Clambake

The man shook his head. Then the woman. A faceless sequence of heads shaking, no, we are not leaving the parking lot, no, these coveted spaces are not yours to have, no matter the little size of your car, no matter the significance of your venture to the beach today, we are not going and you are not parking.

But we found a spot, in the end, that is, someone left at just the right moment, which is really what searching for parking is, anyway, isn’t it? A massive board game of chance in which we, all of us who are automotively inclined, are willing or unwilling participants in, players hungry for fortuitous timing, blind to environmental consequences, as we circle and circle about the playing board. And sometimes, particularly in Asia, we try to rig the game and up our chances and send out scouts, our little antennae-agent-family-member-feelers, who stand in newly vacated spots for us, as we go round and round.

We unloaded our precious cargo, lifting out heavy baskets filled with foil and artichoke hearts and Two-Buck Chuck, with bread and cheese and garlic, a pot of potatoes and onions and asparagus, with little dead shellfish, the centerpiece, and there it all was, the sun and sea, and sand and surf, and we, with our clambake goods to our chests. We did not know at the time that hours later the food would not in fact be cooked, that the banana leaves we had stolen and carried across campus on our heads, barefoot, tribal, a college replicate of a National Geographic glossy, that the leaves would not serve any real purpose later in the day.

We did not yet know, and so we stepped out onto the warm sand that came up between our toes, crawling in between our sandals and our soles. Piles of people littered the cove that was Stinson Beach, with its caravan of elevated houses with window-eyes staring into the west, a parade of stilted habitations, like a family of elephants trudging onwards across the sand.

I noticed rocks beneath one—I later wished I had been looking the other way, had seen the piles of seaweed, fragrant and salty and chewy, lining the borderlands between sea and sand, tangled messes of bumps and curves, in all shades of ochre, mud-brown, olive-green, and a jaundiced, sickly yellow. Oblivious, I set out to gather the rocks I had seen, a sheet around my neck, the bulge of the makeshift sack before me so that I trundled like a pregnant lady when it was full.

Two kids stared.

"Are you collecting trash?" the one, round the way little boys who play too many video games are round, holding a chips bag, asked me, in his generosity.

"No, just rocks," said I, with a smile. I pictured myself as a bag lady, walking back. It did not seem like a horrible way to live. We weigh ourselves down with all the things we own, we anchor ourselves into this world, secure our light limbs and helium-filled souls, and tie our dreams down with dead knots to every minor possession we claim to own. Bag ladies carry their world, their life, with them, pushing it around in carts, thus claiming a mobility that most of us do not have and do not dream of having. It is a confident example that in America, regardless of your station in society, you too can buy into the culture of materialism and accumulation. You, too, can have a piece of the American dream.