Haunted by Waters

Los Angeles, California

For years, actually for decades, I never thought of myself as a writer. Being a writer was unlike being a runner or a knitter or a reader. I didn't think it was something you could simply declare that you were because you engaged in the activity. I thought you couldn't say you were a writer if it was a pastime. It had to be a profession. But when I started dancing salsa and began to meet people in that community, it was easier to say that I was a writer than to say I was a small business owner of outdoor leisure products. It was simple. And it felt good  to present myself in that way, for the first time.

I still am not a writer by profession. I have only submitted two pieces of writing for publication in my lifetime and both were published. Still, I cannot say that I am a professional writer. But I do now think of myself as a writer because I write.

I also study writing in the form of reading. I have noted before that you can learn more from bad writing (not to put too fine a point on it, but Fifty Shades of Crap) than from good. Really good writing can send you into a spiral of despair. I can never write like that so what is the point? But then you don't write to be the best. You write because you have something to say. Something to record. Something to explore.

I was recently watching Robert Redford's film of Norman Maclean's short memoir, A River Runs Through It. I saw the movie when it first was released and read the book afterwards. It's a stunning prose description of life and loss told through the voice of an über-literate fly-fisherman. Writing like that is transcendent.

When I first encountered Wallace Stegner's writing, it was in the novelized memoir Crossing to Safety. Books like these can inspire you to write and to write better. They have the ability to put you into a different time and place, transporting you to the world the writer is representing. And this magic is accomplished by each choice of word, each construct of sentence, built on top of each other to the whole.

Last, but not least, is E.L. Doctorow. A writer friend once stated that Doctorow was the only writer who made her envious. His later work is his lesser, which seems to occur with a lot of literary lions. But his Ragtime is stellar. The best writing may make you envious because it speaks to you in the way you wish to speak. The connection we have to good art is visceral. And for me, good art is at its greatest in fine literature. 

I could never, in any stretch of my imagination or a drug-induced hallucination, hope to write in a way that compares to these literary geniuses. But, as I was watching the last scene, and hearing the last line, of A River Runs Through It, I was struck again by the impact of it. I am haunted by waters. We are all haunted by the people and by the events in our lives. I walked away with that line and thought about it throughout my day. I am haunted by waters.

I realize I have told this story here before, but Sandra once told me about a man who arrived at The Bora Bora Bar (where I first met Sandra) at the old Kona Village Resort holding a funeral urn. He set it on the barstool alongside him and ordered two martinis. His wife's ashes were to be dispersed in the bay the following morning. I thought it was a really lovely gesture, to bring her back to a place they had shared together, putting that poignant closure on what I assumed to be happy memories.

Sandra is buried up in the foothills of the Sierras, but everyone else closest to me has gone out to sea. Whenever I am at near the Pacific Ocean, I think of them. That ocean is important to me on so many levels, after growing up in Los Angeles and spending so much time in Hawaii with people I loved. I am someone who turns to water whenever I am despairing. At a particularly hard time in my life, I could hardly get out of water. I took baths and long showers. I sat in the spa and swam laps in my pool. I escaped to Kona where I found some solace and began to spend more time in Carmel. And as I reflect on the memory of that time, as well as the memory of those I have lost, I realize that I too am haunted by waters. But I am luckily also buoyed by writing and, at this time, by Maclean's writing of that evocative and incredibly perfect line: I am haunted by waters.