The Call of Nature

It had been quite a journey to get to this point, to reach this place at this time in this manner. Not the kind of journey that journalists relate, travels of extraordinary length or travails of extraordinary hardship. No, the journey was as ordinary as a minor change in my daily routine. A transfer of trains where typically a disembarkment would be. Just like that, I had broken loose, dislodged from my life, and drifted away from the current of habits carrying me through time and space.

This new train, I’d never taken before. It carried me along below the skyscrapers and the hills, out upon the surface in a neighborhood unfamiliar for being neither rich nor poor. The people not at work rode this train, gazing as through a glass-bottomed boat at the midday ecology of these obscure blocks – the curious human shapes which found sustenance in, and in turn sustained, the lifecycle of these remote communities. Past Gramma’s Saloon and animal hospitals, instant watch repair and specialty gear, we were carried along by this train, steadily out to sea.

Mortality was forever with us upon this arduous voyage. My party, my fellow passengers, began the journey as a multitude. A car depleted of standing room when I boarded had seats to spare before we even struck the open air. As we snaked along, block by block, our numbers further diminished, until at last I remained alone, the hardiest pioneer-passenger of this express trip to oblivion.

When the train finally swerved, unwilling to follow its path to its logical consequence - a descent below the waves, I pulled the cord and brought the solipsistic caravan to a surprised and sudden stop.

I was not yet at the ocean, but I was close. I could smell the salt which travels in the ocean’s spray. It reached right into me to join and frolic with the memories of beaches past. I was near. Very near to the timeless space of surf and sand.

This place, this neighborhood, this community of coastal dwellers, was decidedly middle class. I was possessed of a paper cup, the detritus of my soy macchiato latte, of which I hoped to dispose. But this was not the sort of neighborhood with wastebins on the sidewalks. If you were here, you presumptively possessed a nearby trash barrel and could afford to wait to dispose of your refuse until your return home. Spying a bin beside a house door, I decided to trespass. I raised the latch on the stranger’s front-yard fence, ran up to the porch in an exaggeratedly self-conscious stride, and threw my cup into the nearest bin, the green one marked “Compost.”

Thus unfettered from my final chain, cast finally adrift from the fatality of an ordinary day, I ventured westward toward the angry waves.

Have I mentioned that the waves were angry? They were. The water of the world is jealous of the waters of the sky, and when the latter splatters the world, the former foams in frustration, churning and smashing furiously against the shore. It was this spectacle, the image of our world worked out of shape, into a dynamic topography of impotent rage, which had lured me away from the ongoing death of my day-to-day life.

The boundary between civilization and shore is a highway. Between the settled and the wild lies a slender ribbon of transit. I crossed this threshold with a minimal briskness in my pace, and found myself at last along the edge of ocean, a vast expanse of terrain angrily roiling against an implacably grey sky.

Behind me, north and south, stretching out of view, lay the human world, a pleasant façade sheltering a teeming multitude of singularities and secrets. Before me, the blank face of a superficial world. An angry surface beating upwards against the sky, jealously guarding its interior, hidden forever away from the turbulence and confrontation of public view. Beneath the churning waves, an army of mollusks and crabs, and schools of oblivious fish carried on in a life which could only be understood through conjecture.

Out upon the water, shrouded in the misty rainfall, a great freighter steamed out to sea, stacks of boxcars set against the sky like skyscrapers. Sullenly silently sulking out to sea, like a great segment of several square blocks, dislodged with disgust and slinking away from the city in secessionary protest.

Before this spectacle, I stood rapt, as wind and spray and foam whipped against my body, oblivious to my stillness. I was alone in my world of observation. But I was not unobserved… I was standing on a sodden sandy cliff, held together by the will of weeds, as the flats of the beach alternately emerged and vanished below me. But there were others. There were joggers along the roadside behind, savoring their own vigor and contemplating a surf divorced from observation of the sunken shore. There were stragglers along the beach, advancing against the ocean’s retreat, only to scuttle in disarray before its petulant surge. Though I saw none, surely there were others perched the same as I, straddling the space between these two scenes.

Why had my attention shifted? Lost as I was in the vastness of space and nature, how had I been dragged into observations and calculations of the positions and vectors of the human figures speckling this austere landscape?

The answer lay within me, an internal handgrenade of mundane meaning. I was possessed of the need to urinate. Here in the face of the unapologetic instincts of the natural world’s existence, I had been seized by an abashed urgency… an appetite of privation which suggested seclusion as a prerequisite for satiation.

My mind was abruptly wrenched from its contemplation of the sublime and brought to bear in the calculation of the obscene. If it must be done in public, and in this neighborhood so denuded of civilization’s niceties and necessities it surely must, then how was it to be done? If guilt could not be averted, how at least to elude shame, and assignable culpability for violation of social norms?

The solution to my dilemma was of necessity tucked within the folds and creases of the shoreline cliffs. Though it would be of greatest relief to obtain immediate release, here upon the cliff-top, it would be obvious to all. What profit is indulgence if interrupted by the indignation of the righteous? I could not do it here, in full view of all.

The notion of release directly into the waves, in a slightly Whitmanesque manner, was seductive, but likewise imprudent. The action would be observable by all the idiosyncratic souls along the beach, and surely objectionable to some.

No. Best to seek the seclusion of this liminal world, the sandy cliffs standing between shore and society. Somewhere the earth must generously twist into a secret lavatory.

Eventually, I found my sanctum. It was imperfect of course. But it was deep enough to drop from view of the pavement and road, and sheltered enough to obscure the expanses both up the beach and below. In this alcove, visible only to the tiniest sliver of surf, I absolved myself, allowing the waters of my body to mingle with the sky’s effluence upon the sand and swordgrass.

Ah… the sweet relief of surrender. When I was through, I shook myself and sealed myself and cast a glance across my shoulders. I had been observed.

She seemed young, though whether that was fifteen or thirty-five years young, I could not say. She was Asian and I found her as inscrutable as she was alien. A basset hound scratched her thigh, jealous of the newest object of her laser-like attention. She stared at me, straight into me, incontrovertibly aware of what I had just done and … upset? Understanding? Observant yet unconcerned? I cannot say. Only aware. That is the extent of the assertable.

I withered before her reprovingly unintelligible stare. Instead of strolling casually down to the beach and striding boldly off, I shrank inwards. I abashedly kicked some soil on top of the puddle of flattened sand my fluids had made. I started away from my silent accuser, scrambling awkwardly up the loose slope so as not to need to turn my face towards her. I stumbled at the summit, dropping a knee into the damp sand, momentarily mistaking the cause of its wetness, sliding slightly backwards. I lunged and crested, returning to the plain above the shore like washed-up flotsam No, more self-propelled than that. Like a crab come to breed upon the coast? No, that’s not it either. I bolted away from the ocean like one who wanted nothing more of it and its wan metaphors. I would return to my life, my monstrous routine. I would rejoin what I knew… noble squalor and public restrooms.