Archives for June 2009

It is 10 o’clock on a Saturday night in the middle of March and I am walking down a sidewalk in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod. I could just as well be walking in the middle of the street. There’s no one around. No cars, no people. The stores are closed for the season; the T-shirts, bikinis, and knickknacks hang in the darkened windows like everyone just left for the night. My reflection in the glass makes me look like a ghost, and a small chill creeps up my back, but it’s not from the cold night. The houses I walk past—huge white Greek Revivals and Victorians stacked side-by-side—are black inside, their wide porches empty. It is so quiet I can hear my own footfalls and they are the only sound. It’s eerie. But I am happy. I like the off-season in tourist towns.

In the summer I know the place is packed. The full-time resident population of Martha’s Vineyard is 15,000. In the summer it goes up to 105,000, and this does not include the tourists who come and go. As I stood on a bluff overlooking the huge Katama Beach just south of Edgartown, a couple and their young boy trudged on the sand. The man and the son started to play catch while the woman and I watched them and gazed out over the open water. We were all dressed for winter because the wind was stiff and biting. Turns out they were local.

“I bet this beach gets really crowded in the summer,” I said.

“Oh, it does,” the woman said. “In July and August, forget about it. The roads are jammed. We don’t even leave the house unless we have to. We draw straws to see who has to go out and get groceries.”

After the three of them left, I had the beach to myself. Miles of it stretched in either direction farther than the eye could see. On the western side of the island in Gay Head, it’s the same. Back on the other side, Oak Bluffs, too. I am amazed and thrilled at the same time.

***
Late one afternoon I took the short ferry from Edgartown to Chappaquiddick Island. And I mean short—both the boat and the trip. The ferry holds three cars in a line. The thing is almost like a big toy. The ride takes two minutes. I went there looking for the small bridge that Edward Kennedy drove off with Mary Jo Kopechne in a car on the night of July 18, 1969. The car flipped and sank in a shallow tidal pool. He got out. She didn’t.

I was 16 years old that summer. I remembered some of the story, but not too clearly. In my hotel room in Edgartown I did a little online research about the event. I remembered there were many conflicting accounts of what happened, even from Kennedy himself. And I read about them now, almost 40 years later.

I had a small tourist map to guide me. I figured I’d find it easily because the whole of Chappaquiddick has about five roads. I would just drive them all if I had to. But I didn’t have to. After one wrong turn I drove from the main paved road down a sandy road; it was the road I was looking for, Dike Road. I drove for a couple of miles through tall pines and mixed hardwoods, then came out into the open as I approached a beach. There was a small bridge in front of me. It spanned a narrow tidal pool before the beach. The bridge was about 20 feet long.

It looked nothing like the bridge in the old black and white photos I’d seen online. That bridge was nothing more than planks laid together with sides that came up only a few inches. This new one was made of hefty timbers, and the sides were railed with posts and more thick timbers. I took a few photos but I was not sure if this was the same bridge Kennedy drove off of. Here, as all the other beaches I’ve been visiting, it was empty. Not a living soul around. No one to ask. I looked at the map through my sunglasses, held it open in the cool breeze coming off the glistening water. I saw the name of the road on the map: Dike Road. I looked up. There was no marker, not a word about the event anywhere. Could it be? It must be.

Like so many sites I’ve visited that are the locations of significant events in the annals of human history or of famous art—the (supposed) birthplace of Christ in Bethlehem, the Great Wall of China, the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen Harbor—this one also seemed to hold a larger place in history and imagination than it appeared in reality. I was looking at a small, wooden bridge. That was all there was.

This was eerie, too, but in a different way. I felt a sadness and emptiness for both Kennedy for having made such a horrific mistake and for the Kopechne family, whose daughter—a member of Robert Kennedy’s Presidential campaign staff when he was assassinated the year before—must have had a bright future in front of her. And for all the others who were drawn into the tragedy and its aftermath.

