O N E N E S S
1
Seek the ocean
Open to its epiphanies
Rejoice in every detail
Put all in order
Then teach
To some people—like me—always having a notepad within easy reach is almost as essential as wearing clothes. Traveling, walking, sitting, sleeping, even watching TV, ideas or word passages appear and I like to journal them before they’re forgotten. They arise organically and unforced during the open moments when I’m not actively trying to think, and as such are often poignantly clear and insightful.
Upon reading them later I often think Huh?, but some passages, even a couple words, might start me on a whole new direction to solve something happening in my life. One such scribbling even led to the formation of this entire journey.
I half-awoke in the wee hours last night—my final night at the resort—and blindly scratched the above phrases into my notepad without turning on the bedside lamp or even thinking about what the phrases meant. In the morning I read those five lines I’d scribbled and felt they were somehow prescient of my next steps.
It is time to see the ocean. And not the ocean through beach homes and partiers and waters full of boats;
The ocean.
Instead of continuing west across the country, I leisurely backtracked for a couple days to the gulf city where I’d first hopped off the bus. I passed through without a stopover and continued hitchhiking east.
The first night into this new area I slept in my sleeping bag under palms and bushes, hidden fifty yards off the highway. Or rather, I didn’t sleep, thanks to the occasional traffic noise, insects, hard lumpy ground, and other minor visitations of discomfort like hearing alligators and whatever else in the swamp nearby. At mid-evening of the next day I was dropped off at the edge of a small seaside town, though from this inland side I could not yet see my elusive ocean.
Exhausted once again from a few long days of travel with little rest—exhaustion is common when you foot around this way— I walked through the outskirts of this new town, barely able to put one foot in front of the other or keep my eyelids open. You know you’re overtired when, every time you pass a small patch of grass or shade, all you can think of is that it looks like a great place to lie down and sleep.
Two adolescent boys and a girl walk toward me on the sidewalk, the tall boy bouncing a basketball and talking to the girl, the other boy fiddling with his iPod. As they neared, I stopped and held up a friendly hand.
“Can you tell me if there’s a motel anywhere nearby?”
“Sure, dude,” the basketball boy said. “Just keep goin’ this way, road goes around that bend then there’s a motel. Not good, though. Drugs and stuff, there’s been some shootings. If you go a few more blocks after that there’s a couple not-bad places. Then the other side of town, if you go over the bridge, that’s where the big tourist hotels are. They’re pretty expensive, though.” He indicated my backpack. “You want something pretty cheap, right?”
“Cheap is good. Right now if it has a bed and a door that locks, I’m so tired I’ll stay anywhere, even the drugs-and-shootings place. Thanks for your help.”
“Hey, whatever. Take it easy, dude,” he said as we all walked away from each other.
He called belatedly over his shoulder, “Be careful there, man. Don’t get talking to people there if they act all friendly. They just wanna fuck you up, take your stuff. Just stick to yourself.”
“Got it. Thanks, I appreciate it.”
I pointed a quick finger at him, accentuating that I’d taken him seriously. When I’m in a land where I don’t know what’s what, I take seriously whatever tips I receive from helpful locals, even from teens or kids. They know what’s what.
2
The manager or owner and his astonishing belly sat behind the motel’s dusty counter, watching television and eating greasy take-out chicken wings with his hands, and didn’t turn toward me when I stepped in. From the looks of the place he was probably surprised a real live tourist would actually walk through the door in cold blood.
After I said I needed a room just for myself, he glanced at me through shady eyes beneath a sparse and dandruffed comb-over, slid an old-style paper registration form across the desk, and continued watching TV and eating. I filled in the card—ink smearing in places on the chicken-fat fingerprints—then he filled in the nightly amount plus tax, I paid cash, and he slid me a room key. I was impressed that he pulled off this entire process while managing to hardly look at me, continuing to eat and watch TV, and not speaking a word. A truly unusual skill within the hospitality industry.
