Poems by Carol Raitt
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Battered
by Carol Raitt
Carol lives in the Puget Sound lowlands, bound on the east by the Cascade Range and on the west by the Olympic Mountains and Salish Sea -- home to sea stars, killer whales, and salmon.
When a black speck appears and then vanishes behind crashing waves I lift my binoculars and train them on the swells of a roiling sea. Bird? Diver? Seal? The rain-streaked windows of my Oregon cottage distort my view.
Three hundred yards due west breakers batter a ten-foot-tall basalt outcrop, a remnant from an ancient lava flow. During low tide it’s easy to believe the rock looks like a woman’s face in profile, gazing skyward. The locals call her Lady Face. Nature’s jewels ornament her crags and wrinkles—gooseneck barnacles, blue-black mussels, coralline algae. Ochre sea stars and aggregate anemones shelter in shallow tidepools near her base. Black oystercatchers and Western gulls probe exposed crevices for food. She is wildlife’s safety zone.
My husband was my safety zone.
Until Halloween 1990, when Sam collapsed at work and diagnostic tests revealed lung cancer that had metastasized to his brain. Sam was 48 years old. Two days later our doctor turned to him and said, “I’m so sorry, Sam. You have twelve months to live.”
Although Sam beat those odds his body and spirit could no longer stop the disease despite seven years of radiation, surgeries, and chemotherapy.
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The mysterious black speck reappears. It’s a cormorant, a fish-eating bird. The cormorant bobbles like a bathtub toy, then slips under the waves. Something seems wrong. Cormorants dive underwater for prey, then rest on the water’s surface and extend their wings to dry them before diving again. When the bird resurfaces its wings look sodden and it struggles to stay buoyant. I pace the sunroom, chew on my ragged cuticle, and wonder if the cormorant will survive the storm or will I find it later, washed up on the beach? Dense, cinerous clouds draw a dark mantle across the sky.
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In the mid-1980s, Sam and I dreamed of buying a vacation home on the Oregon coast—a place no more than a few hours’ drive from Seattle where our family and two mutts could be close to the sea.
In January 1986 we found our getaway in Cannon Beach, Oregon. Seventy-miles-per-hour wind gusts bowed the picture windows and roared through the roof shingles of the 50-year-old cottage while we stood with our realtor inside the sunroom and struggled to see the ocean beyond rain-blurred glass. Each creak and shudder sent a surge of excitement through me. I smiled at Sam. The place felt sturdy enough to survive another half century of storms.
Sam squeezed my hand. He was a fan of squally weather. He said storms reminded him of his Navy days at sea. We joked about how the cottage was a survivor. Scoured by weather and blowing sand, its exterior wood shingles were the color of mouse fur. Knotty pine interior walls glowed like amber honey. The smell of salt spray and seashells infused each room. I imagined our young daughter and her friends creating memories here like previous generations of children—racing from room to room, dripping seawater, tiny feet grinding wet sand into aging linoleum. The cottage was perfect.
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Five years after Sam’s cancer diagnosis and fourteen months before his death we made our final visit together to Cannon Beach.
Relentless rain hammered Highway 30 foreshadowing worsening weather at the coast. Between swipes of wiper blades I counted mile markers and checked the time. Sam slept.
When we arrived, I unloaded the car, then we settled in to watch breakers crash over Lady Face. The storm’s fury matched the anger I leveled at the cancer attacking Sam’s body. Hailstones struck the window like flung pebbles. Fifty-mile-per-hour winds thrashed the foredune, bending beach grass and twig willow. I flung another log into the fireplace and watched burning embers ascend the chimney. Demonic sprites.
Sam’s frail body slumped into a wicker chair. The once-thick, strawberry blond hair I’d loved to touch was gone. Wispy gray strands sprouted from his half-bald scalp. Sharp cheekbones and shadowed hollows. Eyes too wide. Lips too thin. Skin that looked like it had been dipped in beige wax. He was 54 years old.
Between catnaps Sam reminisced about his Navy days, repeating words I’d heard before. Those four years in the Navy were among the happiest of my life. I’d forgotten most of Sam’s Navy stories, except one. Operation Dominic.
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The cormorant struggles to keep its head above the breakers while waves push it closer to Lady Face. Wave after wave trounces the bird, dashing it against the rock, unlike anything I’ve seen. The bird looks weak, defeated, unable to rally from the storm. How did this happen? I’ve seen the outcome of weather or disease on hapless birds washed up, littering the tide line. Did those birds leave mates or young behind? Does this one? When the wave retreats the bird’s wings extend outward and upward. The cormorant struggles to climb the craggy rock but three rollers spill over Lady Face and the bird loses traction. One black wing disappears below the waves. Gone.
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In 1962 Sam’s Navy service was ending. He was assigned to a ship stationed in the Pacific. During that time, our military conducted over thirty nuclear testing operations over land and sea. Operation Dominic was the military’s response to Soviet resumption of atmospheric nuclear tests. That spring, Sam’s vessel participated in a weapons effect test to evaluate how a nuclear blast would affect US ships within a target array between 1.5 to 2.5 miles from a blast site. After a Navy destroyer test-fired a nuclear weapon underwater the detonation produced a spray dome rising 2,100 feet into the atmosphere. As the dome dispersed it left a wide circle of foam-covered radioactive water that radiated eight miles from the blast site.
As Sam’s ship pitched and swayed sailors huddled below deck. The blast’s shockwaves loosened ceiling asbestos, showering the men in toxic dust. When the sailors got the “all clear” they were ordered topside, handed mops, and told to sweep the radioactive soup back into the sea.
For his part, Sam received a certificate with an image of a mushroom cloud and his name hand-lettered across the front. And when he received a cancer diagnosis at age 48, Sam joined the ranks of other Atomic Vets whose lives were shortened because of their exposure to elevated, unsafe levels of radiation.
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When the storm passes I grab my jacket and walk toward the basalt outcrop, gladdened by blue sky, the low tide, and a glint of sunshine on a calmer sea. There is no sign of the cormorant. Bits of flotsam, strands of sea grass, and tiny, orange crab exoskeletons litter the beach. Keening gulls swoop low over the sand.
I zip my windbreaker and walk south. I imagine Sam beside me—salty, tousled hair, ruddy face smiling as he repeats Navy stories I’ve heard a dozen times. My thoughts return to the day, one year after Sam’s death, when our daughter and I carried his cremated remains to a quiet stretch of beach south of our cottage. We climbed atop a rocky remnant of an ancient lava flow exposed at low tide. Incoming waves swirled around us as we released Sam’s cremains into his beloved sea.
As the years pass I feel less lonely when I visit our Cannon Beach cottage. I’ve kept Sam’s yellow slicker on a hook near the door. His stunt kite hangs from the ceiling. My beach walks comfort me. I know that each incoming wave returns a part of Sam to me.
© Carol Raitt