The Stones of Caspersen

There is a beach on the Florida Gulf Coast. There are a lot of stones piled up on the beach at the seashore and perpendicular to it acting as a breakwater. They catch the waves, I guess. Or stop them from eroding the beach. Big clumps of sandstone and limestone, embedded with fossilized shells and small creatures of the past, now only beach ninnies, piling at the edge of water and tide’s end. And they are very coarse and grainy, eroded into pitted clumps, while being as sharp as knives. Dull knives, but still. Sharp enough to hurt under the right conditions. God, what a bunch of wind breaker.

What does this beach mean? I came to Caspersen beach with my family to swim and dive, looking for-well. Adventure. Scuba diving. Taking pictures. And sharks’ teeth. It seemed like a nice thing to do.

We arrived at the lonely beach and parked the car. It was chock full of scuba diving gear: Two tanks apiece, fully charged with three thousand pounds per square inch of compressed air in their aluminum lungs. Enough to support a curious human for an hour or so under water. And some other bric-a-brac to keep us alive: Inflatable vests to make us float, weights to make us sink, air regulators to make us breath, and masks, etc., to make us swim. It isn’t easy to be a fish out of water back in the water.

I was excited. We unloaded our gear and geared up! And headed for the great seashore. It was turbulent. Exuberant, you might say. Grinding up the offerings of the last few days of upsetting weather. At the edge of the sands and the sea, we stopped and looked at our conquest.

There were white caps on the water. The last time I came here it was calm. Glasslike. OK. Calm above water. Once I went in and swam about, and dove to the depths, it was murky. Troubling and filled with green, but calm. The sea told me then, ‘You come here, and I entertain you. But you cannot see me. Tomorrow, you may not endure me.’ I came back, anyway.

“Do we really want to dive in this?” I said, looking over the road overlooking the cliff overlooking the beach and the dull splinters of rock at the waterline where we might meet our doom. It was really churning. I noticed that the Gulf waves were crashing just slightly beyond the rocks.

“Err. It looks rough,” said Seeth.  “But we came here to dive. Maybe we can just go in for a little?”

“Err…,” I waffled.

“If it’s too rough we can come out,” he rationaled.

“Um…,” I increduled.

“And it’s not at all windy,”

“Yes,” I conceded, not sure what bearing that had on the white caps.

“And we came all this way, after all,” He obvioused.

 “And I want to go all that way back home afterward,” I bewildered.

“Let’s go down and have a closer look,” he reasoned.

“Is the tide coming in or out?” I asked.

Perhaps we could scramble over the rocks and into the frothing Gulf waters beyond, but what will they be like in an hour or so when we are trying to do it in reverse? I thought someone said the tide was going out. I don’t remember who. Feeling like I didn’t want to waste the rental fees on my air tanks, I puzzled, “I don’t know… but...”

“We can just go down and see what it’s like now,” Seeth reasonabled.

“Well. We can always do that…,” I granted, painfully. “As long as we can get back out a little later. OK,” I said finally with my usual and inevitable reckless abandon. You only live once, after all. If that. Consider yourself lucky.

We continued mule-ing our equipment down to the beach. We found a convenient plot of sand and laid out a beach towel, on which we laid some of our equipment bags. The white caps effervesced. I think they might have seen us and acted hopeful... Expectant… Hungry… The sea is a raveous mistress. Even if this is just one of her daughters: The Gulf of Mexico. Señorita' can seduce. Suffice. And subsume.

“OK,” someone said. And put on his tank and buoyancy compensator and all of the other things that make one invulnerable to the depths. And so did I, feeling quite a significant bit less invulnerable.

Grinding waves churned up filth and bracken from the last few feet before the shore and spit them up on the land, with sprays of water, thumps, and a halleluiah of thanks to the lord Poseidon. I greedily grabbed at them with the daguerreotype lens. We climbed over the rocks and entered the sea. It was choppy, but not treacherous. Still, laden with heavy, unbalanced equipment that is only supposed to be graceful under water and carrying my fins in one hand and the dive flag and float in the other, I ventured into the sea. Calm would have been a challenge.

It took a while to put on my fins, keep hold of the float with the red, ‘Scuba diver on board’ flag, and not drown. I did better last week on the dive from the chartered boat. The captain hoisted a flag for us, and I was fully suited when I just fell backwards off the gunwale and swam away. The sea gets really angry when it meets the shore. I think it’s because of an old grudge. Poseidon desired Persephone but Hades got her instead. That sort of thing.