The motel was slightly less par than the resort I’d enjoyed a few days ago: a single building, one story, one long row of rooms. Most rooms sported garbage and items outside their doors and along their windowsills. Old white paint was peeling from the walls and doors, concrete steps and walkways were crumbling, parking lot pavement was half-missing and replaced by potholed dirt, and there were no live plants, grass, or trees anywhere on the property. Just dust and dead things. Down the line one drugged-out-looking tenant sat leaning against his open doorway, smoking.
My key didn’t work so I returned to the office, told him so, and he slid me some other key—I didn’t see where it materialized from—without a word. As I walked back to my door I passed a very pretty thirty-ish girl as she walked her bicycle toward another room with stuff piled up outside it. She wheeled the bike into her room, took another look at me with her lovely big eyes, and closed her door. Another long-term tenant, but she was so pretty and classily-dressed that she looked out of place here, like she’d just returned from working in some law firm’s office.
The second key worked—though I don’t know if that’s good news or bad. I heaved my pack on the bed and scoped out my room. About as dirty and old as I’d expected, given the exterior and the price. But standable, for one night. I don’t know how a ‘cleaned’ bathroom could have this much sand and a dead cockroach collection in the bathtub, sand in the sink and on the floor. I obeyed a presentiment to not peer between the bed sheets and instead lay my sleeping bag atop the bed for the night. Barely a half-star room, but when you’re this tired you overlook not having a mint on your pillow. And sand and cockroaches, apparently.
With zero energy to go scouting around for a restaurant, I ate an apple, crackers, a can of tuna, and water for dinner. Then I closed the drapes and flumfed back on my sleeping bag, shirtless but in sweatpants—thankfully—and watched the vintage television, which surprisingly worked.
I say ‘thankfully’ about my sweatpants because an hour later comes a sudden rattling of the doorknob—there’s no deadbolt—and the door opens. The pretty girl, with her bike, starts walking into my room.
“Oops, sorry. Wrong room,” she said, looking completely unsurprised and non-sorry and taking a long, bold look at me, then backing out again.
I simply watched, not saying a word. When the door was closed I turned back to the TV. When you’re truly exhausted and pleading for rest, it’s amazing how the universe then conspires to do everything except let you rest. Nice to know that any room key here lets you into any other room too. Interchangeable room keys—exciting new concept in travel accommodations.
Once again, I felt this wasn’t over. She was entirely too ‘pat’. She’d come in on purpose, wanting to see whatever she’d see, check things out, knowing this was my room, not making any mistake. So, thankfully, I was at least wearing sweatpants. Later, before going to sleep, I placed my backpack on the floor up against the no-deadbolt door and balanced a few noisy items on it. If the door opened more than two or three inches, things would come crashing down and, in theory, wake me up.
Maybe one or two o’clock in the morning, when I was out like a light and probably galaxies beyond even deep REM sleep, in a room pitch-dark due to the lead-x-ray-blanket-grade drapes, some sound half-wakens me. It keeps repeating until I hazily figure out it’s a very soft tapping at my door.
Four-fifths asleep, I try to ignore it but it doesn’t stop. Already knowing who it is, I roll tiredly to my feet, step to the door and open it a bare crack, somehow remembering to not trigger my booby-trapped backpack. I can make out the girl’s face—mainly her big eyes—outside in the darkness.
“What.” I say this more as a tired statement than as question or greeting.
“You wanna… you wanna get somethin’ goin’?” she whispers through the door crack, her face a few inches from mine.
“No,” I say, in some new voice that is quiet and asleep and awake and annoyed and not to be argued with, and I close the door crack and go back to my sleeping bag. For the next half hour I’m in a daze but can’t get back to sleep because every creak in the building startles me, thinking she’s returning again and this time she’ll use her key and my backpack stuff will come crashing down and… well, you get the idea.
And I chastise myself while tossing and turning, wishing that I’d had the energy, or whatever it takes, to somehow be a more positive presence with this girl and with the man in the office, despite their coarse deliveries toward me. I know I have that presence when I’m awake and energetic, but at this stage of my life I guess radiating that helpfulness and care and making it ‘all about them’, when I’m exhausted, requires something I do not possess.
