Ken McAlpine/Writer and Hesitant Blogger

  In this cacophonous age when almost everyone is shouting to be noticed, quiet speaks loudly. Quiet also reigns in the cemeteries here in Ventura County and across the country where Veteran’s Day was just celebrated, although such an occasion, and the men and women we recognize, should not be relegated to one day.

   I know they aren’t, because we all know veterans. Sometimes we encounter them in chance fashion. Sometimes they are family. I have been lucky to meet my share of both. And almost always they remind me of traits that are important to remember, character not missing in our self-trumpeting times, but simply running quietly beneath the surface, serving to make our world a better place.

   Just last week I met a World War 2 veteran. We met in a bookstore. Leon Cooper is short and stooped with a shock of gray hair and a peppy leprechaun’s manner. Leon served in the Pacific.

   When I thanked him for serving our country, his eyebrows bounced and he cackled.

   “I had lots of help,” he said.

   Leon is feeble. He was giving a talk at the book store, discussing several books, fiction and non-fiction, he has written about his war experiences. When it came time to talk the bookstore owner had to help him step up on to the podium, raised slightly higher than a curb, after which Leon leaned a tad shakily into the microphone and gave a mischievous grin.

    “My legs aren’t so good, but my mind still works,” he said.

   Leon’s frailty should not blind you to the fact he fought in six of the Pacific’s most hellish battles, starting with Tarawa and ending with Iwo Jima. As you might imagine, he had his share of difficult moments. He viewed this simply. “I told myself, ‘This is what you’ve been dealt, deal with it’,” he said. Leon speaks his mind now, and on mistimed occasion he spoke his mind then. One remark to a superior officer earned him thirty days confinement in his quarters. “It was great,” he said. “All I did was eat, sleep and read.”

   Leon spoke of his war experiences, many of them horrible, in a light-hearted manner. His face  hardened only once, just before we parted.

   “I was mad at everything when I got out,” he said. “They called it shell shock. They didn’t know what to do back then, all of us home and wandering around loose. They call it post traumatic something now.” He paused. I thought he was searching for the last part of the definition, but I did not give it to him. I have learned that, when it comes to veterans, it pays to stay quiet. Finally Leon nodded, answer at hand. “I was in a number of battles. A needless waste of human lives and treasures.”

   When I was sure he was finished – I knew this because he cocked his head boyishly and looked at me as if I was a prize salamander he might consider jarring — I told him how much I had enjoyed listening to him.

  “Get it while you can,” he crowed in a barker’s voice. “There aren’t many of us left,” and with a last eyebrow bob he minced away.

   My Uncle Jim was cut from similar cloth. I’m not going to give his last name because Uncle Jim was a private man. I will tell you that Uncle Jim was a soldier and that Leon reminded me of him, two men of similar age, possessed of humility, acceptance, a quiet manner and, at times, a wicked sense of humor. Some say their generation was different, but I don’t think this is so.

   Uncle Jim was such a private man that for most of his life he shared little to nothing of his war experiences. For years he sat quietly while all about him everyone else did all the talking. When I was a boy our family would often drive up to visit Uncle Jim and Aunt Margaret in their small upstate New York town, joining other family for the town’s July 4^th celebration. At the end of three days, Uncle Jim might have said as many words.

   I loved those Fourth of July celebrations. They were something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, a small town that sits beside a lake and celebrates our country’s independence with pancake breakfasts and modest fireworks and an old fashioned parade. But Uncle Jim didn’t always enjoy it. One year the town leaders asked him to be in the parade; he was, after all, a decorated war veteran. As you know by now Uncle Jim was not inclined to take center stage, but he agreed (I suspect there was some family prodding). He was assigned a car to ride in and the parade organizers festooned it with balloons. When Uncle Jim saw the balloons he became more agitated than I had ever seen him. He refused to ride in the parade and he refused to give a reason. That evening, fireworks exploding over the dark lake, he sat with, and walled off from, his family.

