a few of my interests, and many of the topics of my blog, into a narrative around the theme of how we are fascinated, drawn to, and ultimately shaped by what we fear the most.
The rain was intermittent as we drove south from San Francisco on a Sunday in the Winter of 2011. The sky had the thinnest of gray clouds, the hue bordering on white in many places. The bushes, trees and grasses blurred together as Karena drove us toward Santa Clara to attend a Friends Meeting of the Quakers. Her father and stepmother regularly attended these gatherings, and since I had never been to anything of the kind I was curious to see what it would be like. I have heard that most Quaker events are filled with silence, one moment stretching into the other in a room full of people sitting quietly, meditating in a way, and speaking only when they felt moved to do so.
The rain came and went on the windshield, like water sloshing in and out of a tide pool in the early morning hours. I found myself drifting into a long neglected memory from childhood, when, as a boy, I stood on a beach in the Marin Headlands north of San Francisco, and looked out into the ocean. A large group of family friends used to go camping together around the Bay Area. They all had children who went to, or used to attend, my nursery school. My friend and I had left the group, and ventured out into the woods leading to the ocean. We found tall trees filled with naked, horizontal branches of a thickness perfect for climbing. One could be 50 feet up the tree with little effort and even less fear of descending. Near these trees were old bunkers, the kind of which dot the nearby coast, remnants of a time the United States felt the need to protect its borders with machine guns and mortar from invading ships. Some of these rooms were blocked off, keeping us from conditions deemed too dangerous, but most of the rooms we were open to exploration. Each one was empty, some flooded with ocean or rainwater, but the act of exploring was perfect for make-believe. Just to the east of these barracks was a tunnel that went directly to a small beach that faced The Golden Gate Bridge to the east, San Francisco to the south, and the infinite expanse of the Pacific Ocean to the west. I can still recall walking through this tunnel for the first time, and though I could see the light at the other end, feeling much more afraid than when I entered the blackness of the barracks. I believe this is because I could see the outside of these buildings, and I was past the magical age where I believed the inside of a house could be infinitely bigger than the outside. I was also of the very next age where one makes a point of not believing in things like that. Maybe this is why, as we walked through the wet and sinking sand between the climbing trees and explored barracks toward the roaring sea, I didn’t tell my companion of the slippery fear the was rising up to me at my feet. I can’t remember how I made it to the end, I only remember the wind hitting my ears with a violence one imagines when sailing across the sea.
I think it was more than trying to save face with my friend that drove me forward. In spite of, or perhaps because of my fear, I was also, simultaneously filled with a powerful curiosity. It is strange how pulled we are toward what we fear the most. I pulled myself against the wind, toward the water. For a moment, just a moment, somewhere near the middle, I imagined water gushing into the cave. In my daydream I wasn’t pushed the dozen or so feet out towards the barracks, but was suspended in the dark waters, weightless and alone. This especially was frightening because I never learned how to swim, and the thought of floating deep in the water felt akin to being lost in space. Even today, I am filled with a deep fear that expands within my entire body when I imagine being submerged. It is the inverse of claustrophobia, the fear of being trapped in an endlessness.
Then I am out of the tunnel. The wind lifted its embrace and instead became a calming breath. Now out of the tunnel I could hear the waves grazing the shore. Though the ocean spread out to the right it didn’t seem so open and expansive. To our left the rust colored Golden Gate Bridge reached toward the sky, dominating the view. The city beyond it appeared small. Hills hid most of it, and the tallest buildings were dwarfed by the bridge and the distance.
Jason began laughing excitedly and pointing. I squint my eyes, looking beyond the reflecting suns nearby to the blue waves a football field away. I could make out a dark shape coming out of the water, then submerging. It was the first time I saw a whale. We were too far away to be struck by it’s magnitude or beauty, but I knew all about whales, had read about them and watched science specials on PBS. They seemed to have intelligence that equaled out own, but lived in the alien depths.
The whale itself that day didn’t strike me, but like a symbol of something, it brought up all of the things I thought and felt about those great mammals of the water. It’s a whale, I kept saying, over and over again. We watched the same spot on the moving water for five, ten minutes, barely moving, Jason’s arm still slightly extended out, our chests heaving from the excitement.
As an adult I continued to study them. Initially my fascination was with the Blue Whale and other baleen whales. This class fit in more with how I had always imagined them. Massive and kind, they sing through the water in beautiful but alien tones. Instead of teeth they have baleen, like a fine-tooth comb, that helps them catch krill. They seem like gentle giants, big and smart dogs, our secret companions, that fills their lives with secret beauty. Somehow the fact that these krill were fish escaped me, and I imagined whales as vegetarians, the antitheses of the murderous shark. These may have originally be based on drawing of dinosaurs in books I loved as a young child. The carnivorous Tyrannosaurus Rex and Alosaurus were the villains of the prehistoric world, while the nice vegan Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus and Triceratops were simply trying to eat and live peacefully. Most likely, I anthropomorphicized sea creatures in the same way. I don’t blame myself entirely. If one looks beyond that one dinosaur books, there are hundreds of others, as well as television programs and films, mostly for children, that demonize predators like sharks and t-rex’s, and, to a lesser extent, wolves, most likely because of their similarity with their cousins, our best friend. Though I understand how imagining other animals to think like humans we would exaggerate certain characteristics that are already there so that a story feels right on a gut level, it is curious that we don’t associate ourselves with the power predators, the meat eaters. Possibly it is ingrained in us from thousands of years ago, when we were hunted by larger carnivores, or maybe we just prefer to think of ourselves as peaceful people, the kind you might see in the paintings on pamphlets from Jehovah’s witness. These tableaus of lions and lambs and black and white people always struck me as strange because they seemed to not only solve humanities problems, but those of hungry animals who probably can’t conceive of a world without the food chain.
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