From the deck of my sister’s house on the Oregon coast, I can see the breakers lumbering in as the heavy morning fog slowly burns away. In true west coast style, I brewed a coffee that is strong and pungent and will guide me through my own morning fog. I was reading until late last night in David McCullough’s book, John Adams. John Adams is an interesting character with whom I feel a marked affinity at every turn in the book (a book which has way too many turns!). Maybe it is my distance right now from New England that creates the affinity. I am certainly not a very political person, but I relate to Adam’s need for, and dedication to, his family, his love of walking the countryside, and his practical working of the earth closest to him—an earth replete with stone walls, fields, orchards, rivers, wood-splitting, and escapes to the sea—but most importantly, his escape to “quill and paper” to better expose his vanities and commonality, and to find a pathway to express the depths of his speculative thinking.
Though he often lived low, he always aimed high, and that is the demon and angel I wrestle with every day. With summer almost over, there is as much undone as done. I feel like a waterbug that has skittered across a great expanse of time and water without breaking below the surface to exploit the riches below. There is no new batch of songs, no folio of poetry, and precious few chapters in Hallows Lake, my own—and only—labored attempt at fiction. I can console myself with ten or twelve decent essays and narratives written in support of the writing communities I oversee during the summer months, but not much creative work, which, ironically, is the strongest suit in my deck of writing cards.
Writing is still the time that is stolen from the day and not the purpose of the day itself. My own purposes and instinctual priorities, like Adam’s, are the myriad responsibilities of the lifestyle I lead, but Adams took his life further, wider, and deeper. As a public figure, Adams was prodded and coerced by the dictates of a needy public and the enormity of the political upheavals of his time, while I am only inspired by a vague sense of my potential and a mysterious need to put words to the narrow confines of my own experiences and my own sense of the world closest to me.
At this juncture in my life, I wonder if that is enough? I wonder if I need to put myself on a larger stage and summon the courage to place my life in front of a larger audience and let the chips fall where they may? A week from today I will be back in the classroom in front of sixty 14 year-old boys who I need to inspire to somehow give a damn about everything I ask them to do. My monologues need to be reinforced by a model of hope and action. Too often it is true that we teach what we do not do ourselves; too often we only build a scale model of our true greatness out of brittle plastic and weak glue that can only weaken over time, and too often we don’t answer the clarion of our own callings, and so we sit, smugly satisfied with the diluted reality of our lives.
What we think is only made real through what we say and do. The waves rolling onto the shore in front of me now are barely perceptible to the boats fishing out of Nehalem Bay. The power of the water is only evident where the water breaks and crashes onto the beach. No one is here in Manzanita content to simply look beyond the horizon. We are here because the sea meets the land in a continual expectation of beauty and awe-inspiring power. We walk the beaches in search of both the detritus and bounty of the sea. If that sea gave us nothing; if we weren’t convinced there was not more to be had here than from the confines of our own yards, we would just have stayed at home and gathered the glory of our own gardens.
I have to set to sea and trawl the infinite stew of what I carry within me, and I have to take myself to where those words curl onto a more public shore. I need to take my garden to the sea and spread my wares upon the waves and let the beachcombers gather what they wish to keep.
It is not the history of John Adams I am after.
It is his unflinching and steady spirit.