To finish up the class, we paddled out of the marina in into the open bay. Once outside the calm of the marina, the chop and swell of the bay felt wild. “Roll with it!” our instructor told us. “Stay loose!” I was working hard to relax and not tense up.

It was amazing, it was thrilling, it was hard. I was on the edge of panic but trying to push it down. I was terrified I’d capsize. My husband looked at ease and confident; he assured me that we wouldn’t flip in the waves. The instructor paddled up beside me with encouraging words.

We paddled under the Berkeley Pier and around a rocky outcropping into more protected water and made for the dock. My arms and legs were screaming for a break. My hips felt broken. After pulling up to it and tossing my paddle up, I rolled onto the dock and collapsed onto my back. We made it.

There were 10 of us in the class. We started out as polite strangers, but by the end of the day, I felt a bond with them. We had rooted for each other. They were witness to perhaps my worst hair day ever (I literally gasped when I got home and saw myself in the mirror). We had all taken the plunge together and lived to tell.

I can only hope that if I ever have to rescue myself in a real capsize situation, adrenaline will somehow carry the day.

Sundays are quiet days at our house, and even if we have plans, they feel lighter than plans for other days. White wine and Sunday afternoons go together. It’s a reflective, day-dreaming day.

As a child, Sunday meant eating our main meal right after church, usually hearty traditional fare, and after our time around the table, the rest of the day was open, with napping encouraged. The smell of a roast in the oven, cooked to pull-apart tenderness along with potatoes and carrots, takes me back to childhood Sundays. The evening meal would be small and casual, maybe leftovers.

I still hold loosely to the tradition, making lunch the big meal of the day. It’s not often a roast or a whole, stuffed chicken; those kinds of feasts are reserved for company or holidays now.  I like to take the rest of the day off from cooking, telling the kids it’s a free-for-all night. Lately, I make popcorn for an evening snack to enjoy with a favorite television show. Downton Abbey was the perfect Sunday vibe for me, although Walking Dead worked too when the kids all wanted to gather ‘round and watch together.

Weekdays are filled with work and school, meetings and appointments. Saturdays are relaxing, but usually busy with recreation or catching up, doing the tasks that were neglected in the busyness of the week. Sunday, for us, is different. It’s a day of rest.

This kind of pause in the craziness of life can be hard to find. Sunday is a work day for many people, or a second Saturday that gets crammed with events and chores. When I was young, church, Sunday dinner and a day of rest was a cultural standard. Shops were closed, or at least closed early, and most people took the day off from life-as-usual. That’s not true anymore.

That doesn’t mean we don’t still need it.

A place with a view of water–lake, bay, ocean, even a river–can cast a Sunday spell on me on any day of the week. Gazing at water, it’s easy to get caught up in a reverie, to let my mind roam, to allow creative thoughts bubble to the surface. It can be a problem-solving space for me too; when I stop and listen, hurts or concerns that have been nipping around the edges of my mind have room to stretch out so I can look and them and deal with them.

I don’t think I’m alone; Herman Melville says, “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.”

There’s something about it: the lullaby motion of waves and currents, the wavy distortion of the secrets hiding in the depths, the tension on the surface that holds some objects up to float and pulls others down to sink. It’s mysterious and open at the same time, welcoming and forbidding, gentle and overwhelming. Just thinking about it gets my mind swirling.

If you can’t take a whole day to rest, maybe you can find some water to gaze at. Ishmael, in Melville’s Moby Dick, confesses that “whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

We don’t need to cast off in a whaling vessel–that turned out to be stressful in Ishmael’s case–but the instinct to get to a body of water, where meditation can calm and soothe our overloaded, frazzled 21st century minds, is a good one.

From my front window, I can see container ships coming and going under the Golden Gate Bridge. Usually they are heading for the Oakland loading docks, those giant four-legged cranes that look like the walking battle tanks from Star Wars.

On the way back to sea, the ships seem to drift past Alcatraz Island–looking almost the same size as the island as they pass–then float north of the bridge and  loop back around to exit the gate. I suppose they are getting into the deeper lanes or a sea-going current as they meander out of the bay and back to the open water.

My photographer son wanted to use his large-format film camera to capture images around the Golden Gate, and decided to get a shot of a container ship as it passed under the bridge. We walked onto the bridge with a container ship in sight in the distance.  We tried to gauge where it would pass  under us as it moved toward the bridge after making its turn around Alcatraz.

As it came closer, we realized we were in the wrong spot, and tried to correct our position. We could see now that it was moving fast. We ran, dodging tourists, joggers and baby carriages, trying to get in position to catch a picture of it before it slipped out to sea.  We missed it.

We spotted another one coming, and stood where the last one had gone under us, making adjustments as it got closer. This time, we were there, right over top of it as it passed through. Camera at the ready, my son tried to focus and capture the image of the top of the containers rushing below us. It proved much harder to get a good, clear shot than he anticipated. All the effort resulted in pictures of colorful, blurry boxes in dark water.

The imagery of time as water flowing under a bridge is a time-worn cliché. It’s used so much, though, because it captures the feeling we have that time is a slippery, unmanageable, wild thing. Difficult to harness, impossible to stop. Unpredictable, like floods or droughts. Rushing by us into the past with alarming regularity and speed.

Aside: Why does the Steve Miller Band say, “time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future?” Isn’t it going into the past? Or is it? Does he mean it’s carrying us into the future? Does time carry us, or slip past us?

My day on the bridge made me think about how time seems to be moving at a manageable pace until you get right up close and realize that, even if you run, it’s hard to have enough time to focus and capture the moment as it passes.

What’s to be done?

James Taylor says “the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.” That sounds right. “Nobody knows how we got to the top of the hill. But since we’re on our way down, we might as well enjoy the ride.”

My instinct is to find the place where time seems to pass the most slowly and try to hang out there, in the moments when I am engaged and aware of all that’s going on around me, really living my minutes. Often those slow-motion moments are not the best ones, though; they might be the times I’m watching from a distance, the opposite of really experiencing the minutes, or the hard times, like the slow, shapeless days spent in the hospital with a loved one, waiting for the doctor to make his rounds, or the nurse to come with the next dose of pain medication.

There are some places where the slow and the good intersect, like at the cabin,  or on a road-trip, or on a snow day (if the power stays on)–bubbles of time that keep the good stuff in and the busy, scary, hectic stuff out.  These aren’t generally the  exciting moments; the times that you laugh hard or get your heart pumping are the hard ones to capture, coming fast when and where you don’t expect them. Maybe the best is losing track of time, like I do when I am immersed in a book or in writing, or  working on a project.

I would love to figure out how to make my own journey through time as enjoyable as possible, taking in all the beautiful and satisfying experiences that life brings me. A nagging thought keeps tapping me on the shoulder, and other images catch in my peripheral vision.

The moments of the people around me affect me too–my neighbors around the bay whose experience of life is so different from mine. How do I incorporate their experience into my own, or begin to make sense of the dichotomy? I can’t pick one small droplet or one little bubble in the river of time to ride happily while people in the water next to me are drowning.

What to do with that?

Here at the start of my 31 day reflection about water, I’m looking forward to diving in and remembering time past, reflecting on how water and imagery of water flows through so many aspects of my life, and discovering where all this thinking will lead.