A Friendship

The Pacific Surfliner announced its approach from a long way off, with a rumble and a clatter and a whistle on the wind, and no matter how many times we had watched it go by, there was something thrilling about it.

At night it was a procession of light, hurtling through the darkness like a dream. There were silhouettes of passengers in the windows, transformed by an amber interior glow into figures from another time and place, toasting the world, celebrating their passage again and again.

But by day, they were just travelers, and we waved to them. We wondered if they wondered how we came to be there, two silver-maned wind-blown women on an empty beach.

“Someday we’ll be on that train,” she said, “and we’ll look out and see ourselves waving.”

She was quirky to the core, a sculptor and an artist, modest to a flaw, honest and irreverent. We were East coast girls still startled to find ourselves here in this unlikely place, and sometimes those old accents and perspectives emerged when we gabbed. She was wickedly funny, but also very kind.

She offered to teach me how to swim (many have) and that goal soon devolved into teaching me to simply make friends with the water. “Don’t fill the pool with your fear,” she said, and it seemed like good advice for living. She was encouraging and patient, but I was satisfied just to sit in the hot tub.

She had a home in Santa Fe and invited me to visit. It was my first significant trip anywhere after the brain surgery that had left me quite flummoxed. It was nearly Christmas, and there were songs and lights in the plaza, snow on mountains, a fire in the hearth and the aroma of mesquite. I met her interesting and colorful friends in their interesting and colorful houses, and I bought a pair of turquoise earrings at a tourist shop, and we hiked to high places through shrubby trails and piñon-juniper woods, and I saw that I could do this. I discovered I was back.

At home in California, we chatted in the hot tub, as silly and shallow as teenaged girls, but we said whatever we felt like and no one was judging, and sometimes we were serious and deep, and we worried about the world, and we brainstormed about ideas and projects and inspired one another. Maybe we would set up ephemeral outdoor art exhibits, and maybe we would publish a book about seaweed, and maybe somehow we could parlay our skills and resources into saving the environment. She painted exquisite branchy trees and the stark blue and white essences of the planet’s coldest places. Her sculptures were stationed here and there on the property, a howling wolf, her father’s visage, a plump outlandish turkey, a magnificent raven in her studio, and there was an ornate bronze door, worthy of the Italian Renaissance. Sometimes we were simply tomboys, walking along the railroad track, collecting rocks and remnants, sitting by a creek reflecting, or scrambling bravely up a steep trail that we didn’t think we’d make. We were in love, as good friends are.

And I witnessed her grace in a time of suffering, her brokenness and wonder, her vulnerability and strength, her vibrance and ongoingness even when nothing made sense. I saw how she put her head down and inhabited a life she hadn’t chosen, laboring through grief, and it was complex and all consuming, but maybe it was a distraction from the dizzying uncertainties and the keenest pain of loss. She remained an artist, always. She opened her mind and the universe entered, shining.

In a few days, she will drive away for good.

People preach and people pray, and people carry stuff away, and soon I will go by that place and it won’t even look familiar, just large and quiet and emptied of my friend, and I already feel an anticipatory ache. Beyond my sight, the wolf will still be howling, and the bronze doors will open up to someone new. There are lupines and poppies on the ridge, and wind ripples through grasses tinged with yellow mustard, and sunlight winks through her vacant studio, and now and then comes the long muffled clatter of the train in the distance, with its reassuring evocation of progress and transport, loneliness and yearning, yesterday and now.

It reminds me of an old poem from the 1950s called Journey by Train, by May Sarton. I love the way Sarton’s train closes the curve of time until the present is gathered up and here. These are the lines that have stayed with me:

…when the clamor stops, we really climb
Down to the earth, closing the curve of time,
Meeting those we have left, to those we meet
Bringing our whole life that has moved so fast,
And now is gathered up and here at last,
To unroll like a ribbon at their feet.

We’ll board that train, before too long. We’ll see ourselves waving from the shore, and we’ll wave back.