learning to see: part 3 (take 2)

Raaiiiin, I don’t mind. Shiiiiine, the weather’s fine.

I know precisley how this day should look. For months I built this vision, ached for the sea. The salt-air.

It looks like this: me on the cliffs following the ocean to where it flattens out and runs into the horizon. Big ship in the distance, a few kite-boards in the foreground. It’s not crowded. The beach is low-tide deep, left to the seagulls, the driftwood and me. Then I'm down in the sand - dry sand - with a book, a journal, a pen. Staring down the waves, eye level, as they come at me head on. Unceasing, endless flow of swells. It's not sunny nor is the sky solid, blue-gray textures and the truth of in-betweens. I've come here to know something. But, what? I've come here following voices inside and out, "Go to the coast," Jennifer says. "You'll find clarity at the ocean." This is my picture and I hold it. Attached to my mind's sketch of what will be.

It's pissing down rain, high-tide, almost no beach. Haystack Rock is way out there, surrounded by water. No point in hiking the slippery cliffs; height will not expand the view. One, two, three, four, five lines of white-cap breakers with the last row spitting mist back into the fog as it rolls over. Then nothing but fog. It's clear. I get it.

Doesn't matter what I can't see beyond the waves, it's all there anyway.

Follow through the mist to the southern most point I've been on this water. Oaxaca coast. Now it's called Mar Pacifico the water is peligroso. Dangerous. Playa Zipolite, 1996. That's me on the beach. Scott and me wearing nothing but brown borrowed from the sun. We sleep in hamocks, lay on blankets reading The Fellowship of The Ring to each other in the sun. Forever passing time with a journey: On The Road, Watership Down, The Hobbit. The days are books and joints and harsh Mexican cigarettes wrapped in sweet rice paper. We hike over the ridge to a secluded spot and lie down in the surf. Edge of the water.

Then on the water. Four months later we're on the water, same water way up north. Now it's called Kachemak Bay, Cooke Inlet, Alaska. My wedding day. White fisherman's sweater worn inside out to hide the dirt. We bring a Nalgene bottle stuffed with wild blueberries picked yesterday for the cake. No rings. Hersheys bar in pieces that say "HERS" and "HEYS" exchanged through laughter before a few friends. Gentle roll of the boat, glaciers baring witness from the peaks around Bear Cove. I believe my life's enchanted. I believe a bond built across thousands of miles alone together is indistructible. I believe the voice calling out "STOP" from the hollows of my belly is full of shit. What the hell does she know about me? Lean back into Scott, my husband, and watch orange billed Puffins bounce along the water.
It's all there.

********

Out of the car, into the rain. We park next to Mo's - the only restaurant at Cannon Beach where we can be inside and right on the water.

“Should we walk first and then go inside?” Jess asks. Pulls-up the zipper of a green rain shell.

She tucks a camera into her coat pocket.

"Yeah. Doesn't look it's going stop. So we might as well get wet first and dry off inside."

A flock of gulls collects and lands in the narrow strip of beach between the water and the pavement, the last of them holding a foot above the sand then slow-motion dropping.

The air is more deep-fried shrimp than raw brine. Neither of us has a change of clothes. (So intoxicating is the freedom of traveling without three sets of dry kid’s clothes, jogging stroller, toys, crayons and enough snacks to survive a month stranded in the backcountry, that grabbing a sweatshirt and rain shell is a lucky afterthought.) I have a journal, pen and two books - Monica's book and Creating Money - in one bag. In the other is my computer. I wanted to leave the laptop at home but, obviously, I have a problem. Are there meetings for this?

My shoes are soaked through before we've walked 10-feet. Let the rain come down. It's all fine. It hits from behind so the drops wick across my jeans until they're soaked too. Wet denim pasted to cold legs.

Jess talks, but I've lost track of the words. Rain drips from the tip of her nose and I watch, feeling how my head tilts to the right to keep focus.

Yesterday I'm sitting at a big gray desk connecting all the O's hidden in a jumble of letters. Letters cover a whole page, my face gets closer and closer while I scan and trace. The therapist keeps trying to put me at ease, but she doesn't seem at ease herself.

This is round two of Vision Therapy evaluation, a bunch of sensory-motor stuff - following scrambled lines and staring at beads to see how close to my face they come before they split into two. You're not supposed to see double when things get too close?

It's startling. I've been through this stuff a half-dozen times in 30 years. I have labels and explanations, definitions for why visual-perceptual disorder means the philospohy of logic makes no sense and why 10 percent of everything I mail is returned with mixed-up numbers in the address. Why reading puts me to sleep. Why it's so tedious I can finish and not know a thing about the content. Why spelling is a riddle and punctuation is impossible (you can't hear semi-colons.) None of this is news to me. And it's startling that still, as I work a pencil across the page, I swallow a lump and hope the tears stay down with it. The grief cycle doesn't end. It cycles.

There is something new though. She explains how I tilt my head right to compensate for my left eye. The ocular muscle is weak. It can't pull-in tight to my nose to focus so I help it by moving my whole head. My eyes don't work together, so when it needs to, my brain shuts down the left to keep me from seeing double. If I could eradicate one word from this language it would be compensate. Not enough can be made of how much I despise that word in this moment.

So I feel myself tilting right to watch one drop drip from the tip of Jess's nose then left to see the wide scope of the water in the distance.

"My butt is completely soaked," she says. And we laugh in the rain. Turn back toward the restaurant to be evenly drenched in the front. It's good, this Oregon wind and rain.

When it's wet like this the beach appears whole. You can't see how it's made of a billion tiny grains. Crunched up branches pile along the rocks, deposited peices of what was, breaking down into pieces of what will be.

Inside the restuarant I wrap both hands around a glass mug of hot chocolate and Baileys so the heat seeps into my skin. Jess talks about how she doesn't understand why it's so hard to make decisions. How she'll remain in something long after she knows it's not working just to avoid choosing. Wonders what the root is.

"Maybe I just need to learn to make a decision without needing to understand everything first," she says. Flips the pen around in her hand.

A gull flys straight at the glass, banks and turns back toward the water.

The therepist - the second vision therapist - said the same thing. She said maybe I could trust in the excercises to retrain my eyes - teach my left to work in stereo with the right - without having to understand the whole of how my brain works.

Let go of my ideas about the outcome. Try it just to see the results.

"Could you look at it as a great journey?" she asks. This experiment in reshaping parts of my brain by teaching my left eye to see. There is more than one way of seeing?

This day is not at all what I envisioned. And, it's perfect. Silverware clatter over breaking waves. Rain splattered glass and great conversation. There's no room for new vision where don't you release the old.

"Should we write postcards," Jess asks. Sucks the last of her second Mo-Mocha through a thin green straw.

"Good idea. You decide," I say. Jeans still wet around my thighs. "You pick them."

The tideline creeps toward the restraunt.

She returns with 11 cards and we quiet down to write. None are like the scene outside. Doesn't match the pictures. So what?

Back through the mountains same way we came. Rhythm of the road moving to Tracy's voice, violin. Into the warm, dry Portland evening. Blossom perfumed air. No-one cares that Jess is late for a show with Lisa and I am skipping dinner with the in-laws.

No one in this car anyway.