At Sea
2017
THOSE OLD LETTERS FROM SO LONG AGO BURNED IN HER memory now, as she stared at the relentless azure sea.
BEREA, KENTUCKY
October 11, 1965
Dear Ann,
When you graduate, please go straight to California. I know you can get a Stanford fellowship. I will put in a word for you. It will be liberating for you out there. When I traveled from Kentucky to California, I began to understand America through our fellow pioneer, Daniel Boone. I remember standing on a cliff at Santa Cruz, at the edge of the Pacific, and watching all the seabirds soar out to sea, and I thought about Daniel Boone atop Cumberland Mountain, surveying the unbounded promise of the wilderness. And I was stupefied to be there. Of course I was stoned, and for a while I felt I was Daniel Boone. Ann, what is your opinion of Daniel Boone these days?
Your erstwhile professor,
Albert
P.S. Please do what I say.
BEREA, KENTUCKY
November 15, 1965
Dear Ann,
When I was at Stanford on the Stegner with Kesey and McMurtry and that bunch—before they were big!—I knew I was at the center of the universe. Mr. O’Connor regaled us with his hilarious Irish tales. I loved to hear his thick brogue. And Mr. Cowley gabbed about his pals Hem and Dos. Imagine, knowing those writers! At first I thought he meant Dostoevsky, but of course he meant Dos Passos. He and Dos Passos were thick. And as for Hemingway, we just quivered in admiration.
But you are wise, Ann, to go the academic route. It suits you.
Your servant and literary pal,
Albert
BEREA, KENTUCKY
January 9, 1966
Dear Ann,
I won’t listen to your self-deprecations. Or your oddball notion of striking out for New York. New York! Maybe Scott Fitzgerald went to New York, but Daniel Boone went west, where everything was new. What is happening in California these days is radical. And I was there at the beginning of this transformative time. This is cosmic.
I know some fine folks out there who will take care of you. You will bloom, Ann. People are so free and willing to explore. California is just what you need to drag you out of your shell.
We loved to go to San Gregorio Beach at sunset. A bunch of us would drop acid and have a square dance on the beach. We’d mire up in the sand and fall down crazy with laughter and desire. We were just barefooted freaks wild by the ocean.
Your pal,
Albert
WHAT A FEATHERHEAD she was. She should have followed Albert’s advice. Even though Albert had never understood her, he claimed to know just what she needed to do—get stoned and practice “free love,” etc. Perversely, she had blazed her own trail. With her unsophisticated rural background, she believed graduate school at Stanford University was obviously out of her league. Harpur College, where she had gone instead for her graduate degree, was in upstate New York, in the snow belt. There was no real springtime, just a June burst of summer after a long, dismal, chilly season. There, she spent each spring in a blue funk, romanticizing the sweet balminess of April in Kentucky. She should have gone to California.
Now, fifty years later, shut in the lofty stateroom of a colossal, farcical cruise ship, Ann wondered what would have happened if she had gone to Stanford instead of Harpur College. Her life would have been different. The dread she faced now made her feel like a weatherbeaten mariner, under a bird’s curse.
If she had gone to California she would never have met Jimmy.
Jimmy. She could still hardly bear to think about him.
But she felt a whir of excitement, an unexpected pleasure in imagining her youth following an alternate path. People always said, Oh, to be young again, knowing what I know now.
Being young again, in the sixties. What a blast it would be to start over—in California. Wasn’t California something of a dream by definition? She could reimagine her life. And Jimmy wouldn’t be in it. Or it could have turned out differently with Jimmy. She wouldn’t be in this nightmarish mirage on an alien sea.
Palo Alto, California
1966
“DON’T BE AFRAID” WAS THE LAST THING ALBERT HAD SAID to Ann before she left Kentucky.
If she had gone to California, she would have driven cross-country alone, following the southern route he recommended. Her two-door antique 1952 Chevrolet, black with a tidy rump, was like an elderly lady in sensible shoes. But the car was a mismatch. Ann sallied out with an innocent boldness, despite a shyness that sometimes made her tiptoe and hide. She kept the windows rolled down until she reached the Sierras. The car had no radio, but the friendly chug of the engine, with the wind whistling and whooshing against the little push-out corner window, made a soundtrack for her journey. Across the vast deserts, she felt she was in suspension, the past receding, the future nowhere yet. Daniel Boone never entered her mind.
In her mind, California would be a kaleidoscope of sunny skies, convertibles, bright blonds, unusual trees. Albert was right, she thought. Out there, she would open up like a flower. But Palo Alto, when she arrived, was cloudy, and the farm fields were dry and dusty, spreading a haze over the coastal hills. It appeared to be a quiet little city, hardly larger than Paducah. Something sweet-smelling drifted through the air, and flowers bloomed luxuriantly everywhere.
She had arranged to rent an apartment from a woman in a white wood-frame house with a dark Victorian interior. From the landlady’s hallway, Ann glimpsed fringed lamps and velvet drapes, with incongruous arrangements of artificial flowers crowding the front room. A stale odor of cigarette ashes and bacon, with an overlay of Evening in Paris perfume, assaulted her. The landlady, in exaggerated lipstick and a lace shawl, was sullen and curt.
Ann rented an upstairs studio unit in a nondescript stucco building behind the house. The rooms were plainly furnished, but painted screaming pink throughout. The carpet was voluptuous mauve cabbage roses, and the bathroom was a deep burgundy color. The sink, the shower tile, the commode—all a somber burgundy. She stared in the mirror, aghast. The lighting made her skin sallow.
THE UNIVERSITY WAS at the end of a long avenue lined with lofty palm trees. Ann drove slowly, the car creeping along as if it too was nervous about the ultimate destination of the cross-country journey. Halfway down the avenue, she pulled over. Stanford displayed itself lavishly in front of her, both tantalizing and threatening. The amount of wealth it held in its history was beyond Ann’s imagination. The palm trees on either side of her made a path to Xanadu. It took her breath.
She was three weeks early, and the campus was nearly deserted. At first glance, Stanford was a pleasant park, all manicured greenery and earth tones, but as she wandered past the imposing Hoover Tower and along the arcades of the sandstone buildings around the Main Quad, she felt as though she had stumbled upon a hidden ancient kingdom. The tall palm trees, with their bushy tops, seemed to have blown in from the tropics. She didn’t know the names of the flowers spread at their feet.
The harsh sun glared off the walkways, making her feel exposed and uncertain. But she almost laughed when she noticed a group of palm trees, their moptop heads peering curiously over a red-tile roof. She walked on, map in hand, wandering bug-eyed past majestic buildings and landscaped oases. Ahead of her was a bold fountain, a sculpture made of green slashes of metal. It erupted like a sea creature rising.