   The years passed and Uncle Jim grew old. He began to talk. A lot, at least for him. Still he rarely talked about war. But bits and pieces crept out. I received a letter, eight typed pages: above the first page was the simple title “My Life”. The pages were typed by his daughter who wisely thought he should write down a few things about his life, and wisely recognized that Uncle Jim’s penmanship was atrocious. Almost all eight pages were about war because much of Uncle Jim’s life was occupied with war. He was the son of an army officer. He graduated from West Point. He was a career Army officer. He went first to Korea, then to Vietnam. Much to his surprise, he rose to the rank of Colonel.

   Regarding his experiences in Korea, he wrote simply of the snow and the cold and the long marches and the Chinese everywhere. He wrote about one battle. The recounting was matter of fact. A fellow platoon leader, under heavy fire from the Chinese, retreated from high ground. Uncle Jim decided the high ground needed to be retaken. He turned to the men behind him. Follow me, he said and up the hill he went with no idea if anyone would follow. On the typewritten page in front of me I see the reason for his decision. I don’t know why I volunteered to go up there and see if I could help out?

  The account of the battle itself is short. Uncle Jim did not prattle on when speaking and his writing is the same. They retook the hill. There was shooting. Men died. Air support arrived. The battle turned and so did the Chinese. Eleven days later Uncle Jim was decorated for his actions. He wrote, I was decorated with the DSC for my actions on the 13^th.  The men who were with me reported that I had done things I do not remember doing.  The DSC is the Distinguished Service Cross. 

   Not long ago Uncle Jim visited us again in Ventura. He was in his mid-eighties. He was growing shorter and more stooped by the year and he walked slowly with a cane, though this did not stop him from getting in his car once a year and driving across the country alone to visit. He had become far more social, so while he was visiting I made a point of taking him places, where often, with no help from me, he met people. They just came up to him. He had an odd magnetic quality. Perhaps they saw beneath the surface.

   One afternoon we went to Tony’s Pizzaria, little more than a shack just back from the beach but some of the best pizza you’ll find. By this stage of his life Uncle Jim existed mostly on coffee, but he ate pizza to keep me company. We were eating quietly when the owner came out and sat down at our picnic table. He introduced himself as Johnny.

   “I saw your medal,” he said.

  Johnny had been a soldier and so he recognized the small fragment of the Distinguished Service Cross affixed to Uncle Jim’s worn jacket. The two men talked of mud, and rain, and sleepless nights and soldiers who simply disappeared in an unholy burst. Johnny was Italian and outgoing. He did most of the talking but Uncle Jim volunteered information when he was asked, and so I heard stories I had never heard before and I gained an added appreciation for men and women who can experience things most of us cannot imagine and then return to life and discuss them over pizza on a sunny afternoon.

   I won’t tell you the specifics. Their conversation was a private matter between them. But I will tell you what Johnny said to me after Uncle Jim rose and began shuffling off to the car.

   Grasping my arm Johnny said, “I knew he was a soldier before I saw the pin.”

   I thanked Johnny for sitting with us. I could tell Uncle Jim had enjoyed the conversation, although I knew it had tired him.  

   “It was my pleasure,” Johnny said. “He is a soldier and a gentleman. There aren’t many of his kind left.”

  There are of course, for World War 2 gave way to Korea, and Korea to Vietnam, and Vietnam to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, and men and women quietly served in them all.

  Uncle Jim passed away three months ago.

  He was buried at West Point with full military honors, more fanfare than he would have liked.

   Recently I met a woman. She was friendly and pleasant, with a warm smile. I listened to her closely when she spoke. I did this, in part, to return the favor. She had listened closely, and even asked questions, during the book talk I had just given.

  “I want to go away and see things,” she told me.

   Many people say this sort of thing. Not so many have Stage 3 cancer. She had a bucket list, she said. Ambling around the country, going nowhere in particular, was on it.

   As a travel writer, and someone with a talent for getting lost, I have considerable experience with aimless ambling. Wittingly and unwittingly, I have seen my share of back alleys and back roads. Partly because she was so obviously sincere in her desire to travel, partly because talking with people with cancer produces in me a sort of hyper enthusiasm, as if a loopy smile and a lot of hand waving can wipe the disease away, I prattled on and on about the joys of travel. The chance to find hidden corners. The chance to meet people. The chance to see the sunrise in an unfamiliar place. The chance for so many chances. Here I may have paused.

   She listened quietly through my babble. When I finished she said, “That’s exactly what I want to do.” The woman’s name is Hope.  