“The mysteries of the case continue to haunt Ted Kennedy as well as the authorities who investigated them,” writes Leo Damore in his 1988 book, Senatorial Privilege. “Charges of ineptitude and lack of diligence abounded, as did insinuations that the machinery of justice crumbled beneath the power and prestige of the Kennedy family. George Killen, former State Police Detective-Lieutenant, and chief of a never-revealed investigation, lamented that the failure to bring the case to a satisfactory conclusion was ‘the biggest mistake’ of a long and distinguished police career. Senator Kennedy, he said, ‘killed that girl the same as if he put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.'”

I got in my car, turned up the heat, backed up, and drove away. I pressed hard on the accelerator, worked my way quickly through the gears in my car; the winter schedule of the ferry is sporadic and I didn’t want to miss the next one. I was the only one to get on. I climbed out of my car and approached the ferryman. He seemed to be in his sixties and I suspected he would know about the bridge. I buttered him up a bit with a comment on the lovely weather. He nodded. “Yep.” Then I made my move. “Hey, which bridge is the one Kennedy drove off of?”

“It’s back down the road. By the beach.” His words were clipped, his tone and expression utterly unanimated. He peered straight ahead either to see where was he going or because he didn’t want to look back.

“Dike Road, right? I asked.

“That’s right.”

And that was that.

***
A couple of days before, I’d found a long beach open only to residents of Chilmark, a rural section of the island, during the summer. Now, there was hardly anyone else around so I went there with my New York plates, unconcerned about getting towed or ticketed. There are clay cliffs that rise high from the beach so narrow I could see that there was no beach at high tide. The cliffs were eroded by wind and water; the surface looked like cookie dough. In some places I could see the rooftops of houses and the remains of wooden stairs and ladders that had been trashed by winter storms, perhaps the rising sea. I took a few photos. It looked to me like a portent of things to come; more beaches disappearing, the bluffs and dunes getting wiped out, the real estate built too close to the water getting hammered.

Sometimes it seems that it’s only unheard echoes that survive, memories. And even the memories will go as the people who witnessed events or cast an eye on the ever-changing landscape of the natural world pass away, leaving us with the only an incomplete record of what they saw. Their photographs, their books. Perhaps someday, someone will look at the photos I took and be amazed that there was ever bridge over a tidal pool on Dike Road, a pool that during one epic storm got flooded by the ocean, which then never retreated. And those houses at the top of the bluff at Chilmark beach will, too, be gone someday.

I’d gone to Martha’s Vineyard to surround myself in the natural beauty of the ocean’s shorelines. I found that. But I also found remnants of frightening encounters of the human kind amidst such beauty, as well as of the destructive powers of the same natural elements that give the area its splendor.

“When the soul is alive to beauty, we begin to see life in fresh and vital ways,” writes the late John O’Donohue in his book, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. But so too with encounters that end with death and destruction. The heart attunes to the sadness that runs through our mortal lives like a silent, underground stream. The heart also quickens in gratitude for the gift of the life that we have been given, and speaks in words unspoken the noble command for us not to waste a minute of it in the shallow grid of artifice, small-mindedness, and bogus wants.

I am on the road. Back on the road. The road. The road. The road. The repetitiveness is a comfort and a guide, like the beating of a distant drum communicating itself to me the secrets of life I’ve yet to learn. I may be skimming the surface of the earth but I am also going deep within myself. I have been here before but at the same time I am stepping into new ground.

It is late spring, early evening. I notice the light is lingering, taking on summer’s languid, honey-colored glow. That makes me happy. But I wonder if I am seeing things because I am traveling north, in the wrong direction at this time of year after having just endured a long winter. I am going back into the cold, maybe back in time—back to some winter long ago and to something I’d dropped in the deep snow, the blizzard of my thoughts and emotions and desires, could not find, got busy, and left it there. Maybe it is something I love.

