The first time I drove through Netarts in September 1998, I missed it. For one thing, the small seaside village tucked into the spruce trees and shore pines just didn’t call attention to itself. For another, I was on my way to Oceanside and my first vacation in seven years. Well, vacation was what my therapist called it. I told my friends I was going on a spiritual retreat. And it would have been, if I'd had any spirit left.
Four years before, school officials in Las Vegas had driven me from the teaching profession for my crimes of imagination against the system. Since then, I’d been trying to write a book to show that what happened to my students and me was a metaphor for all the reasons our education system had been in steady decline since the sixties. But no matter how I told the story, it sound like just one more sad tale of yet another teacher who got screwed by the system. School officials had turned me into the worst thing that could happen to a writer and teacher of the world’s great literature—I’d become a cliche.
I might have survived the loss of my career, my home, and much of my retirement security if developers hadn’t paved over the desert all around me into America’s fastest sprawling city. What I missed most about the desert was the space. That space was filled with a stillness that absorbed all the expectations and bureaucratic absurdities that tried to define me. What happened to me in the desert always felt like the answer to a prayer. Except that I never prayed. And what I heard sounded like the distant echo of the departed sea. Hearing this, I knew who I was going back to the first spark of life in the primal deep.
When I moved to the desert in 1981, Las Vegas was just a gaudy strip down the middle of the valley. But with the mob bosses and one-armed bandits gone, corporate bosses had moved in and were remodeling the desert in to mega resorts that included an eight-acre lake with dancing waters, a lagoon with daily battles between full-sized pirate ships, and a digital buffalo stampede across a ninety-foot-high canopy the length of five football fields. Lured by the promise of fun in the sun, thousands of new residents were pouring into the valley every month with their gated communities, golf courses, hot tubs, and swimming pools. Food, traffic, coffee, and shopping plazas were everywhere. The true-blue desert sky was gone, blotted out by an orangish-brown smog that lay over the valley like a lethargic and acrid god.
By 1998, the only patch of desert within jogging or biking distance of my apartment was the corner lot at the end of my block where the neighborhood turned into a six-lane thoroughfare lined with shopping plazas and convenience stores. I communed daily with the hearty little desert plants who, like me, were hanging on against the noise and smog. I loved those spiny little souls of the desert—the creosote and the sagebrush, the prickly pear, the silver cholla and the teddy bear, the yucca, and the cat claw. They’d taught themselves over the millennia to take the heat beyond all water But, like their spiny brethren that once inhabited the valley, they'd had failed to anticipate the developers from hell.
One night I awoke to the beep beep beep of the big yellow machines that always came in the cool of the night. By morning, the last patch of desert had been stripped from itself. I watched as dump trucks carted off the last of my compatriots. And for what? For yet another gas station and mini mart—the fourth such combo of convenience within sight of that corner.
One night I awoke to the beep beep beep of the big yellow machines that always came in the cool of the night. By morning, the last patch of desert had been stripped from itself. I watched as dump trucks carted off the last of my compatriots. And for what? For yet another gas station and mini mart—the fourth such combo of convenience within sight of that corner.
In the weeks that followed, the only thing that got me out of bed in the morning was the unyielding devotion of my two longtime feline companions—cd, short for civil disobedience, and MITTS, short for MITTStical. All my cats wanted of me was that I fill their bowls every morning and scoop out their litter at night. That’s all I had left to give.
The morning after a big silver tanker truck filled the pumps at the new gas station, I was on the way to my therapist when a guy in a hard hat motioned my pickup to a stop to make way for a flatbed truck rounding the corner. Tethered to the flatbed was a three-story-tall pink-vinyl King Kong bobbing away on a helium high. In the monkey’s paws was a large sign that said, GRAND OPENING COMING SOON.
As the flatbed angled its way into the parking area behind the mini mart, I rolled down my window and called to the hard hat, “Isn’t there some kind of zoning law against pink monkeys?”
“You’re in Las Vegas, babe,” he shouted back.
Not for long, big boy, I shrieked at him in my mind, after which I whipped out the assault rifle from my imagination and blew him away along with all of his hard-hatted buddies. I then turned my weapon on the pink money. As the environmental atrocity fizzled to the ground, I sped off my trusty Toyota, never to be seen again in the town of cards.
I recounted the fantasy to my therapist—a dark-haired, stocky, and pragmatic woman—my last option on the list of preferred providers. When I stopped talking, Dr. Callis looked up from the notes she’d been scribbling on her long yellow tablet and asked, “Did you give any more thought to trying some medication?”
“No,” I told her. “taking medication would be an admission that I’m the crazy one. Refusing is all I have left.”
Dr. Callis lowered her eyes and resumed her scribbling. “Then what about that vacation we discussed?”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?” I joked.
“Yes,” she said. I waited for her to laugh, but she didn’t.
As I was leaving, she patted me on the back. I wanted to smack her.
Outside in my pickup, I turned over the ignition, sat with my foot resting on the accelerator, and contemplated the cement-block wall at the far end of the parking lot. But the cats . . . who would take care of the cats?
Back in my apartment, I sat staring at my checkbook. What could be gained by dipping into my savings for a vacation? “You’re in Las Vegas, babe,” I said to myself, “and I’ve got to get out.” But where? That’s when it occurred to me that maybe if I followed the echo of the departed sea to the sea itself, I might find my way back to the person I was before I became a cliche.
I chose the Oregon coast because I’d never been there. And I chose Oceanside because I’d heard it had a motel overlooking the sea and no shops.
