THE MAGIC PLACES HOLD

Patty Somlo

A short distance from the condo complexes and one hotel, the beach is deserted. I step off the sand-dusted paved path before a trash-strewn field starts. Several small, rusted campers and dirty tents balance precariously on the cliff edge. I remember this place from previous visits, a different side of this pricey paradise, where semi-permanent lodgings house folks who otherwise might be out on the street.

Late in the afternoon, the sand is warm, but not hot. Soft deep grains cling to my feet, as I let my sandals sway from my fingers. I breathe in, feeling a calmness that has eluded me so far. The beach in front and on both sides is empty, without a person, a lounge chair or umbrella in sight.

I spot a long substantial slab of bleached driftwood, far enough away from the waves to stay dry. A flat smoothed section will fit me perfectly. I plow through the sand and drop down.

The sun sits low, lighting the waves a soothing gold, not the harsh glare of early afternoon. Except for moments after dawn, this might be my favorite time. Everyone by this hour has gone back to their condos or hotel rooms, sipping cocktails, and making plans for dinner tonight.

I am alone, though. It’s crazy, but I have no choice. I’ve told family and friends that I made a promise. Yet, I didn’t have to come. At least, not now.

Watching waves build and drop, rolling in and out, cresting the color of jade, soothes me. Though sad, I am also filled with light. The sensation may not last long, but it helps assure me that coming here was right.
	
Two days ago, starting with a 5:15 a.m. pickup by a kind taxi driver at my house, followed by an hour-plus ride to the airport, where I hurried from the domestic to the international terminal, and flustered, got through baggage drop-off, the interminable TSA line, and the unending trek to the gate, I arrived in time. Decades had passed since I’d flown alone. Though I tried not to bring too many clothes, my suitcase weighed almost more than I could manage. Somehow, I succeeded in hefting the cumbersome thing off the conveyor belt before rolling it to the terminal door.
	
When I stepped outside, I spotted a van I hoped would take me to a waiting rental car. The rain made it hard to see.  
	
Before this day, I had never rented a car myself, never answered questions the clerk behind the high counter asked, never, after searching the lot, found my assigned vehicle, and never drove the unfamiliar car away. Rain soaked my purple nylon jacket the moment I stepped outside. Wind whipped the hood down, drenching my hair.
	
The first key fob didn’t work, so I had to dash back to the office and arrange for a different car. Once inside the red Kia with the engine running, I could see that the windshield wipers were barely able to keep up with the downpour. 
	
As I watch the waves now, I am recovered from the effort I made to get here and not thinking ahead. That’s a gift I’d hoped for, what might get me through the hardest time of my life. 
	
Maybe everyone feels this way, or at least people who travel to places like Hawaii. Perhaps they all think, this is my home, this is where I really live, this is where I belong.
	
I did live on a neighboring island once. For three blissful years, I body-surfed waves that climbed higher than I would have imagined possible. I paddled out to the place where the wave formed, and watched it build, planning my next move, and trusting the water would gently carry me to shore.
	
When I was a young girl, living with my parents and two sisters on the Island of Oahu, I made a lasting connection with the vibrant landscape that surrounds me now. In Hawaii, I bonded with the beach and waves, while warm water embraced me. The colors of Hawaii, from the red ginger to the tiny yellow bananas and green everywhere, shimmered when touched by the sun, and were elements of a place I think of as home. Of course, there were frequent rainbows, a sign the rain would soon stop.
	
I am a widow, after three decades with a man I adored. I gaze at the waves and tears which have been a constant companion these last six months since I watched my husband Richard take his last breath, start up. Silently, I begin a conversation I have every day with the spirit I believe remains of my beloved spouse at home. I tell Richard I miss him and wish he could be here beside me, as he was in our years together, on this and other beaches, next to lakes and rivers, or on mountaintops. Though I know he will never answer, I ask where he has gone and if he is all right.
	
Richard and I first came here to Kauai less than six months after we met, strangers before the moment I walked into a dark bar on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, my sight briefly blinded by the sun. Richard must have told the hostess he was waiting for someone because she immediately directed me to a corner on the right. Standing there holding a long-stemmed white rose was this guy I had only spoken to once on the phone. Something told me my blind date was shy. The thought made me like him right off.
	
