Woke early, must’ve been near dawn. The sky was light out the window, a pale yellow of new sun even through the ubiquitous cloud cover. The tide was out, and it was the sound of the rain scratching at the cedar shakes that woke me. I was wide awake and yet felt unwell and unlike getting up. I laid there gazing out the window with my own vision and observed what I knew to be trees swaying in the wind but that appeared to be more hole than piece and roving kaleidoscopically before the light. After a while, still compelled to look, I turned for my glasses and got my book and read for a good long while with the book canted sharply to the window to soak up the meager blue light of that distance.

At eleven, after having slept again for many hours, I woke quickly and with the regret of having overslept. I wanted to go to the Saturday market in town and had wanted to arrive early when all the stalls were well stocked and the tourists still at breakfast. At this late hour, now half over and I just awake, I resolved to drive even though the cloud cover had lifted and the sun shone and I would’ve preferred to walk. So I drank tea and stretched and wrote and dressed and left here in the car, setting an auxiliary odometer so that I could finally stop guessing at the distance.

It is 3 miles from here to the stop sign at Fourth.

In town, the market was nowhere to be found and there was no evidence that it had occurred, except for a banner hung in the park advertising its occurrence on this day at that very hour. Perhaps they saw the rain and did not convene.

I walked around the town, and apart from the city park above the docks and the beautiful view from there of Clayoquot sound, it was a disappointment. I thought that coming to town is satisfying only in that it is a reminder that nothing is missed by staying out on the beach the entire time.

The shops run by locals recognize you as other and treat you less and the shops run by others pander the homogenous luxury found everywhere that families vacation.

In honor of Andrew, I went to Big Daddy’s Fish Fry and ordered a one-piece halibut and chips for 12 dollars. It came with a plate-sized tempura-battered fillet of the most delicate halibut and I did not wait for it to cool before tearing it apart and eating the steamy moist pieces. I did not eat the fries, the fillet was enough.

By then I was more than ready to leave town and so drove back toward the beach, stopping at the Tofitian for a mocha. The same woman as yesterday told me she didn’t have ice when I asked for an iced mocha, and she said that the weather was bad this morning and that was why she hadn’t ordered it. If this had been the first time I’d been there on a muggy day when they didn’t have ice, I might’ve believed her. But what can you do. I handed her my trusty old mug and she looked in it warily and then smiled when she saw that it was clean.

Back on Chesterman, the parking lot was packed and parked cars lined the road all the way down to the driveway. People of all ages and sizes waddled down the road in neoprene, and I thought my god, and then realized it’s Saturday and the weekend warriors are here.

I drank the mocha at the cabin, poured into a glass to cool, and read for the next several hours.

When next I looked up, the glass was blurry with rain. I wanted to run, but it’s a tough sell to start in the rain. I changed my clothes and returned to the chair in front of the window to wait out the shower, watching the surf and the few surfers not bothered by the weather. When it seemed to have quit, I opened the window and stuck out my arm to confirm. Dry. So I left quickly and started off running down the road, everything dripping and crackling, as if the whole peninsula had just risen from the sea. In the evening, in the rain, no one was about. The parking areas at the public access points were empty (weekend warriors vanished), and no one drove by. I saw a kid on a bicycle shrouded in black raingear. As he passed I couldn’t make out his face for the long bill of his hood. Out on the sand, few people walked and many were refugees from the last rain shower, with wet hair and sagging clothes, hurrying back to shelter. I passed a small mottled seal, dead and disemboweled by some scavenger since the last high tide this afternoon.

The tide was way out and running on the sand took on the feeling of running across a desert. I seemed to make little progress. It was tempting to flank the surf, but from earlier lessons, I resisted it. Hidden rivers lurk at low tide that you can’t see until up on them and that, unless you are prepared to ford, force you to backtrack long heretofore unrecognized spits. But the running was pleasant and I felt great. The hard packed sand is a generous surface for runners, requiring no extra effort for its softness but absorbing so much of the impact. I ran out to the resort and back again, stopping at the path and this time walking on to the south headland to cool down. I watched a surfer ride a wave for a long distance over a long time and with very steady control until at last the board escaped him. I watched to see if he could do it again, but he only sat the line waiting for some perfect chance.

It is my last night here and returning is always so sad for the loss to come … because so much is sacrificed, packed away, to maintain a life obliged to sustenance and the demands of others. I wonder if Andrew worries that I might go off one of these days and never come back. If he does, he never says. I’ve been here a long time this time and now I wonder how long I would have to be gone before I’d be ready to return. James Hollis writes:

When Thoreau went into the woods he was not in retreat as such. … By pulling away from the distractions of his rural Massachussetts’ life, Thoreau opened himself to the intimations of his inner world. As the outer cacophony dimmed, the orchestral range of the psyche grew more palpable. Behind the old saying that the cure for loneliness is solitude, is the discovery that when one is alone one is not alone, but present to a goodly company, in a very rich dialogue with oneself. The chief pathology of our time is the capacity of the world to distract us from this conversation. If the world was too much for Wordsworth in 1802, and Thoreau needed to step out of Concord in the 1840’s, what then of us, today?

It occurred to me while I was running that I may be wrong to believe that trying to gain control of the situation at work is a strong and right action. Maybe the strong action is the choice to leave that situation entirely, accepting the fact that it can’t be changed and saving my energy for an endeavor that is a better match for my spirit. If I know myself, I know that I have always sought to gain control where I sense I am a disempowered participant, even if to know me from the outside I might seem to go with the flow more easily than most. But I, at least, observe this struggle to try to persevere. Because this has not been successful, I think it has created an interesting duality whereby I commit to something to the bitter end but am ambivalent about commitment altogether, such that I’m always fighting for the cause with one foot out the door. In any case, I then realized that my fear in making the choice to quit is the worry that the next thing I decide to do might feel just as oppressive, and if so, what then? What if my experience of powerlessness is, in a sense, universal in interactions with others, and quitting would only be a short-term, and ultimately chronic, method of relief?

This is the logic that keeps me where I am, fighting the good fight, however flawed.