It was a winter day, because it is always winter in Carmel. I was six years old. My older brother ran ahead of me, his feet kicking back dry sand. The sand squeaked under my sneakers as I trotted after him. We had a younger sister too, but she wasn’t there that day.  My mother was slow way down the strand. I never thought much about why she was always jogging us up and down the beach. I supposed she wanted us to drench our eyes in the expanse. She was always talking about the wildness of it all. Or else she figured fresh air and exercise are good for kids. Now, years later I see her motivation had very little to do with us. She needed space of her own.

There had been a lot of water again that year. Just the year before, rain had caused the Carmel River to rise over its banks, into the hundred-year floodplain. Which flooded every other year give or take ninety-nine. Rebuilt homes were destroyed again, and people were still exhaling. In years to come, when the river had overflowed its banks again, Clint Eastwood, no longer the mayor of town, but still an interested resident, would buy the artichoke farm and let it return to a natural, tough coastal, shrubby floodplain. But the day I am recalling is before any Hollywood financed land initiatives are set in place and nobody wanted to live through another sad soggy Christmas.

Bulldozers were at the beach to fast track the naturally meandering Carmel River. The river usually preferred to be intimate, snaking through the shallow sandbars from the marsh to the ocean. The machines were there that day to cut a direct channel from the lagoon, through the deep sand straight to the sea. The water rushing through this man-made strait was angry.

This wrath is what my brother and I are running to oversee. The water was mad, hastening hard into its deep bed. It was a grey day, and you could smell the salt in the spray. My mother was still far down the beach. She was just a green windbreaker in the distance because Granny Esther never sent knit sweater in her size. My brother and I stood on the edge of that quickening in the wind. We felt important, like maybe we could do something improbably large, like leash a flood. It was my brother’s idea to build the dam. We began by pushing the sand beneath us down the vertical slope into the river.

Nineteen years elapsed. The winter of my twenty-fifth year was mild. I returned to Carmel Beach a young woman. There had been almost no rain, and the sun was shining. A pale splash of yellow, like watery butter, spread itself all over the beach. I was doing tai chi. I had just spent a month learning the ancient form at Esalen. Esalen Institute is a natural healing community with a history in mindfulness teaching. My tuition was partially paid for by working mornings in the institute’s craggy garden.

The topsoil at Esalen was a black, seven feet thick crumb that had been built up over centuries by the Native Americans that farmed the Big Sur cliffs. They thought the place was special, holy because three waters converge: fresh, salt and sulfur springs. Everyone there was open to their faults, the fissures that crack and shift, morphing the way we become. The old, naked people living on the cliffs looked like Picassos.

I liked to practice tai chi. The form came easily. Maybe because of all the ballet I learned in my growing up years, it just flowed naturally. When it’s done gently, with even rhythmic breath, power pushes through the dark corners. I liked it. I was hooked and as I said before, I was a natural.

My teacher at Esalen was Ken, a Feldenkrais practitioner in real life, but once a year a yurt loving sensei. Ken made me his front left corner. "Watch her," he directed the class. They had to follow me or be wrong.  Ken had a car at Esalen and took me out for wine, saying he wanted my help choose gifts at the Nepenthe store. But by then I was used to men like San Francisco Ken, who tried to get girls drunk or high. He bought me a beanie hat, perfect for cool coastal weather. True, I may have looked adorable modeling it, but hand-knit clothing made me itchy. I never wore it. Not even once. 

The day I did tai chi on Carmel Beach my body flowed over the dry sand, but I was thinking about Heathcliff, the Esalen electrician. I hadn’t stopped thinking about him since he first sauntered up the hill in his nimble way. I was hoeing in the garden, aware of the ripe smell of manual labor under my arms. He stood before me a perfectly formed human with a dark nature, brown salty curls, boiling eyes and a sinewy body, browned and shirtless. He was not well liked, misunderstood. The kind of man that people avoided, maybe because he reminded them of what they tried to push away: a disconcerting dream, a poor response in a tense situation, not wanting to be where you are, or addiction. But he smelled fantastic, like red meat charred on electric wires, rubbed in rosemary oil, and finished with dark chocolate salt.

