When I travel to other countries, I think of how my life would have been if I had spent it in this other place. Sitting on a boulder that had been set with others upon mowed, tough beige beach grass, I was positive not only did I know what it would have been. I had lived it.
This was no past life fantasy, it was very real. On my first, and only, morning in Korea, I had found my first fifteen years, lived in Anchor Point, Alaska.
I had chosen my overnight hotel because it was near “a private beach.” Photos on a website had shown fishermen under a grey sky, standing on grey rocks, poles immersed in a grey sea. This was not the typical Asian beach that I’d done my best to avoid over the years, filled with colorful canvas chairs and revellers. This was serious shoreline and my only worry was that it might turn out to be some distance from the hotel.
But when I went outdoors, there it was, down a slope and stretching in either direction toward points of land, each a mile or so away from where I stood. The tide was out and the sea was a narrow grey ribbon that seemed to have reached the horizon, with white ruffles of breaking waves. The ribbon was bordered by mudflats, then a strip of sand, and finally a rock-studded beach.
There was just enough wind to give my face a thin skim of salt, but not enough to pierce through my insubstantial coat. It carried a smell that I usually only find in my dreams, of saltwater, seaweed, dead things washed up on the sand along with random gloves, socks, and several lonely shoes. Lying in picturesque coils near a cluster of boulders taller than I was a hawser, triggering my Alaskan upbringing to note that most of it still looked usable--a shame I’d come without a knife.
Any good shells would be where the mudflats met the sea. What I picked up were oyster shells, clam shells, whelks, and broken pieces of delicate, fragile construction. Some of the pebbles gleamed like agates and they went into my purse as well. With each acquisition came a small amount of coarse sand, every grain an eroded rock with the consistency of rock salt, and that made me happy. I wanted to bring away as much of this morning as I could.
The sky had become a streaked mixture of opalescent morning light and clouds that were darkening rapidly. The trees on the shoreline were the indomitable, tenacious, dwarfed ones that battle against salt-filled air and crippling winds all across the Pacific coast. There were no visible houses, only buildings that seemed to be untenanted resorts that were closed for the season. Perched on a tree-covered slope far down the beach was a four-storey building that rose like a pagoda above a rock seawall, its exterior painted in varying patterns of red and black lines. It was surrounded by a tall fence that had been set in concrete, rose as high as the third storey, and was topped with billows of razor wire. Its final storey had a wall of windows facing the sea and an antenna jutted from the roof, making me wonder if this was a lighthouse.
The coast in this part of the beach was covered with large stones that had been placed just in front of the trees in a way that looked like a protective barrier, Just beneath them was a white line of plastic bags and battered styrofoam, and then there was the pebble-strewn, pebble-spawned sand. Tiny tidepools lay between rocks frosted with barnacles and dots that were almost microscopic darted in the puddle of trapped seawater.
The sky began to brighten, the distant points gleamed with sunlight, and the blackened clouds began to give way to soft white puffs against patches of pale blue. The mud flats were shrinking and bare poles that had protruded from them were gradually becoming invisible. I quickened my steps, knowing that my time here was almost over, stopping only to scrawl my name with an oyster shell in the wet sand.
And then I saw it, an ombre shade of grey with small spikes partially buried close to my name. I scooped it out and held a perfectly formed, unbroken shell, almost the size of my hand, looking like a drab cousin of the pink conch shells found on Caribbean beaches. I knocked it against my palm. Nothing emerged from it but large grains of sand. I sniffed it and smelled nothing that was dying inside.
It was too big for my purse but I was certain there was room for it in my laptop bag. Clutching it tightly, I walked past dark grey rocks that were layered with parfait streaks of pure white, past slabs of brown that had once been clay, past little dumps of garbage, up the slope toward my adult life, reluctantly leaving my first fifteen years behind me, on a beach I had never seen before.
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