We swam out a ways and did some submersion. Maybe in twenty feet of water. There were clear demarcations in the light. Five feet or so down and the bright green glow turned dim. Further down, it darkened and lost color. At the bottom it was almost black, with just an afterglow of emerald tainted with black. Enough for me to see my arm in front of me up to my wrist-the hand obliterated. There was no seeing the bottom. Not without jamming my mask right into the sands. Some spots were just fields of a gooey seaweed called sargassum (what-gasm?) It’s pronounced Sar-Gasm. Yes, I know. The first time I heard someone straight facedly use that word I was not sure whether to give a bawdy laugh or flash a learned nod. I just avoided the weedgasm, entirely.

Back to the non-vaudevillian world, it was hard to keep track of my buddy. I had the flag float tethered to my jacket, which meant that the tether line got entangled with the rest of me occasionally. Seeth finally took my annoying toy away from me. So much for sea toy-gasms. That was good. I couldn’t see him under water, anyway. Visibility was invisible under the stealth cloaking device of the orgasm filled water. Every so often I would come to the surface and reconnoiter. I was looking for my buddy, Seeth: Surface, scan, see, satisfy, and submerge; sound and secure in the sense of my location.

We did this for an hour or so, then decided it was nice floating around in algae laden warm water, but the dive was in no other way productive. And the currents were driving us north. So we leisurely swam south at a distance of about two hundred feet off shore, dropping down once in a while to determine that the bottom was still impenetrable and swathed in green goo-gasms, and resurface. In my case I always found myself further away from Seeth. I wasn’t wearing a wetsuit but the water was around ninety degrees. To this chalky New Englander, that’s what you make bouillabaisse in, not swim in.

Then we decided to head shoreward. Beachward? Either way I was a bit concerned about that dialectic of pumice stones barring our way. I really wasn’t up for a stone-gasm. As we got closer to the beach, Seeth reminded me not to take off my flippers until I could stand up and walk, backwards. I kind of knew that, but not in those words. I would have said, Don’t take off your flippers until your chances of being washed out to sea and lost in a watery-gasm are nil. Same difference.

I got to the shallows and noticed two things. First, that the waves were getting more potent. And second, that they were engulfing the stony shoreline more thoroughly. The waves were crashing across the rocks that I had easily climbed over earlier. I thought the tide was going out? I expected the sea to kowtow gracefully to the shore instead of angrily crash upon it!

I expected to have more breathing room between the Devil and the deep green sea on my exit. I swam up to the rocks and took off my flippers. I part scampered, part slithered, up the rocks, using the seawater as buoyancy. The waves would help me heft myself higher, then reconsider, then try to drag me down. But the waves were, as I said, getting more aggressive. Instead of getting calmer, they were approaching their own climax. I kept an eye on the sea.

People were near me. Encouraging me. I said, “Hang on. I’m trying to time this with the waves,” and kept vigil against the water. I was waiting for a lull in the waves. It will happen that there will come four or five really big waves, then maybe a few where the receding wave interferes with the advancing, interfering, and making for confusion, followed by an interval of relative calm. That’s what I was watching for.

Maybe the next one-No. That’s a big one. And now? That looks like-Nope. Another big one. Shit.

“Look,” I thought very hard at the tides. “Haven’t you ever been waiting to cross a busy street with traffic coming from both directions and no traffic light? Sometimes one side has a lull and sometimes the other. You are waiting for that periodic coincidence of them both coinciding so you can shoot across and take up your place in the next driver’s nightmare? Can’t you have a break in your breaker?”

But it didn’t come. I could see gathering energy. I knew when it was sublime, and made sure to make myself as flat as possible against the steppingstone on which I lay. The wave would wash over me and try to suck me back, but I resisted. My mask flustered off my head at one point and I had to lunge at it, I wasn’t going to lose my vision. And then I’d look back at the sea and see another goliath approach.

Shit. I had friends strategically above me.

“Yes, people. I’m OK. I haven’t lost my senses. I’m not in a panic. I just realize that I am tired and can’t exactly make a break for it so I am trying to think myself through this. Brain over brine. I’m starting to get a little irritated, actually. Brine might, indeed, win.”

A particularly big wave broke over me and lifted my whole, supine body off its rocky perch. I sensed the effort of it and capitalized on it, exploited it, using it to hoist myself one higher stone up the barrier, clinging on against the retreating backflush. The wave picked me up and washed me, like so much flotsam, over this rock and onto another. And then tried to drag me back, sucking me across the grinding stones of the former.