   October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Here in Ventura County there are events everywhere. An open house at the new Rolling Oaks Radiology Women’s Imaging Center in Thousand Oaks. A “Relay for Life” event on the track at Camarillo High School, honoring cancer survivors and raising money to fight the disease. A cancer symposium, “Surviving and Thriving”, at the Ventura Beach Marriott. Another symposium, “How to Cheat, Treat and Beat Breast Cancer”, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. On the first day of October our local paper the Ventura County Star printed the day’s edition in pink.  

    If I was a newspaper journalist I would have written this column at the beginning of the month. But I’m not. I’m writing this at the end of the month, hoping it carries into November and maybe on. Cancer will carry on. Procrastination too.

   I don’t know if Hope has breast cancer. She didn’t say. She might have breast cancer, she might not. Sadly, there are many cancer options.

   I may have been frenetically enthusiastic in my delivery, but I told my new friend Hope the truth. The greatest joy of travel is the people you meet. Travel has seen me to breathtaking places and moments — lightning forking over the snowy Andes, mantas swooping through blue Hawaiian waters, evening shadows purpling the Grand Canyon’s deeps – but even these moments pale in comparison with the people I’ve met. They have surprised me. They have bewitched me. They have welcomed me into their towns, and sometimes their homes. Sometimes they have cheated me, or stolen from me or just been rude and cold. People come in many packages. But most of the people have been good, and many of them have given me a gift, a little piece of them I will carry with me forever. Lessons in living.

   Once, kayaking off Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, I met a man named David. It was Thanksgiving and brutally cold, a hard, damp wind producing an uncountable army of whitecaps on Pamlico Sound. When I met David, he was bobbing at the mouth of Ocracoke’s tiny harbor. I saw him before he saw me. His head was down, consulting the navigational chart spread across the deck of his kayak. He had a compass too.

   It is bad form to paddle silently past the only other kayaker for miles.

   “Beautiful out here, isn’t it?” I said.

   It was, in a frozen, gray, victory-at-sea fashion.

   David’s head came up slowly, as if reluctant to leave the chart. He appeared to be in his fifties, though it was hard to tell, as only a small portion of his face emerged from the bubble-wrap of protective gear. I was wearing nothing but a wetsuit, and perhaps a bluish complexion.

   David looked at me like the idiot I was.

   “It’s a little cold,” he said.

   We bobbed in the water, the wind beating between us, and exchanged pleasantries. David had come to Ocracoke for the long Thanksgiving weekend.

   He didn’t smile as we talked, but his tone was amiable. I had drifted close enough to see that he had a small plastic orb affixed to the shoulder of his jacket. Technologically speaking, it resembled one of those Christmas snow globes, only instead of swirling snowflakes, it contained a winking light.

   His eyes followed mine. “GPS,” he said. “I’m one of those people who like to plan.” 

   David asked where I was from, and when I told him California, he said his wife’s family lived in California. “My wife died about a year and a half ago,” he said. “Of cancer.”

   The wind whistled.

   “I was just paddling in a sluice back there,” David said, more to himself than me. “There were herons and egrets. It probably goes back two miles. I was paddling back there and I’m thinking, ‘This is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.’”

   I paddled to David’s sluice, a ribbon of gin clear water little more than paddle-length wide in most places, snaking into the interior of the island. I floated over its mirror surface to the whisper of marsh grass. Out of the wind it was warm. Birds sang, and egrets, snow-white and silent, swooped low, dropping below the grass line to their own secrets.

   David was right, it was beautiful, but now, ten years later, it is David I remember, bobbing quietly beneath the marled sky, a meticulous man who couldn’t plan for everything.

   “You know, she loved to kayak,” he said. “She really wanted to come here, but we just kept putting it off.”

   You don’t have to travel far to meet people with cancer or bucket lists. I met Hope ten minutes from home. I’m glad I did. 

   Before we parted Hope gave me another warm smile, but there was something harder in her eyes.

  “I mean it,” she said. “I’m really going to do this.”  

   If Hope reads this, I hope she doesn’t mind that I wrote about her. But I hope she doesn’t read it. I hope she’s miles from the internet, sitting on a weathered dock in the Florida Keys, watching baitfish ripple the surface as the sun rises.