We followed the hostess out into the light. She directed us to a table at the edge of the bleached wooden deck, close enough to San Francisco Bay to get wet, if the wind picked up. The sky was that drenched blue you see in San Francisco on blessed days when fog stays off the coast. To my left, the burnt orange Golden Gate Bridge glowed in the sun.
	
He was dressed nicely, a requirement for guys I liked, in a short-sleeved teal green shirt and khaki pants. Everything else about his appearance fit into the box of what I considered my type—black hair, dark brown eyes, nice smile, slender and not too tall. I would later learn he thought me beautiful. When we talked about our life together in his last months, he deemed the day he met me the happiest of his life.

We went cheap that first visit to Kauai, getting a package deal that included hotel, flight, and car. The hotel, the Kauai Sands, still sits above the beach not far from where I watch the waves, though it’s been remodeled and renamed. The dreary room with its tiny kitchenette overlooked the pool. One evening, waiting for me in the sink, I discovered a cockroach the size of my thumb.
	
Every morning, we drank our coffee on the lanai, surrounded by the colorful landscape, listening to those little Hawaiian doves make their repeated percussive coocoo coocoo, which would forever remind me of that time. We inhaled the beauty of this island, hiking the Kalalau Trail on the North Shore, its exploding lushness and slippery soil keeping our attention focused in front of us. In Waimea Canyon, off and on showers brought rainbows, arcing across layers of red dirt, like a travel poster. Wild green and brown chickens and their fuzzy yellow chicks delighted us. And we snorkeled for the first, but far from the last, time, following flat neon fish, just to keep looking at them.
	
After that trip, Richard and I returned to Hawaii again and again, eventually visiting all the Hawaiian Islands, except Molokai and tiny Niihau. Having stayed away for decades since my childhood, I was surprised each time, when so much, from the feel of the warm humid air to the scent of the delicate yellow white plumeria, brought back long-buried memories, reminding me of home.
	
I have brought pieces of my life with me to this moment, sitting on the beach alone. There’s the trauma I’ve barely begun to explore with the kind counselor hospice has provided me back home. I took care of Richard for four and a half years following the devastating stage four cancer diagnosis, when we learned the pain he’d started experiencing in his back weeks before Christmas was caused by cancerous tumors that had migrated from the prostate to his bones. At the time I took on the caretaking role, I was a childless woman, who’d never taken care of a single soul before. 
	
Sitting on this welcoming driftwood, I recognize that healing from the trauma of watching the person I loved most in the world suffer, and eventually cradling his too-thin shoulder as he died, is one reason I have come. And yes, I did promise Richard during his final months I would scatter some of his ashes here on the island, where we shared so many memorable moments and love. He wasn’t able to make one last visit with me, not wanting to come when he felt too sick and weak to hike, snorkel or enjoy a Hawaiian breakfast of Saimin or Loco Moco at a beloved local establishment, the Tip Top. That’s why I needed to bring him along after he died.
	
But there is more. I am alone, without any close family to help me. It’s the reason I’ve traveled here alone. As sad as it is to say, there’s no one but me in the life I have to live now.
	
In the months since Richard’s departure, I have passed days when I don’t speak a word to anyone. Yes, I have long enjoyed time alone, to ponder and walk, think and write. But an entire life alone? As I watch the waves roll in and back off, the thought brings more tears and a reminder. I must create a new life practically from scratch, molding the clay of it, as I once did in a wonderful life sculpting class at the Sharon Art Studio in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
	
This isn’t a new realization that’s just appeared to me. I came, in part, as a step in that direction. As I understood, I could stay home brooding and feeling sorry for myself or start creating a life that in some ways mimicked the rich one I had with Richard. More than that, I hoped to take what I have been learning from his loss, and being so intimate with illness and death, and quit wasting time.
	
