1997
On a Lake Huron beach, close to Southampton, Ontario, a yellow catamaran sits in the sands. Today, no mainsail hangs from the spar. Where the staysail should ripple from the wind shines only the sun in a blue sky. The black rudder stays dry and dirty. Yet behind it, underneath the deck, among the sailboat’s shadows, are bundles of toys: red pails and shovels, pink water worms, a white surfboard, paddles, a soccer ball.
Blue beach chairs flank the chipped hull and in them laze adults sparkling in the sun. Lotion lathers their skin while they rest in the mid-day July heat. Men wear boarding shorts; women lounge in one pieces. Their bodies slowly cook and turn from white to a soft, golden brown. They all gaze skyward for the moment, their eyes hidden behind shades, and say not a word.
From the water, the children come running. They run through the maze of relaxing adults, who may mutter a “slow down” or “be careful,” and dart toward the rudder. From the shadows, they pull out and then fight over their favourite toys. Two girls in green bikinis take the pails and shovels, and retreat to the shoreline, where they nestle in the shallows and build cities and castles of sand. Two skinny boys grab the water worms and pummel each other with them. One chases the other through the grass, past the swing set, and toward a marshy inlet full of frogs and resting seagulls. As they disappear into the horizon, the waves and wind soon muffle their laughter and playful screams.
I lie on the deck in a thick, black t-shirt and watch the children frolic on the beach. The sun bakes the cotton on my skin. I feel heavy and uncomfortable. Fat. The first drops of perspiration form on my forehead and on my legs. I run my fingers over my chest and grab fistfuls of flesh, and then pull at my belly’s rolls and ripples. I have become aware these things should not be. Laughter to my left makes me close my eyes and dream of some angel preparing to grate and skin my tubs of gelatin to feed the skinnier. In her long, stainless steel knife, I see myself smile.
I descend to the rudder and lay my hands on the surfboard. I drag it through the sand, past the adults glowing in the sun, past the girls building cities in the mud, and toward the lake and water. Barely a touch of wind disturbs the surface. The initial cold shock quickly vanishes as my feet and ankles soon welcome the sensation. Sunrays pierce the water illuminating the bottom where my toes wiggle and dig into the muck. Shards of sunlight dance on the water as if a series of tiny stars bathing in their own light.
I push the board through the water until it reaches my knees. With the board secured in my hands, I gently lie down atop it and paddle away from shore. The sounds my hands and arms make as they slice and cut through the water please and calm me. Soon, the people on the beach become unrecognizable; their bodies blur into only colourful outlines. Their voices transform into only sound. Away from them, I lift myself to my knees, then, gingerly, delicately, I push my right leg forward until it bends, and with my hands on the board’s prickly surface, I shoot my left one forward, mirroring the right, and I am crouching above the water. Arms outstretched, muscles quaking under the strain, I let my body unravel and straighten to the sun. The board trembles over the light waves, but I balance nonetheless. My toes clamp on the board; my calves flex and my quads twitch. When I feel confident my body has fastened itself to the board, I raise my hands to the blue and my fingers move through the soft breeze.
I close my eyes and remember the mirror and my reflection. I watch myself pull my shirt up revealing a flabby stomach. Its rolls are untoned and unhardened—abnormal. I remember thinking not to worry, for I am still so young, and in only a year or two, my body will grow and blossom into those bodies I see on television: toned and hard. Bodies of men.
On the board, though, standing above the water and under the sun, I know my body will undergo no such change. My body is my body is my body. So when a trace of wind tickles my bellybutton, I realize to my great horror a piece of myself has been left exposed to the world. My shirt has somehow risen up my torso, and I sense my stomach hanging over my shorts. I hear laughter from the shoreline, and, again, the beach has become my classroom, with me in front of the blackboard, and the teacher directing his ruler at me and sighing, “Class, this is an example of a husky child,” and the class nods and jots down notes. A student raises his hand, “Teacher, how does one help a husky child?” “Wonderful question. Through the art of positive reinforcement. Repeat after me. ‘Husky children do not get to play.’”