I loosened my body against its wash and stiffened it against its backflush. I succeeded in not being dragged back down with it. I grabbed the rocks, flattened myself against them. And felt the surge as it tried to drag me back down. And the surge left me. I was slightly higher up the breakwater. Now, if only the next few waves could be lesser, I could use this respite to get beyond the maelstrom.

No such luck.

My brother volunteered to take my heavy tank and vest from me. Yes, I’m glad someone thought of that. I was wishing the awkward albatross would go away, myself. Along with the fins and mask I was holding now. I unlatched the various cummerbunds and clips that secured it to my chest, and carefully loosened the ones over my shoulders so I could slip my arms, one at a time, out of them. I didn’t want to disconnect those.

“Just release the shoulder straps,” he said.

“No. I’m not losing control here.”

Careful, now. That would make the vest completely free of me. Any tidal blast after that could wrench it from my body and drag it off coast, possibly doing damage to it or to somebody else in the process. And since I was the only other person in this process, I wanted to avoid that. I wanted to slowly relinquish control and only once my rescuer had a firm grasp in my place. And at a time when the sea was not looking. Poseidon is not ever blinking. I slipped my arms, one at a time, out of the shoulder straps.

It worked. Dan took my vest and tank and I was then able to clamber up and over the rocks with ease. I trotted up the beach, trampling a patch of dried sea-gasm, and sat on the blanket, which was now much closer to the water. All I had to show for it were a few scratches on my right elbow and a bruise on my bicep from a few bashes against the rocks.

And respect. Respect for the sea that respects no man.

Isn’t this fun?

Checkmate

I used to work in the defense industry. In the 1980’s. I was a clerk. Well-A ‘Technical-aide,’ as my pay grade said. So I was a glorified clerk that the company could overcharge the government for. I worked in a steel grey office sitting at a steel grey military style desk doing steel grey tasks, mostly involving filling requisitions for overpriced parts, many of them steel grey, required to overhaul overpriced submarines, also ditto, sitting in the yard and needing repairs vouchsafed to the day they could go back to costing the government even more money to operate doing things we all prayed they would never have to do. The military is always hungry.

So was I. So I worked.

In the next room, in document control, worked a friend-droid of mine named Gene. He was a sharp guy and filed his forms with precision. He was a Palestinian. He would talk about the Israeli war against Palestinians in the Mideast, the modern state of Israel built on a thread of land stolen from its previous and current inhabitants. How the state of Israel attacked the USS Liberty to stop it from observing their war crimes. He was clear to distinguish between Israelis and Jews, a distinction mostly lost today. I had lived in Israel for a year and knew Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians and respected them all and this was the first counter argument to the Zionist propaganda I had been exposed to. It was…disturbing. Something to think about.

He also played chess. He had a little, magnetic chess set in his desk, next to his pencils and his saltshaker. At lunch I used to come by his desk and we would play.

He mostly won. Dramatically. He had this habit of taking his piece de gras and throwing it down on the space that was my Waterloo, shouting, “CHECK!” Or even more dramatically, “CHECKMATE!” Sometimes I saw it coming, mostly it was completely out of the blue. Occasionally, I would get the upper hand, at which time he would resign. He could see it coming and just cut his king’s jugular, forfeiting the game. Regicide is preferable to admitting defeat, after all. How many kings have been suicided on their own swords? The king makers can always make another king. Dime a dozen. I generally fought until the bloody end. Usually mine. He rarely lost. Well, only once.

I have no idea why he liked to play with me. Easy blood, I think now. Or only blood. Nobody else would play him. I liked to think he wasn’t just interested in easy blood then. After all, what’s the fun in that? Other than when you are actually hungry, that is, in the actual world surrounded by actual prey that might like to actually kill and eat you as much as you desire to actually kill and eat them. And when you are hungry and meat is in the forest and death is on the table, any blood will do, as long as it can’t fight back. And thus hunters became herders.

Oh, we weren’t hungry. Not in the, ‘Kill and eat them before they kill and eat us,’ sort of way. This was just a game, after all. But it was more visceral. Still, there was no question of survival. It was played in the mind, not the stomach, if there is a difference. At the end of the game, or at the end of lunch hour, he would put the board, finished or bearing a partially played game, back in his desk by the cigarette lighter and paperclips, and I would go back to my steel grey, military grade behemoth in the next room, working at my steel grey, military job of playing a game of chess with the Soviet Union, our banal existences resuming. Paperwork to Ivan’s Requisition Seven. CHECK!