   By then it probably won’t be October. Not that it matters. Any month is as good for cancer as it is for following through on a bucket list.

Hi Wonderful Readers: As I send this our oldest son, who appears in the essay below, is out in the living room packing up his things for his second year of college. Believe they will grow up, believe they will move on. And, maybe if we’ve done our job, they’ll continue to believe too…

Believe (and forget the naysayers)

   We are standing at the edge of a dock looking out at the harbor. The water is still as ice, mirroring the reflection of pelicans sweeping a gray sky. Just off our toes, small rivulets of oil eddy. A soggy tatter of whole wheat bread floats just beyond this sheen, skewered by a paper clip bent into a hook and tethered to a makeshift fishing pole.

   Adults are long past the day when they would root about in a backyard or the woods, searching for just the right equipment. They won’t rummage patiently through drawers, fingers working through jumbled messes until they find scotch tape, string and just the right paper. But a five-year-old will. First Cullen found a bamboo stick. Tongue working the corners of his mouth, he cut, then taped, one by one, tiny paper eyelets along the length of the pole. Carefully he ran the string through the eyelets, and then tied a paper clip to the end. None of this meticulous preparation brings us any closer to catching a fish, but a five-year-old also patiently ignores the naysayers too. Off we drove, fishing pole, bucket and bag of bread in hand.

   Standing on the dock, line drooping into the water, we have already made many decisions. We have decided there is little chance of a sperm whale taking the bread (The water is too shallow). We have decided that if it does, it will probably take the pole too, along with the rest of the dock. We have decided we will keep what we catch in our bucket, and then catch a second fish so it will have a friend. When the bucket brims, we’ll tip it back into the harbor so the fish can go home.

   We talk about different things, Cullen and I. How deep pelicans dive. What fun it is to swim. Why the Valentine’s Day hearts he is making for school have arrows through them. 

   After thirty minutes, all that’s in our bucket is a strand of kelp. It doesn’t matter to me. I am enjoying this game for what it is. But one of us is here for fish. 

   Cullen speaks to the water.

   “It would be okay if I just caught a little fish.”

   Plumbing the reservoir of my fishing knowledge, I suggest a slight change in technique.

   “Instead of letting the bread just float, try pulling it across the water,” I say.

   “Make it fly?”

   “Pull gently.”

    I see the seagulls watching us. In short order the bread may very well fly.

   “Maybe we should just try fishing from the other end of the dock,” Cullen says, but he stays where he is, pulling the bread in and tossing it back out.

   “It would be okay if we caught a really, really small fish,” he says.

    We wait for a nibble. We wait some more. The sky turns purple. The dock lights flick on. The first chill of night touches our faces. The breeze is picking up. The guy wires of the sailboats chime.

   “Maybe we should go,” says Cullen.

   In the near dark I can still see the hopeful way he looks at me.

   “No,” I say. “We should keep trying.”

   I wait for the hug I deserve, but Cullen ignores me. He crouches quickly, and peers into the water. The fishing pole is statue still.

   “Dad,” he hisses.

   I crouch beside him. I see nothing. The water is murky and the falling darkness isn’t helping.

   “What?”

   At first I think he hasn’t heard me. I start to speak, but the child has become the father.

   “Shhhhhh. Wait.”

   I do. I wait until my knees are killing me. I wait until I know it’s time to go home. Enough  charades. It’s time for practical things like baths and dinner.

   A small finger extends cautiously.

  “Here it comes,” says Cullen. “Look.” 

   In all my years of poking around this harbor, I’ve never seen a bat ray. This one soars just beneath the bread, the edges of its wings lifting and rippling like curtains in a breeze.

   “Flying,” says Cullen.

   The bat ray makes two more slow passes beneath our dissipating clump of bread before turning away.

   Cullen stands.

   “Yep,” he says certainly and winds up the string.

   I empty the kelp from bucket. I would say I’m sorry we didn’t catch anything, but I know it doesn’t matter to either of us.

   We clatter up the dock ramp and stand beneath the blue halo of a dock light. 

   Cullen takes my hand. He looks up into the light.

   “An iceberg,” he says.

