inauguration day
short fiction - words and photos by Brian Clark
After a full day and night of rain, the middle aged man laid in bed and looked at the ceiling. He tried to judge how close it was to sunrise based on the dim light coming through the tinted vent cover. Probably less than an hour until dawn. He took a drink of water. His mouth was dry and his bladder was full from drinking the night before. He stretched his legs and stepped into his sandals and slid the side door of the van open. There was the rushing sound of the ocean coming from over the dunes with the occasional thumping of the shore break off to his left. The air was fragrant with sage-like desert plant life, newly green after the rain. He took a leak in the shrubs and walked up the dunes to check the surf. There were dozens of tiny stippled tracks in the sand that formed long diagonal lines and crosshatched patterns. They must be from the hermit crabs Tocho told him about. They had a busy night. The swell looked about the same size as yesterday. Conditions were good. There was little to no wind, lightly offshore if at all. The left off the point and the peak just out from the beach sign would probably be working again today. He strode casually back to the van.
Tocho was up and about before the man. He had already checked the surf and walked over to the van from his tent. The middle aged man idled the van for about 15 minutes or so. He wanted to make sure they had enough battery life to run the stove and make coffee. They discussed how they slept and talked about what they presumed were coyotes moving through the camp in the middle of the night.
“Did you hear those coyotes last night?” the middle aged man said.
“Yeah man, sounded like a whole pack or maybe a mother with her puppies. I bet they were within 10 yards of my tent. Sort of creepy, right? Probably checking out the garbage cans and campsites for goodies.”
“It was an eerie sound,” said the middle aged man, “I heard them yipping and chattering among themselves as they moved through camp. It sounded like a pack of baby hyenas or something. Have you actually seen them before?”
“Yeah,” Tocho said, “they’re smaller than you think. Something to do with the scarcity of the desert. They’re not as big as the ones we’re used to seeing in California and Oregon.”
They sipped the strong black coffee. Tocho picked a board from his quiver in the back of the van, attached the fins, and got suited up.
“I’ll be out with the nice camera soon,” the middle aged man said.
“Right on,” Tocho said, and he ran off over the dunes with his board.
The middle aged man got dressed and grabbed his camp chair, monopod, camera, and coffee. Out on the beach, sitting on a little dune by the point, he snapped a few nice shots of people riding the left with some pelicans in the foreground. When a set hit the point just so, the left peeled all the way to the inside in front of the fish camp to the north.
The colors were dramatic. The peninsula was a place of high contrast and color. Where the desert met the sea. There was the deep blue of the ocean and approaching swell lines. The turquoise and green of the waves as the morning sun lit up their faces and partially shined through their peaks. There was the contrast of the vivid white spray and the piles of crumbled white water against the blue, as the waves stood up, feathered, pitched slightly, and peeled off down the line. Large groups of gulls stood on the cobble stones of the point now exposed by the outgoing tide. They all faced in the same direction—head on into the breeze. Pelicans glided by. Their wing tips almost touched the face of the wave at times as they patrolled the surf and looked for fish. The gulls and the pelicans made the photos interesting. They populated the fore-and mid-ground and framed the surfer riding the glassy chest to head high waves.
Again, the middle aged man was struck by that most wonderful feeling of utter contentment. Happy to be right where he was, doing exactly what he was doing. The sun started to warm his backside. He took deep breaths in and out through his nose. The air was cool and salty and smelled faintly of fish and seaweed. His mind drifted somewhat, but not in an intrusive way, and he watched the surfers ride wave after wave as he snapped the occasional picture.
photo by @orcatransient
With his coffee mug now empty and satisfied he had a few good shots of the morning session, the middle aged man collected his things and walked back up the dunes toward the van. At the highpoint of the dunes, he stopped and took out his phone. This was one of the only spots in the area where you could get a weak signal. There were notifications on his lock screen from NPR and The New York Times—it was inauguration day. Not wanting to contaminate his pristine morning vibe, he switched his phone back into airplane mode, put it back in his pocket and walked to the van. He wanted to feel relieved about the swearing in of the new president but feared it would be marred by violence at the hands of the conspiracy-fed diehard followers of the political far right. It was yet another intermittent reminder—even though he felt removed and isolated from the world he inhabited just a few weeks before; that world was still there and it continued on, with all its problems and divisiveness, with or without him.