I asked him to give me some pointers. He spent a half hour lunch hour running through a hypothetical game, explaining the strategies of both players as he went. You could do this and I could do that, with the intention of accomplishing the other, while trying to thwart the thing you think I just did and advancing your own agenda, making sure you were prepared to give it all up in a wink if necessary. Huh?

Right.

It was interesting, but I’ve never been a good chess player or a good geostrategist, for that matter. I just can’t see things that far in advance. And I just expect other people to work with me, somehow, making me a lousy diplomat. And a worse dictator. Somewhere in there I just hope there is a decent human being. Maybe. Or at the very least, not a willing sheep. But back to the real world.

One day we were playing, as usual. The crowds around me were eating their lunches, reading their sports sections, and doing what the deplorables of the day did when they weren’t entertaining deplorable thoughts and such, as usual. They were being just people, also as usual. And I was losing, even more as usual.

His strategy was to bear down with as much force as possible on the left side of the board, from my perspective. I don’t even remember if I was black or white. We had both castled early in the game, in the same direction; my right and his left, so he was attacking me on my vulnerable bits to the left. My least protected side that had a clear shot at my king, guttered behind a row of pawns on the right side, both protection and stranglehold. As was his king directly across the board. If he could dominate the rank in my territory, well. Game over. Or soon to be. I had the same option, if I could seize it.

My strategy-well. My strategy was to not lose, as always. But I kept an eye on his king… Alone… There… Across the board… With all of his heavy hitters marching hither and yon towards my defenseless underbelly on the diagonally opposite side of the board… Creating a defenseless underbelly of his own… Interesting… In the flower of victory lay dormant the seeds of defeat.

And so I gave up defending my soft spot-Let them come! As long as I could lunge at him one move before he managed to close his pincer strike against me. My castle was defending my king from the rank. My queen was also on the first rank. She was superfluous. Extraneous and available to do mischief on the enemies ranks. I could see how he was setting up pieces to outnumber those two, formidable opponents while ignoring his own exposed flank. Pity him,

Take out the queen. Then march against the castle. Then the king would be his. So he thought. He could take them out, one by one, in a few moves, sacrificing his pieces, one by one, until he had another piece ready to close in on my king:

One knife poised for the blow, two for the crippling, three for the death. Four for victory.

I watched him remove his guard from his own king, nestled smugly behind three pawns at the upper rank of the board. Unguarded. Assured. Vulnerable. His finger on the button. Just like mine on yours, you son of a bitch! He was one move closer to destruction than I. If only I could manage it.

I brought my queen back close to my castle, two spaces from my king, also nestled vulnerably behind three pawns opposite the enemy, plotting his counter strike. I took her out of the fury of his assault on my left files. They were abandoned. He was too intent on his strategy to care and didn’t notice the feint. When the enemy lunges he leaves his heart exposed.

I moved my queen one step diagonally forward and in front of my castle, on a file six spaces away from the pawn guarding his king. She was now invulnerable. He was too far into blood lust to notice that he had left his king completely exposed while mine was momentarily protected. For a glance. For a move. For a nod to death in your direction one may win and one may lose. Such is war. He continued on his strategy, gaining my first rank. “Take it,” I thought. Now the board is mine.

I took his pawn with my queen. “CHECK!” I said, less dramatically than I could have.

I refrained from throwing it down dramatically, preferring the more noble, ‘You’re going to die, mother-’ approach. He was nonplussed. Confused, he paused, looking back and forth diagonally across the board. He realized he had no defense with which to take my queen, and then pushed his king one space left, somewhat distracted as if he felt it an annoyance. Like I was just fucking with him before I had the good sense to die on the sword. He was so intent on his plan he didn’t see what was happening. Pride goeth… I had him.

I pushed my queen forward, invulnerable due to my castle loyally standing behind her back on the first rank, guarding both my king and my queen… His king, trapped behind a wall of his own pawns, inescapable.

“CHECKMA-!“

Realizing what was happening, he quickly tipped his king over. Hari-kari.

Technically, he lost. When I put him in check he could have given up then, but he chose to move, so it was then my move and I put him in mate. He would rather die than admit defeat.

Of course, this is but a game. Like the sound and fury it encompasses, it signifies nothing…

…perhaps…