"What will happen if we stay here . . . "

Fed up with the heat and smoke-filled air from fires in the mountains surrounding my home, I managed to get away for a few days camping in the Crescent City/ Brookings area--the tsunami region on the Pacific Coast.

I half-expected to find the beaches strewn with radioactive debris from the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Instead, I found the cooling mists of renewal, the continuing play as the sea arranged and rearranged its assemblage of bones, shells, feathers, and seaweed. The sea, the great artist, granted its dignity to old strands of kite string, to sand-creased plastic bags, even to the bottles we humans have so carelessly discarded.



Because I kept busy walking and running in the surf, I barely touched the novel I brought with me, but I did take time to read each night from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry edited by J.D. McClatchy. I kept returning to these lines from the German poet Ingeborg Bachman that echoed my feelings as I picked up plastic and glass from the sand:

          What will happen if we stay here,
           homesick to the root of our flowing hair,
           and ask: what will happen  
           if we survive beauty's trial?