“The Austrian psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich, a pupil of Sigmund Freud,
found that his neurotic patients had developed muscular blockages against thorough
expulsion of air…some patients describe the inhibition, when they become aware of
it, as follows: ‘It is as if a wave of the ocean struck a cliff. It does not go
on’.”
In late June I am driving up Highway 1 near Northern California. The rented car
has little breathing space. It is filled nearly completely with luggage and baby
wares. Jennifer, her one year old daughter and I are road tripping from Los
Angeles to San Francisco. After a couple of hours in her car seat, Mallory has
exhausted her few cardboard books, her blanky and pacifier. We pull over on the
dirt shoulder of the southbound lane to make her bottle. There aren’t many options
for pit stops on this part of the Pacific Coast Highway, so it’s stopping our car
on the edge of coastal cliffs or nothing. While the baby is being taken care of, I
wander the ledge of foliage and rock and the end of the world. I don’t stop at the
few steps it takes to mount the embankment just above street level. Some courage
of mine nudges me to the point of a narrow overhang, further and further until I
can see straight down to the quiet beach below. It is at least thirty feet to the
seam of sand and gray-blue water, and I feel like a tiny speck of existence, and I
can’t breathe.
In a moment I understand why the world was once thought to be flat. Imagining that
it might actually spill over into something larger than just a joint of water and
sky makes me feel suddenly sick and fragile and still. Then Jen, with her
daughter, peeks over the slight hill separating us and says something of the
seascape like, “wow,” her impotent expression petering out to a whisper. The
thought of Mother Nature’s endless miles begin to wrap around me, cinching tightly
at my chest—a kind of panic—and because my efforts at order are so clearly
obsolete, my body seems weightless against the ratio of masses.
Jen asks if I want her to take a picture (documentation that I was here). She has
her camera out, and of course I want her to capture this image of me (so small)
against the Horrifying Beauty. As I pose for the camera, Mallory looks at me with
worry. She hasn’t yet learned the words, “come back to us,” so she beckons me by
franticly opening and shutting her tiny fist.
We walk to the car slowly along the shoulder squeezed between precipice and
highway. It is hard for me to leave the edge, but San Francisco is still a few
hours drive. Jen somehow buckles the baby into her car seat without shifting our
precarious stacks of coolers and other traveling paraphernalia, and we turn onto
the road, northbound again.
—
M. Gurley
writes here.
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