I am not a wise old man. Not yet. Right now I’m all about me, my need to rest, and it would be a lie, a false and forced positivity, to pretend differently.
Finally, I fall asleep. Kind of.
Still exhausted, I awaken early while it’s barely light out and the street lamps are still aglow. I don’t bother to shower or eat or wait for the motel office to open, I just lug on my backpack and start walking toward the ‘not-bad’ motels farther down the road.
Might as well leave before the shootings begin.
3
Walking.
Wondering how to stay awake for the day.
Wondering when I should visit the ocean.
Wondering if I should walk past the town and across the bridge to one of the expensive and theoretically quieter and non-eventful hotels that presumably have deadbolts and keys that only fit that room.
Wondering if all this is worth it or if I should just fly back home and sit in my apartment. Wondering what these steps, these lessons, mean to my future. Wondering why, even with the wonderful breakthroughs and experiences of the past weeks, I still feel empty. I still feel like the same person, not particularly further ahead emotionally or spiritually.
This trip is divine in some ways, but when it’s over will I still feel the same emptiness as before, will these happenings become just… distant memories?
Will anything really change, when I’m back home?
I’m so tired, so much of the time.
What is my next step?
Thoughts spitball against my head while I walk to the next motel, but I’m too tired to even fish out my notepad. The thoughts come anyway:
Your next step does not always refer to your next physical actions, your next part of a plan or project; sometimes your next step means… a new way in how you flow through the same old things.
You are approaching a pivotal moment along this beginning of your journey.
Open.
Open to any happening and at any time.
Until now you have been confining your awake-ness and travel and meals to daylight hours, then stopping and trying to sleep at night.
Now, disappear those constraints, for a while.
Sleep, whenever you feel like sleeping, day or night.
Eat, whenever you feel like eating, day or night.
Travel, whenever and wherever you feel like traveling, day or night.
Dissolve the boundaries you have constructed between day and night, meal times and active times. Open yourself to a seamless flow without those constraints.
Just for a while.
You need that kind of freedom right now.
I can do that.
In fact, circumstances have seemed to be ‘herding’ me into doing exactly that, but I’ve been pushing back against it, trying to maintain the daily and nightly patterns I’m used to.
Time to stop resisting.
4
The next motel is humble but pleasant. It is attractively arrayed over a large well-manicured property, the office is warm and inviting, the all-night desk clerk actually speaks, and he is friendly and unfazed by my ‘backpacker’ status. He possibly even likes it, talking as if I’m interesting and welcome, rather than undesirable.
I don’t even explore over the motel grounds, I simply ask for whichever room the clerk considers would be their quietest, walk straight to it and enter, strip down and fall into bed, and sleep.
This time—all the day long, morning and afternoon and into early evening—my sleep is sound, deep, unbroken.
At mid-evening I awaken, alert and energized, almost leaping out of bed. I feel strangely elated, mind piercingly clear and untired, nerves dynamited with energy. My body is still lethargic, no doubt due to being ravenously hungry, so after a quick slick-up I walk across the grounds to the motel’s small but trendy restaurant and order—and eat—perhaps the largest amount of food I’ve ever eaten in one sitting in my life. I eat steadily and slowly for more than an hour until my physical energy is near to bursting, to match my unexplained verve of mind and nerve.
An uncontainable force courses through me tonight and cannot be constrained to my room, nor to exploring idly. Nor does it seem to desire aimless exercise as a catharsis.
Rather, I feel some insistent beacon calling me.
It’s time.
5
Seek the ocean
Far-apart highway lamps staccato through the pure darkness ahead, dotting my roadside path toward the ocean. The town lights are behind me, the palms have given way to an expanse of dark seashore dunes disappearing into black void beyond the highway glow.
It’s now late at night and only a vehicle or two passes during my walk. The barest breeze ripples through tall dry grasses that patch the dunes. Distant waves break along some sandy shore ahead, but it’s too dark to see even the whitecaps.