I sit here thinking about how nature has almost never let me down. In Kauai, and too many other places to count, Richard and I rekindled our love, as we reveled in being on ocean beaches, alongside rivers and creeks, winding our way up and down mountain trails, or relaxing in rustic cabins shaded by Cedar and tall Douglas Fir. Together, we explored treasured places and grew closer to our deepest selves. I am incapable of separating my love for Richard from the happiness of sitting on a beach watching the water and sunlight dance to an ancient tune they’ve long enjoyed.
	
A favorite habit was to hike to where we would be rewarded with a splendid view, usually of water. That meant finding large rocks or driftwood for seats and enjoying a simple lunch of homemade sandwiches or bread and cheese. My heart aches writing this, as I recall how overflowing with gratitude I felt, not wanting to be any place but there, with anyone but my spouse.
	
Until coming here alone to Kauai a few days ago, it never occurred to me that Richard and I had a certain symbiotic relationship with the places we visited and loved. Hiking a favorite trail around Clear Lake in Central Oregon, we absorbed the magic that place held and then multiplied its healing grace by having the experience together. A landscape photographer, Richard always carried his camera and snapped photographs, even if we’d been to that exact spot numerous times. I jotted down impressions in a small notebook I toted in my pack.
	
After returning home, I often wrote about the visit, because something happened to me nearly every time. Maybe I noticed sunlight striking the rocks or how the time outside made me feel. I never thought I was the same person coming home as when I’d left.
	
Before meeting Richard, I had an inkling that being out in nature, and especially close to water, affected me. But not until I went to remote wondrous places with him did I understand. Having a kindred soul who felt drawn to these places, as I was, multiplied the effect. 
	
It’s fitting that in Richard’s final few months, we gravitated outdoors. At that point, he didn’t have energy and strength to travel. 
	
A few years earlier, I had purchased two black wicker chairs and a small matching table and set them on a wide concrete strip underneath the fig tree, in our back yard. For some time, I had been drawn to sit out there, facing a garden patch whose plants attracted hummingbirds. The stress and sorrow from caring for Richad, especially as his condition worsened, briefly melted away, as I listened to birds singing in the fig tree above my head or watched leaves dance in the breeze. So, when we couldn’t go on hikes at the nearby coast or somewhere farther from town, Richard managed to muster up enough energy each afternoon to join me outside.
	
As we used to do at the midway point on a hike, overlooking Silver Lake in Northern California’s Lakes Basin Recreation Area, or gazing out on Drakes Estero, from a hilltop in Point Reyes National Seashore, not far from our house, Richard and I talked. In some ways, it was as if we’d pulled out photo albums of our life, paging through, looking at prints, and remembering the fun times. We reminisced about our favorite trips, transporting ourselves back to places we loved. Those late afternoons, we traveled through California, the state we knew best, and then on to Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. Once again, we revisited Montana and British Columbia. And we went back and reminisced about the last big trip we took to Utah, before cancer was diagnosed.

Interspersed amongst the memories, we wondered out loud about what we’d both fretted over alone—Richard’s death and my life once he was gone. The talks were sad and hard, but necessary, I understood. Mostly, I did my best to reassure Richard that though separate, he and I would be all right.

If I close my eyes and picture us on any one of the trails we loved—at nearby Point Reyes National Seashore or north on our Sonoma County coast, or in Central Oregon—I feel myself come alive. We befriended those spaces, anticipating what we would see along the way. On the Estero Trail in Point Reyes National Seashore, we would lean over the worn wooden railing to watch small crabs scurry under the water in Drakes Estero. At Abbott’s Lagoon, we looked toward the shore, sure to spot a lone Great White Egret pecking for food in the mud. In August during the years we lived in Portland, Oregon, we headed east to Mt. Hood, hiking up to meadows we knew would be bursting with colorful wildflowers. Or we would take our inflatable blue and white kayak out on Central Oregon’s Clear Lake, where Richard would bait the hooks on our bamboo fishing poles, and we’d catch shiny trout.
	
I let my mind wander on this Kauai beach, a widow, feeling this deep mix of gratitude and grief, wondering where my life will take me now. And just for a moment, I feel Richard by my side, our breath mingling with the waves and wind, knowing that love remains, for his sweet spirit and the places that are still a precious part of my life.