Evanston: landlocked
Evanston: landlocked
An experience can strike an unexpected resonance with a distant and seemingly unrelated part of one’s life. In literature the most famous of these is the taste of Marcel Proust’s madeleine which resulted in seven volumes that I have never made my way through.
Several of you emailed after yesterday’s post, and in forming my replies I realized I am feeling trapped by the land, as I did in my childhood.
I was born and raised three hundred miles southwest of here, and I didn’t want to be there.
I first saw the ocean when I was seven years old and travelled with my grandparents to Florida.
I saw it again in my teens when they retired to a tiny house about thirty steps from the sea wall in Mission Beach, California.
I lived for those summers I spent with them. And back in Kirkwood, Missouri during the long school year felt trapped by the land stretching out for thousands of miles around me.
The day after I graduated from college, I started driving west. That was in June 1963. And from five days later until Carol and I moved to Evanston in 2006, I have always lived at least on the edge of oceans and often in the middle.
When Carol was offered a job near Chicago six years ago, she knew my feelings about the Midwest and gave me veto power. But I like Chicago more than Saint Louis--Lake Michigan is certainly an improvement on the Mississippi River--and it was never part of the bargain that I be here all the time. So I have not felt oppressed by the land. Until now.
I’ve been back here seven months and there is no end in sight. An apt phrase.
I miss THE HAWKE OF TUONELA. I miss Opua. I miss my mooring. But most of all I simply miss being on the ocean, being on the edge of land with an horizon that my mind knows stretches forever, not to Michigan sixty miles away.
Those of you who wrote offered the advice that I be patient. It is good advice and I will try.
In the meantime I’ve downloaded the above painting, one of my favorite seascapes, J.M.W. Turner’s, YACHT APPROACHING THE COAST, and am using it on my desktop.
The ocean waits.
Thursday, November 3, 2011