Some places speak to your heart so deeply that the very thought of them is like a call from “home,” reminding you that somewhere in the world you fit. Every time Washington band Mount Eerie's "Voice in Headphones" pops up on my Apple Music playlist, the lo-fi melody transports me to a time and place when/where I felt my heartbeat washing out before my eyes across a landscape I was lucky enough to witness. To embody a place and feel embodied by that place is an experience I wish for everyone at least one time in their lives.
I hail from the coastal plain of southern Alabama. The state’s springs, rivers, and creeks are intricate veins running southward through pine forests and packed red clay until they drain into marshy estuaries or rush into the Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, a body of water often stirred up by hurricanes.
However compromised by the state’s lax enforcement of farm effluent laws, these coastal waters are still sacred to many people. They’re made more sacred and awe-inspiring to me since I never learned how to swim in placid ponds let alone to take on the roiling Gulf waves.
Some nights after late shifts at the local grocery store near our high school, my best friend Marci and I would end up at Gulf Shores. We’d sit together on the beach talking about our British Romantic and American Transcendentalist obsessions. The inky night was dotted with a gibbous moon, its light painting the sugary sand an alabaster so luminescent I could pretend I had squatted on stone carved by light and chiseled away by the waves’ sharp and persistent crashing to shore.
After college I moved to Portland, Oregon, and spent as much time as possible along the state’s northern coast. Once, I hiked out alone to Cape Falcon at Oswald West State Park, the wind and rain lashing my jacket and jeans. I looked out over the ocean where the line between sky and sea blurred in the mist. I knew I never wanted to be anywhere else but right there. For a moment I stood at the cliff’s edge and leaned forward on my tiptoes, the wind so swift it would have held me back had I slipped. I looked out at the turbid sea, thought of Ted Hughes’s poem “Wind” and Anne Sexton’s “There You Were,” and imagined I was flying, skating my goretex wings along wind gusts, shearing that steely sky.
Even now, I want the ones I love there beside me on that windy outcropping, to watch the point where land plummets to sea and washes out past the horizon, to witness the way the froth-beaten waves lash those cliff walls. I want them to feel the mist beading up on their cheeks and hear the tide rushing in and the wind whistling past their ears.
Maybe they’d take that memory with them as I have, a calcified conch shell memento, for those difficult days on the plains. Hold that shell against your ear, I’d say, like headphones harkening you back to the sea.
We may have so few times in life when we know, without doubt, we’re alive and completely present. When our heart opens up to the glory that is the wind, the rain, the sky, the earth, the ocean, the trees, the grass crunching under our feet. When we are more than ourselves because in that moment ourselves don’t matter a bit. What a gift and a comfort it is to be outside our heads and in such miraculous moments.