“Husky children do not get to play.”
“Husky children do not get to play.”
“Husky children do not get to play.”
On the water, I struggle to cover myself and shield the world from unformed bodies—the sin of slovenliness. My hands tear at my shirt, the board shakes, and I lose my balance and tumble into the lake. Under the surface, water soaks my t-shirt, the cotton becoming heavier and heavier, and I sink deeper and deeper until I reach Lake Huron’s bottom and drift. I cradle my knees to my chest and revel in my weightlessness while I do slow summersaults in the depths. I open my eyes and face the lake’s skin. Everything twinkles and glitters. Beams of sunlight splinter and shatter into a million pieces as a hammer would break rock. In the water’s silence, I do not hear laughter coming from the shore, from the other children with footballs and abdominals, buckets and ribcages. In the water’s depth, I need not walk across the sandy stage and pretend not to sense eyes of disgust on me from an audience of ordinary families sipping juice under green umbrellas. Below the surface, I need not absorb each polite punch, each encouraging blow, with a graceful smile as if some slug thanking the toad for swallowing it.
2003
At York University in Toronto’s north, I am walking toward Steeles Avenue listening to Sigur Ros. Jonsi’s voice and the band’s instrumentals have put me in a meditative, contemplative state. It is a Thursday evening in November; the sky is grey and sombre, and I am heading to the liquor store at Steeles and Keele to buy a bottle of Havana Club. Five hours from now, my head will glide through alcohol, and I will try to entertain strangers at whom I would not glance in the cold, crisp light of sobriety.
The air is sharp, and it blows the oak and maple leaves along the sidewalk. They are dried and arid and frail. They do not sound when I step on them. It feels as if it could snow at any second. And I welcome it.
Students huddle at nearby bus stop. They have zipped up their jackets. Hats and scarves and boots cover their various parts. Their bodies are covered in colour, and I find it impossible to trace their outlines with any accuracy. A red and white Toronto bus screeches to a stop, its doors swing open, and the pedestrians step onboard. They find a place to stand, reach for a handrail, and balance themselves as the bus accelerates then stops behind a cement truck, then roars to life only to stop again in a few seconds. Its brake lights blink and flash in the grey along with those of another dozen vehicles. Together, they look like a series of red toques flung over a frozen lake.
Light dissipates. The north has almost turned completely from the sun for another day. In the distance, as far as my eye can see, a sliver of cloudless sky sits above the ground. As the sun passes through, just before it disappears, missiles of light fire over the landscape and illuminate its parts. And they are magnificent in their decay.
The stretch on Steeles between Jane and Keele is striking in its ugliness: drooping telephone wires, distant, decrepit buildings, muddied fields, gas stations, cracked cement. Yet walking amid the grey, the leafless trees and littered wrappers, I feel strangely at home. Grey offers no expectations. It promises nothing. It needs nothing. Beautiful things demand adoration and affection. Grey things, like grey days, may exist on their own accord. They find beauty in the atrophy of the everyday—a melting candle, for example, or a water stain—for they understand in the course of human history, the sun has stayed hidden more often than not.
A UPS truck drives by. A bird chirps from a wire. The sun has vanished, but in its wake are trails of pink and rose. The celestial pink briefly dances and flashes over the humanized landscape. Electrical towers overlook empty lands ready to be maximized, to be made efficient, by faceless men and women in suits first and then in hardhats. Signs advertise sales in bright, bawdy adjectives. A few kilometres to the north, near oil drums or six-lane highways, little suburban cities rise from the soil. Yellow bulldozers stay parked for the night; their tracks lie still atop a dirt mountain. The blade rises to the night sky. And when darkness comes, lights electrify the night. Cars turn theirs on, as do stores, stations, and restaurants. The city twinkles; things blur. A city convinces itself it exists beyond the grey.