The highway rises and I walk up a modern concrete bridge arching long and casually across an ocean inlet. The bridge lamps dimly illuminate almost eerie blue-green waters below. A small, shadowy shark glides under the bridge, unhurried even while alert and hunting.
Watching that perfect gait of nature, I slow down. Prodded by this unusual energy, I had light-stepped my walk and eaten up a mile or two as if they were nothing. Now… what’s my hurry? Where am I going, and why am I trying to get there so quickly?
Standing atop the bridge, peering into the dark, I’m glad I cannot see the ocean yet. I want my first true look to unfold as a singular experience, a magical moment even, not to be weakened and chipped away by interrupted and dilute glimpses along the way. Yes, I’m admittedly still wanting those ‘big moments’.
Ahead, the bridge plows into the sand at the far shore of this inlet, the highway lamps veering off to the right toward a row of tall hotels along the beach. But to the left of the bridge is total darkness; no hotels, no lights, just beach dunes curving around a long bend that disappears into blackness.
I walk down the bridge, barely moving my feet, stopping often, looking, smelling, listening. Like an old man savoring an orange for an hour. It’s the best bridge in the world.
6
Cool, smooth sand sinks and slides beneath my bare walking feet. Shoes and socks are zipped away in the smaller knapsack I’d packed for this night’s foray. I’ve walked at least a mile along this beach, in the opposite direction from the hotels and bridge. The lights are still an annoyance in my peripheral vision; I don’t want to look directly at my ocean and have hotel lights glaring in from the side, I’m here for a more purified experience. On the flipside of that… I’m walking into pure darkness, into an area I’ve never seen, and I’m a little afraid to leave the familiar lighted path behind.
So… I run.
As suddenly as I’d slowed down on the bridge, I now sprint along the beach, full throttle as fast as my legs and bare feet can carry me, running all-out toward the darker wilds in front of me.
Over and around beach dunes, through grasses, between trees, I can barely make out shapes in the darkness, but I keep running, guided peripherally by the dim white lines of waves crashing along the shore. I might break a leg if I run into driftwood, might step on something that cuts or breaks my foot, might be bitten or struck by something poisonous, might die if I face-first into a tree, but I still run flat-out into the dark.
This also might bring on a heart attack, going from zero to all-out with no gradual warm up. My lungs gasp and burn and I wish they were twice the size because I need so much more air. Eventually my muscles sour with lactic acid and they slow down and seize up, even though I try forcing them to keep giving their all.
And finally, who knows how long I’ve run, my ‘flat out’ is no more than a jogging pace. My muscles spasm and seize and won’t run any more, lungs are bursting in an earth-quaking way, heart and vessels are pounding dangerously, and it’s all I can do to just remain standing.
Stars flash in my eyes and spread into white fireworks and I’m blinded and fainting and almost falling, but I force myself to remain standing through it, stopped there on the sand. Gasping, veins throbbing, body maxed out, wired and exhausted at the same time.
What a foolish thing to do.
Do I still feel a need to take such threatening steps to face my fears, a need to do rash and foolish things you’d expect of a teenager? The need to do something that might kill me, or injure me into spending the rest of my life in a bed with no movement from the neck down? Was that worth it?
But I quieten down my brain. I sought this ocean, so now it’s time to be here-and-now, not neurotically debriefing past events.
I roll out my towel on the beach and sit down, cross-legged, knapsack beside me, and check out where I’ve landed. The sand is comfortably firm yet soft, warm yet cool. The wide shoreline curves far off into the dark on both sides of me, no human-made light is visible in any direction. The trees, foresting miles of darkness behind me, silently witness.
The sky above is infinite, pinholed by stars so clarion and so far away. I draw in a deep breath, unhurried—like a shark swimming—and look down to my chest, then to my legs, my feet, the sand in front of me…
…Finally I look straight ahead, at my ocean.
Journey continues on the next page.