   I have learned this lesson before. I will, no doubt, have to learn it again. Adults are as slow as they are ploddingly practical. But right now, in this moment, the wall separating reality and possibility lays in happy ruins at our feet.

   A dark string of pelicans glides past.

   “Pterodactyls,” I say.

   “Yes,” says Cullen. 

    Not long ago I received a phone call from a friend whose son was turning eighteen. My friend said that as his son set out in the world (or at least went off to college, where he could stay out all night without repercussion), he would need some words to follow. For his son’s birthday, my friend was asking a few select men to give him their words of advice.

   No doubt the astute reader has already seen several glaring holes in this request. For one thing, my friend was not soliciting advice from women, though perhaps he realized that one day his son would get married and this would take care of itself. It is also true that we were all eighteen once, and I distinctly remember what I was interested in eighteen and it did not include advice from fifty-something codgers. I paused for a delicious moment, remembering the paths down which my youthful interests had led me.

   “Ken? Are you still there?”

   Yes, but it’s a miracle I am and my survival into my twenties and beyond was not due to intellect.

   “So,” my friend asked, “are you in?”

   Of course, I told him. I’d be happy to jot down some advice, but it wouldn’t be easy.  Probably the one thing I am now certain of at fifty-three is that I shouldn’t be giving anyone advice. Could I have until, say, his 30^th birthday?

   My friend, who is a newspaper editor and accustomed to wheedling writers, demurred. He would need the advice in a week.

   After he hung up, I gave myself some advice. This is important, potentially life-changing stuff. My friend’s son would probably keep this advice forever, consulting it on youthful Friday nights before going out and breaking every dictum I gave him, running his callused fingers along its curling yellow edges in the waning years of his own life in bittersweet remembrance. Start writing right now, I advised myself, so that by the end of the week you’ll have something worthy of an eighteenth birthday.

   I can only say that when I finally did sit down to pen the following advice, it was not as soon as I hoped but not as late as anyone’s 30^th birthday…     

Love someone. Love more than someone. This one’s beyond words. But, selling it short, when you love, and are loved in return, you’ll know a joy and satisfaction that’s unimaginable. There are tough times too. But if just the thought of that person brings a smile to your face, the tough times will pass.

Be curious. Life is a wonderful gift. There are amazing things in the very smallest places. Don’t miss them. Don’t become inured to them. Erase the word cynic from your vocabulary. Don’t give a damn if other people see you peeking behind the curtain.

Be respectful of others. They may not look like you, they might not act like you, they may make mistakes and sometimes do the wrong thing like you, but they are just trying to make their way in life like you. Plus sometimes you’ll be surprised how just a little respect and reaching out on your part will come back to you in happy ways. And you can learn so much from those who seem different from you. Treat them with grace.      

Listen. Not easy to do, but no one ever learned anything from the sound of their own voice.  

Be a good friend. One day you’ll probably have a family and it’s easy to surround yourself with just them. Raising children is one of the most important things you’ll do – if not the most important thing – but don’t forget the friends in your life. They may need you. You may need them. Plus they’re just fun.

Have fun. Don’t get too serious about things. Life really can be short. Life really is a gift. Do ridiculous things. Look ridiculous (but don’t make other people look ridiculous). Be rash. This is it. Enjoy the hell out of it.

Do one thing every day that scares you. I’m stealing this from Eleanor Roosevelt because it’s one of my favorite pieces of advice. You’ll figure out how to apply it.

Do things for others. This will do for you too.

Never stop appreciating. The roof over your head, the freedom to do what you want, a healthy breath, parents who love you.

Be yourself.

   That was it. I kept it short. As I said, my friend is a newspaper editor. I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to do what he does.

   I don’t know if my friend’s son ever read what I wrote. He left town and went off to college, where he is no doubt occupied with plenty of other things he doesn’t want to read. But, if by some miracle this last bit of advice falls into his hands, I hope he takes a minute to think about it.

   There’s nothing wrong with advice from others. But it’s your life, and your one chance. The best advice is the honest advice you give yourself.

    Everyone loves a shark story. The other day, as we tucked into hamburgers at a restaurant a stone’s throw from the beach here in Ventura, a friend told me about a shark he had once spotted only a short distance up the coast.