I see the liquor store in the distance and think about the screenplay I am writing. A pivotal scene settles in my mind. A young man and woman work together in a twenty-hour superstore selling everything from avocados to air mattresses, and their shift runs from midnight to eight in the morning. Part of the man’s duties is to collect the errant shopping carts outside that sometimes come to rest in the most curious of places and positions. Outside, at around four in the morning, he wanders the empty parking lot, the size of a football field, and collects each lonely one. On windy nights, he sometimes sees carts rolling across the pavement on their own accord. Tonight, however, the wind is calm, and the moon lightens a few drifting clouds. He sets to work, and in about ten minutes, he has rounded up a dozen, pushing each into the other, and has formed a long line of carts. He muscles them toward the automatic doors when something to the left, beyond the parking town but before Mason’s farm, catches his eyes—something silvery in the moonlight. The superstore sits on the town’s edge: to the west are stores and subdivisions, and to east, farmlands, rolling hills dotted with centuries-old homes and dogs who roam leashless. He walks toward the object and past the various sections of store: the pharmacy, garden centre, automotive section, McDonald’s, travel agencies, optometrists, hair salons. And there in a patch of muddied field, decorated with “Coming Soon” signs, lies an overturned shopping cart. The still wheels extend to the stars; slush and silt harden on the red handle. He moves to grab the basket and return the cart to its proper state, but something about its pose, something about how striking it looks, prevents him from touching it—an overturned shopping cart covered in mud on the border between light and dark.
Inside the store, the lights glare from the ceiling and turn the products into a striking white. All is quiet. The bicycles stay unridden, the clothing unworn, the video games unplayed, the produce uneaten. Of the twenty or so cash registers, only one is open, and on its still conveyor belt, a young woman leans over an opened magazine. She wears jeans and a sweater under her blue apron emblazed with the store’s name. Her head bobs to the music flowing from her yellow headphones. She chews a piece of gum, and turns the page.
The young man rolls a cart toward her check-out counter, and when she sees him, she glances at her wristwatch, and smiles. Her hands grip the cart’s handle, securing it to the best of her ability, while the man places his hands on the basket’s edges, lifts himself up, and then drops himself in the cart. He sits with his back to the handle and his legs crunched to his chest. She removes the headphones from her CD Walkman, releasing music from the crackly speakers, and sits it next to him in the basket. The music is subdued, meditative techno, almost ambient yet almost danceable, and its beats and seductive, simplistic patterns calm, momentarily, the store’s hidden fury. The young woman pushes the young man down the store’s principal corridor, two-hundred-metres long, toward the eastern wall. They pass jewelry encased in glass, grates of soda stacked in towers, hundreds of gala apples displayed in boxes, cotton shirts hung on hangers. When they reach the store’s end, she turns the cart around—so it faces west and all the products in their totality—puts her weight on the handle, steps once, then twice, and begins to run. Under her strength and guidance, the cart accelerates, the man raises his hands, and after twenty metres, she releases both the cart and him. She watches him fly under the lights, past all the things for sale, until his hands become smaller and the excited shriek he released upon release drifts away, and when the cart eventually slows, its wheels turn to the right, and she loses sight of him among the trousers, dresses, and bras.
At the cash register, the morning light seeps through the windows and glass doors, which open under the slightest provocation. Soon shoppers will arrive looking to save a few cents on bread and milk. Soon the world will enter searching for the latest discounts. Soon the man and woman will leave and sleep through most of the day. But now, in their final moments together, under the hush of fading tranquility, she rests her Walkman on the check-out counter and presses play. There among the magazines and confectionary, the chewing gum and sports drinks, they shift their hips, flay their hands, and jump a little. Rhythm is of little relevance. Movement has no screenwriter. Choreography is for the uninspired. And as their bodies become even more uncoordinated, as they whip their limbs into a frenzy, little smiles creep upon their lips.
