EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALMay 20, 1999
Calle Conde de Barajas, Seville
Words and Paper, and the Life Cycle
In the lower left-hand corner of British Columbia there is an
unchanging seaside village, with a half-circle beach of clay and sand – an ancient
burial ground for British Columbia’s West Coast Indians – at the edge of the
cool grey Coast Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. It's the kind of place where people ride
their bicycles on the road and don’t notice the neighbour’s children at their
dinner table. Families hold tennis round robins and walk the empty beach all-year round.
Summer cottagers give names to their little yellow cabins and send their dogs out to find
their children at the bakery, or the ocean-fed swimming pool – one of the oldest
swimming clubs in Canada, including an additional off-shore, barnacle-encrusted floating
barge with a hole in the middle of it for authentic ocean swimming experiences. "Dive
to the bottom and retrieve some sand," the coaches would instruct, remembering their
own rite of passage. Young blood dribbled from knees and knuckles after climbing the
wooden ladder and onto the slippery dock.
Children return to the village when they grow up, and start families in
houses they knew well as the homes of friends or grandparents. The village is a microcosm
of the life cycle. Toddlers run foot races on the beach, winning candy doled out by
enthusiastic teenaged swimming instructors. Those toddlers grow up to instruct swimming to
the children of their old coaches. Then they themselves go away for a spell, seeing the
big city, and then return to the unspoiled beach to raise dogs and families and vegetable
gardens.
Today there’s a call here, from childhood friends, Jane and
Lindsay – young women who are to Crescent Beach what words and paper are to a book.
We stood at the edge of the swimming pool, prepubescent, shivering, drying off between
swimming and more swimming, when summer days were a series of swimming strokes and fresh
doughnuts and sandy footprints stained with beach tar and dirt from the blackberry bushes.
Today Jane takes a summer sojourn before she begins articling at a Vancouver law firm.
Lindsay joins Jane in Spain and Portugal for three weeks, between seasons of rock climbing
and helicopter skiing in the waste-deep powder of the Rocky Mountains.
They arrive by overnight bus from Alacante, beaming in Seville’s
hot breath, carrying packs the size of ovens, flip-flopping in cheeky platform sandals.
They’re gasping and gushing at the beauty of Seville, and we’re catching up on
the days and years between Crescent Beach and now, before Crescent Beach comes up again in
the life cycle.