   He leaned forward. People always lean forward when they commence a shark story, as if you can test the veracity of the tale by their breath.

   “Dude,’ he said. “We were walking on the beach and we saw this sea lion. It was acting kind of weird and then I saw this big fin. The next thing I knew, the sea lion was gone. Just blood in the water.” 

    He leaned a little closer.

   “Right off the beach, dude.”

   He bit down on his burger. I couldn’t help but notice how sharp his teeth were.

   I would like to report the name of the beach. It’s a scant sea lion toss from a surf spot I frequent, and this would surely cut down on the summer hordes of visiting inlanders who are currently cart-wheeling down the faces of our waves in truly dangerous fashion. But I am leery of purported shark sightings, even from the ketchup-anointed breath of trusted friends. More important still, with due respect to Hollywood a sighting does not constitute an imminent frenzy of attacks from which even helicopters aren’t safe. 

   Not long after hearing this story, I received an e-mail from my friend Chuck, linking me to several articles about a recent spate of shark activity off Cape Cod where he lives. The first article reported that a man swimming off Truro was bitten on the foot by a great white. The second article reported that a 12-foot white shark was spotted six feet off a Wellfleet Beach. I waited, but no more e-mails came. It is possible my friend Chuck has been snatched from his living room.

   A few days after Chuck’s disappearance a young great white was hauled into our very own Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard, caught inadvertently by fishermen who brought the 5-foot male in so researchers could tag it. The shark was released, its’ subsequent tracking now part of the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s “Project White Shark”, aimed at preserving great whites and educating the public. Neither is an easy feat. As Peter Benchley once wrote, “It’s hard to build a constituency for an animal that may decide to eat you.”

   The root of our ribald shark fears, and the essence of most shark stories, is soundly anchored in our fear of being devoured, although, really, the odds of this are quite long. “We’re not just afraid of predators,” wrote Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson. “We’re transfixed by them…”

   When my friend told his story, it wasn’t the sea lion out there, it was me. I felt the sea lion’s visceral pain. I’d bet you did too. Eaten by a shark. You do not feel the pain of your fellow citizens killed by vending machines that fall on them after being jostled for a soda or a reluctant quarter. Even though they are also more apt to kill us, we do not fear dogs, cats or cars.   

   Back to Peter Benchley. Those of you who were around in the 1970s recognize Benchley. He wrote a book called Jaws. In 1975 the book became a movie. For many, the ocean was never the same. Benchley’s world changed too. In the ensuing years his fame earned him time with marine biologists, fishermen, divers and other assorted experts on shark behavior. He came to sorely regret he ever wrote Jaws. He had, he said again and again, unfairly demonized sharks. The real demon was elsewhere.

    For a long time now I have kept a file of clippings on sharks. Is has become a very thick file; its girth not unlike that of a great white itself (I know, I could scan all these clippings but I like the way old clippings yellow and the food stains are like a trip down memory lane). Sharks on my mind, I returned to my folder. There were articles about shark fishing tournaments, about shark attacks, about shark feeding operations, about an increase in attacks on sea otters and, my personal favorite, an article uncovering a plan by that devious revolutionary Fidel Castro to launch trained killer sharks against the U.S.  To check the veracity of this last story I googled Fidel Castro. Indeed he was still alive, although busy working on a book. Having written several books myself, I can tell you he is too busy to train sharks. It is also true that the same issue of this particular periodical featured a story about a 3-breasted woman and a 3-armed man having a 3-legged baby. 

   Having spent my life around the ocean, I have some small personal experience with sharks too. Once on a surf trip in Indonesia I jumped from a boat and almost landed square on the back of a blacktip reef shark. I have had the good fortune to dive with sharks on numerous occasions. Once. off Beqa Island in Fiji, I watched two female bull sharks, eight feet long and thick as trash barrels. They moved sleepily at first, investigating the floating chunks of tuna, while we divers, appropriately, knelt on the bottom. Finally one of the bulls opted to feed. In a blink, languid nonchalance turned to focused perfection. In less time than it took you to read (and count) these 14 words she devoured a pot roast chunk of tuna with a series of convulsion that would have snapped the spine of a lesser creature. Then she swung easily up into the sun-splashed shallows, pausing for a moment, thick tail still, while the equatorial sun sent ribbons of light wavering along her sides. Outside of each morning when I wake to my wife, it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. I also know a man who was attacked by a white shark (he survived). It does happen.

