I remember one afternoon many years ago I went with a friend to Point Reyes where my mind was exactly in that kind of place and stared at the fences as we drove deeper and deeper into the peninsula which of course unfolded like layers of abstraction and intimacy constantly being circled by hawks.

We parked at McClures Beach. I remember very clearly the sound of the car being parked. It made a lot of noise. There were some other cars parked there. Even after our car was parked, totally silent, it was still making noise.

Warm fog swirled in the canyon as we gradually descended. A hundred feet in front of us everything was lost in the fog and a hundred feet behind us everything was lost in the fog. We were walking in a capsule between amnesias.

There were hushed flowers all around us. The flowers looked as if they had been painted by a Fourteenth Century anonymous French painter. My friend and I had not said anything to each other for a long time. Perhaps our tongues had joined the brushes of that painter.

I stared at the watercress in the creek. It looked wealthy. Whenever I see watercress, which isn’t very often, I think of the rich. I think they are the only people who can afford it and they use watercress in exotic recipes that they keep hidden in vaults from the poor.

Suddenly we went around a turn in the canyon and there were five handsome teen-age boys in swimming suits burying five pretty teen-age girls in the sand. They were all carved from classical California physical marble.

The girls had arrived at various stages of being buried. One of them was completely buried with only her head above the sand. She was very beautiful with long black hair stretched out along the sand as if it were some kind of dark water, perhaps jade, flowing out of her head.

The girls were all very happy being buried in the sand and so were the boys who were burying them in the sand. It was a teen-age graveyard party because they had run out of everything else to do. They were surrounded by towels, beer cans, beach baskets, picnic leftovers, etc.

They gave us no particular attention as we walked by and down to the Pacific Ocean where I mentally pinched myself to make sure that I was still in this Christ-powered photograph.

Forgiven

This story is a close friend or perhaps even a lover to a story called ‘Elmira’. They both deal in a way with the Long Tom River and the time when I was young, a teen-ager, and somehow the Long Tom River was a part of my spiritual DNA.

I really needed that river. It was the beginning answers to some very complicated questions in my life that I am still trying to work out.