Landscape: Memory Read Online Free PDF Page B

waves. I was running strong and steady, running through the deep valleys, up and over the difficult hills, stumbling in the damp sand and running to get the bucket back. Father was, it seemed, a mile distant, stumbling down from off his dune, fixing, I imagined, on a better site from which to watch the marauding birds. I heard Mother's distant cry of "Fore!" and the soft thwack of her wooden driver.
    That exquisite delirium came over me, that feeling when my blood is rushing so swiftly through the muscles of my legs, and my arms and body flexing with each stretching stride and pounding of my feet pushing into the sand, and my lungs stretched full force and aching, drawing the whole salty cold atmosphere through me, desperate for oxygen and hungry, hungry there at the very back of my throat. I ran and I ran like this so hard and long I finally stumbled and fell flat in the sand.
    It all stopped, the quiet as sudden and complete as an earthquake. I lay flat on my back and stared, dizzy, into the sky. The clouds were opening up at sea, but staying thick with chilly fog in above the golfers. Mother's tiny sphere sailed silently off the lip of a far dune, a tiny little whiteness winging away into the drifting mist. And then, after, came the soft thwack.
    I scooted backward up the dune, unching on my behind, to see farther and watch the full progress of the balls. The dunes sat in long rows of ridges, wrapped round in tangled turns and worked over every day by winds or rain. The sky opened up in patches, letting loose shafts of sunlight to shine down into the endless sand. And there was Father, two or three dunes distant, regarding me calmly through the spyglasses. I'd somehow run clear past him, making my way almost to the sea. Occasional wisps of fog would sweep between us, but his watch went uninterrupted. I lay there, staring east beyond him, staring after the silent white specks. They sailed through broad sweeps of blue sky where the clouds had blown suddenly clear. Father stood, caught in the bright sun, watching.
    Amidst this crowded chaos of golf games and shifting weather his attention had fixed, as it always seemed to fix, trained and focused through the powerful glasses. His aspect was calm, his two feet firmly planted in the heavy sands. He stood steady in the slight wind, the dune rising under him like a lifting hump of whale.
    Behind me the pelicans wheeled, tracing wide circles up into the disappearing mists and diving ferociously down into the cold ocean. Those idiot birds, driven through the sky on instincts and hunger, eyes wide open through air and icy salt water. They dove deep into the sea after fish they'd somehow spotted from high above. I wondered at this strange intelligence of theirs. Some queer dumb knowledge of each moment, felt in their tough muscled necks. Father was watching them, watching beyond me, this feston of birds.
    I stretched my arms out and wheeled around the top of the dune, feeling for any intelligence that might emerge from my body, from the flex of muscles across my back. I dipped and danced, not thinking, or rather, thinking to not think, imagining perhaps Indians or mating quail. Itucked and bobbed and still nothing took me, no wave of feeling or intuition swept through me. I got dizzy and fell down.
    10 JANUARY 1915
    Mother went to a suffrage meeting this morning and left me at home with Father and the rain beating on the windows. It was as wet as it gets today, the clouds so full and low and dumping like a mammoth shower let loose. Our road's a river of mud. Lincoln Beachey had said he'd fly come hell or high water and I'd planned with Duncan to watch from Cow Hollow but they wouldn't allow Beachey up, or said that was the reason, and Duncan decided not to leave his house and probably not to leave his bed for that matter. I imagine he'll lie about in his nightshirt all day, bundled in his eiderdown and napping, listening to comical songs on the Victrola and emerging only for food or a