To the north, there is an old rubbing beach where the whales used to come out of water and flop awkwardly about. “Wake up,” a sleepless person would say back then. “Come.” And others threw on their coats in the early morning to watch the whales rub their backs into sand and stone, to scratch and remove the barnacles that lived on their skin. The whales looked joyful and happily clumsy when they did this, heaving themselves about with great breath and effort. They were sights to behold, and were watched with awe and laughter. The whales have always been loved and watched, their spumes of breath blowing above water, their bodies turning, rising.

Sometimes this is a turbulent place. Two rivers reach the sea here, sometimes in a muddy rush away from the land. When there are storms, waves reach far heights and water crashes against the rocks, still smoothing them through time.

Sometimes, too, it is peaceful, the water calm. Then the people go out on the still water and fish, or sit on the beach drawing pictures or sifting through the gray sand. They talk with their friends and eat sandwiches. On summer days the sand is warm against their backs and they rest on its heat.

Across the bay are whitewashed buildings. They look as if they’ve been painted with milk. The old people, the traditionalists, live there.

It is a secret place, this world. You could say it is in Washington but that is too far north, by degrees and fathoms. I keep it a secret, the place, the people, though the world will soon hear about it.

But place or time or season, it doesn’t matter to the man who turns his back to the sea. No one knows if he will turn toward life again. They wonder if it is hate he feels, or remorse, or merely human grief. After a while, some forget he is over there.

PART ONE

OCTOPUS

The infant Thomas W. Just was born on July 2, 1947, to much happiness and many pictures of his mother smiling down at him. It was the day just before the octopus left the water, walked on all eight legs across land and into Seal Cave. Sometimes young people made love in that cave. Sometimes boys escaped school and smoked cigarettes there.

But on this day, the day after Thomas was born, the octopus walked out of the sea and they watched it. Every one of these ocean people stood back, amazed to see it walk, the eye of it looking at them, each one seen, as if each one were known in all their past, all their future. Its skin paled at the sight of men smoking cigarettes and women in their cardigans pulled tight, with their dark windblown hair. One child stepped toward it as if to speak before his mother grabbed his arm and pulled him back to her, claiming him as a land dweller and no communicator or friend of any eight-legged sea creature.