So, back I go. I must have been 8 or 9 years old when I began to like driving. On some summer Sundays my aunt and uncle would visit from their home in Bronxville, New York and we’d all spend a leisurely late afternoon roaming the winding roads through the Connecticut suburbs where my family lived. On some evenings my dad would drive us to town for ice cream. We owned a convertible in those days. I was thrilled to be out in the open, in the wind that whipped my hair and the sun that flashed though the trees that canopied over the roads. It was perhaps my first love—inspired, emotional, instant.

One day when I was 12, I asked my mother to show me how to drive. We were coming home from the grocery store and had just turned onto the dead end road we lived on. I slid across the bench seat and she made room for me, let me take the wheel. Eventually, she showed me how to use the gas pedal and the brake. We would do this often over the years. By the time I turned 16 and was old enough to drive on my own, cars had become second nature to me, like someone who’s trained on the piano and can play anywhere, any time. Put me in a car and I’m at home. Friends are amazed at the lengths—measured in time and miles—that I can sit behind the wheel and enjoy it.

I enjoy the motion of going somewhere—as I am doing now. It does not matter where I am going. I am here. And though I am alone I feel as if everyone and everything I care for is with me—in my head, my heart. It’s as if, by some strange Newtonian law of physics, the more miles I put between me and the presence of these people and things, the more they crowd inside me. It is a lot to carry, I know. I do not travel light.

But this is a floating world, what the Japanese call ukiyo, “pictures of the floating world.” It was a popular art form in 17th-century Japan. Asai Ryoi, a 17th-century Japanese writer, describes ukiyo as “Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in just floating, floating; … refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current: this is what we call the floating world.”

The Mass Pike has drifted away behind me. Interstate 495, too. Interstate 95—Portsmouth, Portland, Augusta, Bangor—are all gone over the horizon that I glimpse in the rearview mirror from time to time. Nothing back there now but this narrow slice of road that cuts through the deep woods of Maine and rolling carpets of wild blueberry scrub. There are long grades up and down. On either side of me, the sun angles in the tall pines and on the still, dark ponds that shine black like polished ebony. The radio is off so I can hear myself think, pay attention to what’s around me. I can feel my pulse settle into a slow, steady beat as if corresponding to that distant drum that beats just below consciousness, leading me onward, inward.

We often dream of places we’d like to be, of what we will do when we get there. But it’s often the getting there that I dream about, that makes me happy, that I tell my friends and family about. Downpours, rainbows, animals, sunsets, the moon.

“There is always hope, always something better, if you keep moving”, I’ve heard people say with a snicker of cynicism. But that’s not what this is about for me. Sometimes when I am on the road, life just doesn’t get any better. I’ve no hope because I don’t need it. I’ve no expectations about any place because I am already there. And I am never disappointed because the motion always gives, and gives, and gives.

It’s 3 o’clock in the morning and I am at the office. I’m not there because I’m working late, at least not that late. I’m there because I just woke up from a dream.

Night after night I’ve been waking up several times just after having dreamed of being in a meeting, going over my schedule of appointments or list of things to do, driving to work, emailing someone about something important (or so it seems), and impatiently waiting for a reply. Then the following morning, I come into the office and the same thing starts happening all over again, only now it’s in real life and real time. When people feel busy, they often complain they’re working 24/7. In my case these days (and nights), it seems that’s what’s happening to me. And there’s no comp time for dreaming of work.

It’s been so long since I’ve dreamed of anything but work that I’ve sometimes found myself humming “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” even as dozens of yellow-headed daffodils are popping up outside in my garden. A white Christmas on Easter would at least be a change of scenery.

I’m feeling so desperate that I’ve resorted to setting intentions just before I go to sleep. I ask whoever or whatever might be listening (and this is a real question for me since I live alone and have no pets) that I be visited by dreams of a sunny beach, the open road, a night on the town, falling in love—anything but a day at the office in the middle of the night, please. No luck. If there is a God, my requests are either falling on deaf ears or being ignored. I feel like I’m trapped pacing up and down the middle aisle of an all-night convenience store.