    No doubt, few things generate more interest than sharks. I’m betting Benchley had files upon files bursting with shark stories. He certainly knew there was no shortage of reportage. Sharks, he once noted, “are the alpha predator in the food chain of news-making events”.

   Wherever Benchley got his information, it changed his mind. He became a champion for sharks, although it’s doubtful as many people read his book Shark Trouble: True Stories and Lessons About Sharks and the Sea as devoured Jaws. He turned from fiction to fact. On average, less than a dozen humans are killed by sharks each year. An estimated 100 million sharks are killed every year by fishermen. There has been a drastic decline in the numbers of nearly every species of shark. At our hands, Benchley’s white shark may ultimately succumb to extinction.

   Forget for a moment the far-ranging ecological repercussions of the elimination of an apex predator. Because there’s a farther ranging point still. One of my most treasured possessions is a dog-eared copy of The Outermost House by Henry Beston. In it Beston writes, “We need another wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals… We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”  

   Personally I believe my friend’s shark story, just as I believe the surfers a mere hundred yards away were perfectly safe.

    And if they weren’t, well that is our part as a stitch in the fabric of this world.

 (This column originally appeared as part of KCET’s “SoCal Focus”; http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/commentary/west-is-eden/one-with-jaws.html) 

 He looks at the jetty, his hand in mine.

 “I don’t know,” he says.

 “You can do it,” I say, though the truth is I don’t know. The boulder-size rocks must look like the side of a building to a four-year-old. Very carefully he climbs up the side of the jetty. I climb just below him, one hand out to catch him if he slips, though I’m not sure if I can grab him before he hurts himself. When he reaches the top his smile tells me I made the right decision.

   He stands at the water’s edge, peering out to the wood platform anchored seventy yards off the beach. Older kids are jumping off it, laying on their backs in the sun.

   “I don’t know if I can make it,” he says.

    Seventy yards must look like the horizon to a six-year-old.

   “I’ll swim with you,” I say.

   We stop three times on the way out. I tread water. His small hands press down on my shoulder. But he is smiling wide again.

   He balances the surfboard on his head; eight-year-old arms are too short to tuck the board under an arm. The waves are small; they crumble softly without a sound, but I know they look small to me because I am grown.

  He has been asking me to teach him how to surf for weeks, but here at the water’s edge he has his doubts.

   “You’ll stay close to me?”

   “Right beside you.”

   I swim out with him. He stands on the first wave, wobbling, feet planted wide. He falls just short of the beach. I swim in as fast as I can. By the time I reach him he is already paddling awkwardly toward me. The smile is beyond words.

    They are the biggest waves of the winter. They march toward shore, lumbering giants. The handful of surfers in the water bob far out to sea, farther out than we have ever seen them. When the waves break they throw forward with sledgehammer force and the sound is like not-very-distant thunder. Mist wafts through the parking lot, the aftermath of the thunder. More than a few surfers stay in the parking lot, leaning against their cars.

   We change into our wetsuits. My mouth is dry and there is a lump in my throat.

   He changes faster. These days he does everything faster. He fastens his zipper and turns to go. He is fifteen. He will not ask me to stay close to him. I think about telling him to be careful, but he is already running for the water. I am a little frightened, for him and for me, but the way he runs tells me I have, on occasion, done the right thing.  

   I recently returned from a magazine assignment in Curacao, a lovely slice of Caribbean island off the coast of Venezuela. I was there for a diving story but, in the way that life goes, the real story turned out to be Clarina Gomez, who, in her job working for the tourist bureau, spent a week showing me her island.

   Spend a week with someone and you learn a few things about them, and what I learned about Clarina was that everywhere we went she was recognized. It’s true, Curacao is not large (some 40 miles long) and Clarina has lived on this block of limestone her entire life, by my guess sixty-some years (it is impolite, and to be honest mildly intimidating, to ask such a distinguished woman her age). But longevity and close proximity to one’s neighbors do not explain what unfolds as Clarina goes through her day. In restaurants, people wave from tables; from doorways they nod hellos; they get up from behind important desks, ducking their heads respectfully as they come forward. When Clarina walks the colorful streets of the Willemstad capital, they stop her. At traffic lights, they roll down their windows and lean across the seat, unleashing a happy torrent of Papiamento. There are times when I am certain that, in their excitement, they’re going to hop right into Clarina’s car, turning a deaf ear to the honking masses.