On my walk back to campus, the Havana Club nestled in my backpack, I light a cigarette and think further upon the grey. In a few hours, I will be drunk and in love and saying something clever about Frederic Nietzsche or the American invasion of Iraq. But now, in the desolate cold of northern Toronto, I worry not about what I will become but think about how I became. I remember those glorious rainy and green afternoons. The sky was a grey as a shark’s belly, and the rain gathered in little pools just outside the sliding door by which I sat and stared and smiled. I loved the rain not simply because the emerald colours inspired me but because the dejection it produced in others soothed me. I adored the clouds and the dampness for ruining other people’s plans, for making them cover up, and for forcing their grins to turn to frowns. Grey, and the rain falling from it, was the great equalizer. I no longer focused on me in relation to the world but solely on the world. In the grey, I felt as close to free as I ever had. The sun is for sycophants; grey is for creatives.
Turning left on Founders Road, I see the dormitory lights of Tatham Hall glimmer in the encroaching night. I wonder if the residents study or prepare for Pub Night. Someone approaches her third-floor window and looks across to the brake lights, the lampposts, the crosswalks, and the land beaten and kicked by human ingenuity. What does she see? I see beauty in what the majority deem unworthy. Grey teaches this. It also teaches that to critique with grace is the first step towards love.
2016
“Remember,” Arnar says, “do not go near the waves.”
Everyone sitting in the bus stops chatting and stares at the man holding the microphone with his right hand while adjusting his wool-sewn, ear-flapped hat with his left. Wavy streaks of golden hair fall to his shoulders. They remind me of gilded snakes or a scarecrow’s intestines. Either way, the light seems foreign to this place.
“Stay on the dry ground. Stay far from the water. The waves will suck you in. You will drown. You will die.”
We have travelled from Reykjavik along Highway 1, which circles Iceland’s inaccessible interior, and have watched the asphalt become sheathed in slush. We have seen the flurries intensify, growing heavier than mere raindrops, and have noticed how they are buoyed by the grey swells sweeping in from the North Atlantic. We have passed rented red Renaults that have slipped and slid into the white, slim shoulder, and have noted the passengers who emerge wearing Alafoss hats and holding GPS phones to the sky. White fields stretch into the horizon and meet the grey skies, and we have difficulty judging where land ends and ice begins. People have disappeared here, gone away. Here on Iceland’s southern coast, every stride is a risk, every step a wager.
“Last week, a girl from my group went a little too far out to take a picture,” Arnar says. “She got a little too careless, got her boots a little too wet. And it took her.”
Our bus has stopped in parking lot full of other busses. The driver has not shut the wipers off and instead turns on the lights. It is February and it is early afternoon and it is almost dark. Precipitation smudges and blurs my window view; all I can see is tail lights reflectedthrough drops of liquid. But then I hear it—the thunderous clapping, the unmistakable call.
“Luckily, I got her out,” Arnar says. “Pulled her from the wave. Pulled her from its teeth, its jaws. And got my nice new pants wet.”
He smiles, and I manage to see a trail of people in red down jackets and neon boots walk towards the sound.
“Others have not been so lucky. People have drowned here. A man from China. Another from Florida.”
I picture a pair of pink earmuffs punished in the waves.
The driver opens the door.
“Be safe. And be back in forty-five minutes.”
Anar jumps down followed by our diverse group—tourists from Denver to Dubai, from Lausanne to London.
We follow the long line of pilgrims trudging through the broken basalt, heads down, braced against the winds. The gray smothers, strangles, and then, suffocates the earth. Cloud and mist and fog have allied, making only the nearest perceptible, the wider world invisible. Snow beats the “Welcome” board and renders it illegible. We ascend a small dune, the roaring getting closer and closer, the war lying just ahead, and we brace for bullets and bunkers, artillery and air assaults. Arnar stands ahead rolling a cigarette with his bare fingers. And as he licks the flimsy paper, strands of hair in his mouth, he motions for us to continue. The ringing gets louder, the winds heavier, and I have made a Faustian pack, sacrificing something holy just to see and feel this ugly beauty, a landscape so desolate, so unearthly, so unheavenly, that my wind-made tears begin to feel more genuine.
And just over the knoll when the crashing becomes almost unbearable, we see the waves pounding the shore, and there is Reynisfjara, the primordial black beach, with the Atlantic lacerating all around, lacerating even the sea stacks, which stand like arthritic fingers, the water a row of teeth, growling, the tourists snapping photos at its tip, laughing, unaware of how close they are, screaming, to be taken to out to sea, lost forever.