The tai chi form I practiced was long and slow. It took about twenty minutes from start to finish. When I finished, I realized how connected I felt to that beach. A part of me had never left. I decided to walk. The lagoon was bright, with the sun glinting off the still surface. A flock of wild seabirds nesting in the reeds took flight as I approach the wet sand. I climbed the rockpile at the end of the beach where there was a trail, that bends along the coast beneath zillion dollar homes, with expansive views you can see for a discount. But you have to look the entire time, or you don’t get your money’s worth.  

I was gone walking for some time. Maybe two hours. The entire time I was thinking of Heathcliff. He has wide muscular hands from stripping electrical wires. I remember the time I saw him interrupt a Frisbee game. He leapt into the middle of the course and snatched the disk from midair, like I’ve only seen a Border Collie rotate its entire frame in space. He was still in the air when he changed direction to toss the Frisbee to its intended receiver, before touching his feet down on the soft grass. Barefoot. He never looked back. 

When I got back to the beach the sun was lower in the sky. But it was still bright and cheerful, so unlike the coastal town I remember. I begin to wonder if it was I who was actually different and not Carmel. This felt like a heavy moment and I stopped where I was standing on the sand, directly in front of the lagoon. That is when I first noticed the channel in front of me. It wasn’t there a few hours earlier, but now a thin passage, only a foot or so in breadth stretched from the lagoon all the way to the sea. It appeared like a thin model of the original furious straight from long ago, when I almost turned into a mermaid. How odd that this little way should appear just then, at that hour, when I was just thinking about things.

Presently, I heard a voice, “Careful now. You don’t want to fall in.”  The voice belonged to a middle-aged man. I had to laugh. I might have just stepped over this long ditch and kept on my direction. But this story was bubbling up in me. So, I told the stranger not to worry, because I had experience with this particular sand channel. Of course, I remembered it much wider. At least thirty feet across and the sand walls ten feet high. Though I couldn’t really say, because I was smaller, too. It was so many years ago. “I fell.” I told the stranger my story. The man did not smile or change his facial expression all throughout my account. It occurred to me he might be dumb. So, I ended my story by reassuring him I would be very careful. I was going to leave, but he stopped me. He stretched out his arm and I recognized his hand in my whole body as breathe. Life.

I had just told this stranger half a story that began in the sand right there. The other half he lived himself. “I rescued a little girl from drowning here,” he began. “I remember her older brother. He wore glasses and a striped sweater.” My brother’s cries would have carried over the sand. This man had re-lived this story, turned the pages back and forth as many times as I had. It didn’t seem possible, but then there we were again, reunited on opposite banks of our shared river.

There is a negative bias that wants to believe maybe it was somebody else, because neither of us could fully fathom finding each other, in just the same context. People pass each other on the beach all the time. We stared at one another. He was just a man. He smiled sheepishly at me. His paunch hanging over his salt-stained cargo pants. I thought he would be taller. He worked the bulldozer that dug the wide channel back then and became some kind of sand engineer becoming the foreman of that river rerouting project. That day he had just finished a survey of the beach. I wondered how being the hero there nineteen years ago had shaped his life.

I didn’t know what I wanted to express to him exactly. So many winters had since come and gone for both of us. If time could be measured in sand, then I had lived that beach, grateful for every grain of my experience. But so had he. The simplest expression seemed the right one. I said, “Thank you.”

He blushed, murmuring, “I’m glad you’re here,” which made him blush an even deeper shade. There was more awkward silence between us. The sea birds dipped and soared in the background. I watched a Sandpiper plunge its sharp beak into the wet sand and swallow a crab. We parted because there wasn’t anything left to say.  

I stepped over the river I’d outgrown and walked away. An hour, maybe two hours passed, and I realized I never got his name. I’d already forgotten his Hispanic countenance. It simply sank back into the sand and was lost in the fold of my story. All that mattered in the end was the gesture.