   It is like being with Lady Gaga, but without all the self-obsession and weirdness. Of these people who wave and smile and offer their hand deferentially Clarina says, “Just to see them, it’s a happy day.”

   She says this softly, but she is no softy. She commands respect. She brooks no nonsense (a handy skill when traveling with me); when a drunken pan handler approaches us, she gives him her “hard face” (her words) and he veers away. But she says things like, “Oh my goodness”, and in her eyes you see genuine caring, and she reaches into her purse for candies for little children, but not before asking the parents’ permission. She speaks five languages. She remains curious. Currently, she is devouring history books, learning more about her island, although she has likely trod its every inch. She is dushi (sweet). In the evening, our official day done, the phone rings in my hotel room. “If you aren’t too tired,” Clarina says, “I’d like to show you more of our island.”  

   I pick up my notebook and take the elevator down to the lobby. How can I say I am too tired to learn?  

   She is retired now, but that doesn’t matter

   Juffrouw Gomez, they all say.

   Teacher.

Hi Readers:

   The essays below, including the just posted “Ask for a First Kiss”, are part of a book in progress, written by a father to his children. It’s a series of “lessons” based on a fortunate life spent, and shaped, by the sea.

   This isn’t a book of advice passed from parent to child. That’s foolish conceit. The truth is, though I’ve spent my life around the ocean, I wasn’t wise enough to see many of its lessons until I began learning them from our two sons. As every parent knows, parenting is two-way street. As you strive to make your children decent human beings, they undertake their remodel of you. This begins with their first breath. Henry David Thoreau walked Cape Cod’s shore producing a book of insight and rumination, but his observations would have been decidedly different had he walked the beach with small hands yanking on his sleeve wanting to know why dead oyster bits can’t be pocketed, what bait is best for crabbing and why sometimes low tide smells like the word grandpa shouts when people don’t drive how he likes. For this, Thoreau’s experience was shallower. There are few certainties in life, but here’s one more. I couldn’t have written this collection of essays before our sons were born.

   Simple is better, and on the surface these essays that may one day comprise a book, are simple. Ask for a first kiss. Don’t be quick to judge. Be yourself. Look closely. Believe in magic (and forget the naysayers). See past your fears. Give everyone a chance. Do stupid things because you can.

   But simplicity doesn’t exclude something more. Look out at the ocean and see a palette of blue-green. Slip beneath that palette and glimpse a world we still don’t fully understand.

pixmove asked: Hi Ken. Just wondering if you had any new books coming out soon?

I actually do have a new book coming out this June, a novel called “Fog”! You can read the first chapter and watch a video trailer at www.kenmcalpine.com. Hope you like what you see, and thanks for your interest :)

   You might know she is different. You might not. Love isn’t always bold and certain.

   I’d kissed girls beside the ocean before. We walked beneath dark clouds that obscured the stars, beneath full moons that washed the dunes fairy tale silver and moon slices that threw just enough shy light to highlight a downy lip. We walked beside waters that frothed over our bare feet and retreated with a whisper, like lovers turning in the sheets. Sometimes we had already been lovers turning in the sheets. You shouldn’t kiss just one person.

   This one was different. I’d be lying if I told you I knew it at that moment, two of us, at the end of a first date, sitting on a dark jetty in sudden awkward silence, staring at waves that flashed white in the dark. The world smelled of salt and perfume and my hands shook, and I did something strange. Until that moment, kisses were unspoken. This time I asked. I asked with a strange seriousness, a stiff formality as far from suave as a cinderblock. In storybooks, heroes take the initiative. They don’t stutter and crush their fingers and hold their breath in the face of their indecisiveness. And this girl from New Jersey looked at my baffled face and smiled without a stutter and said yes.

   What marked a new beginning for us marked the very beginning for you.

   I know now what made me ask. It was respect.