Seeing in the Dark (eBook)

Chapter 1: Beginnings Poor boy -- leaves moon-viewing for rice-grinding. -- Basho When you see a drop of water, you see the nature of all the waters of the universe. -- Huang-Po At dawn on a deserted Florida beach in 1954, the first rays of the Sun sent my father's long shadow and my shorter one rippling like kite tails across the rumpled sands. We were out early to see what had washed up during the night. In the past we'd found a gleaming conch shell that whispered surf sounds like betrayed secrets, a dark, ancient wine bottle, stout and heavy as a stonecutter's mallet, and a bottle with a note in it from an English schoolgirl who tossed it from the taffrail of a cruise ship in the Bahamas, a hundred miles away. The previous winter a freighter burned and sank in the Gulf Stream, and for weeks afterward cases of its cargo washed up, providing us with a set of new white wooden lawn furniture. The rising Sun painted the seashore gold, lighting up the pear-amber flotation balls clustered in tangles of seaweed, the indigo sails of beached Portuguese men-of-war, and the miles of unbroken Australian pines that stretched south along the beach. My father in his faded swim trunks was golden, too. He'd been a boxer and a tennis pro, had grown fat and famous in the caf society of prewar San Juan and Miami Beach, then gone broke and gone to work driving a truck. Now he looked like an athlete again, tanned and muscled, given to drawing lines on the beach so we could practice the standing broad jump and the hundred-yard dash. Weekdays he loaded forty-pound cement bags onto a flatbed truck and drove them to construction sites. On weekends he delivered wooden cases of soft drinks to gas stations and bait shops in the Everglades. Nights and early mornings, he sat at a typewriter propped on the rattan table in our tiny living room, writing short stories that he sold to magazines to bring in 'extra' money. He'd stopped drinking when we fled the city, had escaped the boredom that stalked him when his name was in the gossip columns, and was full of wit and wonder. 'Look,' he said, touching my left arm lightly to bring me to a halt as we stepped gingerly around a delta fan of violet men-of-war tentacles. Up ahead, high on the beach, something strange was happening -- a slow flurry in the sand, rhythmic and methodical. We advanced slowly, peering intently, trying to make sense of it. Scoops of sand flopped up and over, casting long shadows. 'It's a sea turtle,' he whispered. 'A loggerhead, I think. She's been laying her eggs.' Now I saw her -- the enormous shell, so dusted with sand that it had been nearly invisible, and the big, powerful flippers, throwing sand into the hole beneath. My father explained that she had dug the hole five or six feet deep, laid something like a hundred eggs in it,...