2.06.2019

SAN FELIPE

Summer of 1977 and the Gulf of Mexico welcomed our tiny entourage of friends into San Felipe. From the rough concrete pad, we'd sleep on for the next three nights, I watched grey waves crashing hard on the shore, and digging away shallow canals in the sand as the water made its way back to wild ocean.

I was a new bride, just twenty, with my heart still open and forgiving and eyes wide in hopeful expectation.  But here, this very day, I could feel all of my dreams ebb away.  Long strands of my hair blew crazily in the breeze as I stared out over the horizon and wiped away a tear, just another of so many I had already cried in just 2 months time. But little did I know, I'd cry so many more over the two decades to follow.

A beach walk I was excited about taking together quickly disintegrated into a predictable verbal barrage I'd have to ignore or defend.  Just more criticism and hurtful commentary. I stopped walking, my toes dug into the wet sand, but it was an inevitable end when he turned back to camp and left me to walk alone. I continued adding shells, sea glass and sand dollars into my plastic sand bucket and carefully stepped around tide pools of starfish, carcasses of dolphins and other unfortunate sea life dotting the shore. I paused looking up toward the dry deep sand part of the beach and walked in disbelief toward the skeletal structure of a beached whale.  I stared up inside of it and stood there motionless for several minutes.  It was as if I had stepped back into a prehistoric time.  Then blinking, I breathed in the rancid stench of the whale's rotting flesh and choked back the vomit pooling in my throat, suddenly suffocating under a blanket of grief.  I ran to the water's edge to escape, but the volume of my agonized wail competed with the ocean's crashing waves.

The following morning, we rolled up our sleeping bags, loaded our mostly empty cooler into the bed of the truck and drove north for home. I watched out the streaked passenger window and held my precious collection of shells in my lap. I couldn't trust them to him.  I knew he'd break them like he was breaking me.