I am not having the same dream. This is not my own version of Groundhog Day, the hilarious movie in which the character played by Bill Murray wakes up each morning only to find it’s the exact same day as the day before. Each night my dreams are different. What’s the same is the theme: Work and more work. This is not funny. When I’m on vacation, I never dream that I’m on vacation. I sure hope that when I’m on my next vacation I am not still dreaming about work.

Buddhists speak of the “non-self” not as lack of identity but as an identity that is fluid. “It appears that human beings are wired to create a separate self,” writes Polly Young-Eisendrath in her book The Resilient Spirit: Transforming Suffering Into Insight and Renewal. We grasp onto a passing quality and make it, she writes, “into the essence of who we are.” What Buddhism teaches is that the idea we have of a separate unchanging self, of seeing oneself apart from others, is a fundamental root of our suffering. “We do not allow ourselves to be fully who we are; we want a definition of a self that exists and continues,” she writes.

In dreams, too, there is a sense of having this Buddhist “non-self” because you cannot tell your mind what to dream for you, as much as I’ve pleaded for that to happen. In our dreams, we don’t have a “definition of a self that exists and continues.” Your mind goes where it wants to go and you become who it wants you to be. And you can learn and grow from where you go and what you do in your dreams.

“People go to wild places in search for their true nature,” the Zen teacher John Tarrant said at a recent Omega program, Mindfulness, Love & Relationship, in New York City. “Where is my true nature?” he went on to ask. This is what he called a koan, an ancient Buddhist practice of posing a question that has no definitive answer because it has aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding. Here’s a koan of my own: Of all the things my mind can conjure up when I am dreaming, why in the middle of the night does it take me back to the office I just left a few hours before, and will return to a few hours hence?

Maybe I can train myself to have lucid dreams. “A lucid dream,” according to the website luciddreaming.com, “is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. This awareness is referred to as lucidity or being lucid.” When you are having a lucid dream, you are supposed to be able to manipulate the experiences you are having in the dream. I think I like this idea. If I could lucid dream when I am dreaming about work then maybe I can see myself out of the door, get into my car, and drive home to a wonderful wife who’s just prepared a wonderful meal. We are sitting outside, the weather is warm, blue birds are singing in the trees, and the beads of condensation on the glass of a tangy Sauvignon Blanc are picking up the last salmon-colored rays of the setting sun. Talk about dreaming.

Then again, it seems to me that if you lucid dream, you miss the whole point of dreaming. Dream images come from the unconscious and, as such, have much to tell us about our lives—our desires, needs, problems that need to get resolved, even illnesses. I remember in a psychology class when I was a student at Union Theological Seminary the teacher, a psychotherapist, told a story about a man who kept having a dream of seeing a huge pumpkin on the side of the road he was driving on. Turns out the man had a huge cancerous tumor in his stomach. The moral of this story, the professor concluded, is that the man’s recurring dreams were trying to tell him something he needed to know in the symbolic language in which dreams speak. As much as I don’t like dreaming about work, I really don’t want to tell my dreams what to do. I’m thinking that lucid dreaming is just another control issue that I really don’t want to deal with right now.

“No one on his deathbed ever said ‘I wish I spent more time at the office,'” the late U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, Paul Tsongas, once said. So perhaps what I need to do is let a little reverie into my life, to take a moment or two out of my day or night to give myself what the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called a “psychic détente.” Instead of burning the candle at both ends, perhaps when I wake up from a dream in which I am at the office, I need light a real candle and gaze into its flame and soft pool of light for a while.

“There is no well-being without reverie, no reverie without well-being,” Bachelard writes in his On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. “We discover, by reverie, in the first place, that being is good.” And a lit candle can take us there. “One may well be interested in the inner swirls surrounding the wick, and see in the depth of the flame stirrings where shadow and light struggle,” Bachelard goes on. “But every dreamer of flame lifts his dream toward the summit. It is there that fire becomes light.”