Costa, Sierra y Selva

Every story has a beginning and an end, I thought as the bus slowed to a stop along the main stretch in Mancora, a beach town on the northern Pacific coast of Peru. I’d poured over lush photographs of swaying palm trees and white sands and, like a director seeking location, location, location, ultimately decided that no landscape would better serve as backdrop for a time of reflection on the events of the months before.

“You need time alone to process your experiences,” said a friend while we talked at a cafe downtown in Trujillo. I inhaled the soothing scent of chamomile while I tried to explain what was going on in my crowded brain. I knew that my experiences were valuable, that I had grown and learned in ways visible to others. Hadn’t my mother remarked, “you seem more serene somehow”? How could these experiences not have shaped and changed me? But I turned back and the faces seemed to peer expressionless from beneath a dark, rushing current. Words spoken in love, in wisdom and in jealousy that once shattered my world seemed now silent. To whom did these strange and dear faces belong? Whose jokes shared and whose heart wounded? But to summon them was to summon shadows, and I had enough shadows for companions already.

“I think you should go away somewhere for a few days, to pray and read scripture. I think you need that.” The words were refreshing. Yes, I thought gratefully. You’re right, that’s exactly what I need.

That was how weeks later found me on the shore, with a thousand tiny grains of sand pressing against the soles of my feet and the sunshine drenching my skin like rain. But the clarity I sought was not in the persistent breeze or the age-old push-and-shove of wave upon shore. “I’ve looked forward to this moment for so long,” I told myself. “Why isn’t it all clear now?” Silence. The ocean, always nudging my soul to its brink, shivered unobliging before me. It was the same ocean the grizzled ancients had gazed upon, and now I, too, rested my eyes on its dynamic surface seeking its wisdom. It offered none.

The shoreline along the Mancora hotel district is bordered by majestic palms and weekend getaway villas owned by wealthy limeños and used two weeks out of the year. In September, they are shuttered and curtained and quiet, while further up the shore a diminished community of backpackers and surfers revel in their loneliness and toast their sadness from bitter cups. I saw them when we went into the village, observed them as one observes seals on a far-off jut of rock, with uncommitted curiosity. No man is an island, I remembered, but perhaps what we are is a bumper car, swirling around frenetically, charged by some invisible current, fighting and struggling against each other amid smiles and other less benign gestures. A woman tanned to the color of a candied apple snuffs a cigarette while her companion struggles to keep his head. It rolls back, curling strands of a dark, angry color shaking in the breeze as he tries to remember his name. Surely it wasn’t always this way. It started when they couldn’t remember each other’s names…now they couldn’t remember their own. No matter, another quarter in the slot and the world would go on as it always had before. Poor, wounded souls. Whisky is clearest when still in the glass.

The little horse was sturdy and shaggy; my bare feet barely touched the worn, wooden stirrups and the hard, grainy texture of a rein felt good in my hand again. The sand gave way begrudgingly beneath us as we trodded along the shore. I remember I used to talk to horses when riding, but this one was not in the mood for conversation. Perhaps he was a seeker, so I let him be. To our right, men and boys pried clinging crustaceans from the slimy rock with violent, knocking knives. To our left, the deserted villas and a few, isolated bodies glistening in the sun. What next, God? I asked. The question startled me. I’d come to find my past, not my future, in the persistence of the ocean. The poets had told me that the ocean was time itself, that the answers lie buried in its deeps. These were the mysteries that plagued Job, that the Psalmist could only wonder at. And yet I had come not to seek clarity, but to peer into my future. No mortal should be permitted this gift, I told myself (you see, I’d forgotten that I was no mere mortal) and so I turned the horse to go back up the beach. The animal arched his neck and then tossed his head and shook it vigorously. Perhaps he, too, had realized his mistake. Encouraged, I nudged him first into a trot, and then into a gallop.

I’d forgotten the feel of a fast-moving horse beneath me, the liquid cooperation between horse and rider as a watercolor landscape rushed by. I’d forgotten the wind and the snorting and the heat as both beings stretching eagerly forward, racing against time itself. When we slowed to a halt I felt as winded as the horse beneath me. What now? I can’t see backward or forward. I’ve lost my vision and it all looks the same.

The color of the ocean reached into my soul and played a chord of nostalgia. It was the color of the sky in Florida when a storm is about to hammer and rail. I believe it to be the deepest, grayest, bluest color on earth, the color of fury and power. The white caps danced gleefully on the water’s surface and the sun bore down upon us all with shocking strength. I could be roused to no new anger, for the greatness of the ocean quieted me…how could I speak in this presence? Then it happened. The years flew by in the vortex of my memory and I became once again the skinny child of six sitting beside the Gulf of Mexico, straining to find that foreign land and dreaming of all foreign lands while my feet felt cool beneath the sugar sand. I was a dreamer at six and I’d lived those dreams, I suppose. I’d heeded the voice of the poet:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Had I come to the place where all dreams ceased to be dreamed? I was afraid to ask such a question, but there was Someone not afraid to answer it. In the midst of my reverie, something rose between the horizon and the shore. It was the sleek, dark outline of a great creature, shimmering in the sunlight. My heart felt hushed as it rose and fell, time and again, in the surf. In moments it had disappeared completely and I, solemn and hushed, dismounted.

Sitting minutes later in the shade of the porch, I sought the ocean’s depths for the sign to reappear. My life, my past, present and future, are held in another’s hands. I am swallowed into His greatness, and no harm can reach me.

So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.

There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein. (Psalm 104:25-26)

It was a hot morning, but the heat I felt came not from the sun but from that invisible, urgent tide that rises within us and sears our eyes with joy or grief. Mine was the joy, His the glory. The dream continued deferred, but now I was hungrily content to wait for it. All things would be revealed, all things made clear, in His perfect time.