Dawn Sojourn by Karen Nichols

I didn’t sleep that night.  Not much, anyway.

The motel room, strange and uninviting, had smelled like something small had died that hadn’t yet been discovered and disposed of.  I knew because a dead mouse trapped in a wall is not something ones’ olfactory forgets.

Unable to rest, I remember rough sheets and a shabby woolen blanket scattering as I disentangled myself from lumpy bedclothes.  My own bed lay over a thousand miles away and I missed it.   

Tattered red drapes blocked all but the tiniest sliver of approaching daylight, which left the room in shadow.  Bare toes slid onto chilly linoleum and I dressed, taking care not to waken the others.  It was important that this be my adventure…and mine alone.  Fumbling for the room key I had carefully tucked in my coat pocket the night before, I quietly let myself out.  The November dawn was disappointing…a kind of plethora of gray damp, and making my way, I strode between the rows of parked cars and headed towards that street I knew would guide me toward my objective.  I had memorized the map from the “places to visit” booklet left on the desk of the room when we’d first arrived, and now knew how many blocks I needed to traverse before making that first left turn.

I wonder if, as I grew closer, I ever became conscious of the erupting grin that spread across my face and managed to spontaneously supplant my more traditional, pensive guise.  This was no familiar midwestern small town stroll I was undertaking.  No, this was a whole new kind of journey, a sojourn set amidst a city’s clamor.   After the first mile or so, my feet began to find themselves, and my newish Mary Jane’s did little to dampen my pace as it quickened.  At sixteen, I imagine my legs flew, as much as ran, down those unfamiliar streets.  Vaguely aware that the neighborhood houses I was passing, slowly decaying, had known better, more prosperous times, I recall halting at a traffic light…a scenario totally incongruous with my imaginings… and waiting impatiently alongside cars and trucks for the light to change.  Then…and here my memory blurs a bit, that ill placed stoplight finally turned from red to green…and I must have bolted across the crosswalk, and kept on… I recall halting and gasping for air once because my chest had grown molten and heavy.  My lungs, fighting to cool themselves, sucked in huge gulps of cold moist air.  It was right about then that I first heard it.

At first a murmured whooshing, but then big sounds, power sounds…rhythmic cadences that rounded, spiraled and tumbled.  This was the mythic music I had only imagined.  High on an adolescent’s adrenaline, I leapt onto the boardwalk, and with the pure passionate excitement conjured only in youth, I just stood there, riveted.  At last, after all that waiting, and reading about, and hoping for, and sighing, there it lay…rolling out in front of me, opening across the whole of the horizon…my dream…vast and long imagined, come true.

            

I saw it,

dropped into it,

gaped at it.

Drinking salt mist molecules

I let a river etch its course along my jawline.

Course sand grains squished between stinging toes,

And I dashed and thrilled and rode the wet.

Those were the pure waves, the virgin waves,

And they pounded and churned

and polished

and called.

I wanted to burn the whole of it into my psyche for always…so great was the ocean’s impression on me.   And so I ran, plunging into the icy frothing, and then back out again as quickly as I could, snapping a photo of my footprints before the ceaseless, oncoming waves erased them.  I still have that old Poloroid photo…a blissful reminder of my first encounters at the water’s edge.