This is Reynisfjara.
And no sailboats bob in the still waters. And no beachgoers lie on towels, toes tickled by gentle waves. And no lovestruck romantics amble down the sands and coo at the sun pulled over the horizon, sighing in the scene’s perfection.
The tourists run toward the water and snap photos of the basalt stacks; their boots inch closer to the rippling undertow. I walk in the opposite direction through snow falling in angled streams and covering the footprints of older tourists. I see a man kneeling at the waves’ edge. He keeps his balance, amid the rising winds, his left hand dug into the sand. In his orange jacket, surrounded by fog, he seems the last vestige of humanity.
I turn and watch Arnar stand on the knoll surveying his charges and smoking his cigarette. The tourists in the distance appear as only blurs, indistinguishable from one another, and a few saunter closer and closer to the water, oblivious and unconcerned, so ensconced in the belief that it is impossible to die on vacation, particularly on a beach. The wind blows Arnar’s blond hair across his face, and when a man gets his feet wet, the guide shakes his head in disbelief. But Arnar does not move, he only exhales his grey smoke, which soon joins its brethren in the sky. The man jumps and then hops to avoid a wave; I hear the laughter from where I stand. Under the basalt stacks, camera flashes erupt in erratic bursts. Arnar rolls another cigarette.
The snow falls heavier and leaves white ribbon streaks across the black sands. I fall deeper and deeper in love with the place—the landscape I have imagined ever since I first heard Sigur Ros’s desolate yet angelic sound. The beach evokes a sense of vulnerability but not the typical sort. The danger lurking everywhere reminds me I am part of this world. The finality of an end does not lessen the impact of a journey. I have survived golden beaches so to enjoy grey, bleak ones. I have watched people populate and redecorate lands the world over, but here among the waves and snow, how insignificant it all feels. How wonderful it is to be reminded how small we are, how fragile, and what a gift it is to think on grey, to taste it, to experience it.
When the Norse settled these lands over a thousand years ago, they brought with them their gods and goddesses to make sense of the new lands and to justify their actions. One such goddess was named Freya—the warrior goddess and guardian of dead warrior souls. She must have felt at home here amid the snow, ice, and fire; she must have seen it as her own personal Valhalla. When she crouched over her fallen devotees, those muscled men with sharp features, I like to think she would raise their ghosts, carry them here to the beach, and deposit them in the sands. Along the beach, the beautiful boys, only grey spectres, would dissolve into fine glasses and minerals—the obsidians, irons, pyroxenes—and they would sparkle and shine even among the harshest winter storm. Freya would often return to plant new souls but also to check on the progress of the older ones, and sometimes she would be so impressed with the gleam of one ore or crystal that she would feel its smoothness in her hand, burrow a hole through it with her nail, and add it to the necklace dangling around her neck. On the goddess and among the grey, the old boys, now polished stone, watch danger and beauty unfold in equal measure as they fly through the clouds and over the mountains. On Freya, they are all immortal.
Under the mountain, the tourists raise their heads to the first car horns sounding from the lot. The light has dimmed almost to dark, night advances, yet the wind still wallops. They hurry back toward the busses, and a few trip and then laugh. In the sea, the stacks drown in the mist and are eaten by the waves. The trucks have started their engines, and their headlights illuminate the snow falling in white switches and the beach drifting to black.
I, too, walk toward the lot, and soon I can no longer see the mountains or the columns or the stacks or the sea. The night has come, and I stumble in my big boots through the sands. This is Reynisfjara. No mere beach. This is water, rock, and sand at their most savage, virulent, and unrelenting. This is a reminder of our past and our future: wind, snow, and silence.
From atop the knoll, I watch some buses rumble back to the highway; the headlights cut pathways through the night. Human voices dissipate, and I am the only one left on the beach. I stand at the border between light and dark.
I am grey.
My bus gives a long honk.
This is the beach of my dreams.
The bus begins to move.
As do I.
.