BEACHCOMBER

Sometimes a humble stranger can have a lasting impact.

Photo by author

I look over my morning coffee at him, a stranger whom I have seen only twice before, both times early in the morning as we walked in opposite directions along the ocean shore. Now we sit together in a window booth of the Boardwalk Diner in the little coastal town of Rockaway, Oregon. The window frames the beach and breakers of the Pacific Ocean that stretches beyond them to the horizon.

Our first encounter was along a stretch of that beach. I was out for an early morning stroll, taking in the salty smells and rushing sounds of the pounding surf as I walked briskly on the hard-packed sand close to the water’s edge. He was walking more studiously up along the high tide line. I saw him pause every so often to pick up an object, examine it carefully, and either cast it back toward the ocean or put it in a cloth bag that hung loosely from the belt of his well-worn trousers.

I slowed my pace as we approached. We exchanged a smile and passed by in silence.

The next day when we again crossed paths during our morning strolls, I added a word of greeting. “Wonderful Day!” I shouted over the roar of the ocean. He smiled in return, adding a gesture that was half a wave and half a salute. Again, we continued on our ways.

This morning is our third encounter. My wife, the kids, and I had driven into town from our rental cottage a mile south on Highway 101. There was food to buy, and I promised a stop at our favorite diner with its majestic ocean view and its hearty “Timber Man” breakfast. After eating, the rest of the family sets out to shop, leaving me content to linger alone with my newspaper and a bottomless cup of the diner’s coffee. The waitress had just cleared away the remaining breakfast dishes when I look and see the stranger approaching on the boardwalk along the diner’s ocean-front side.

He catches me looking at him through the window, and I find myself, rather precipitously, motioning to him to come in, to join me, to have a cup of coffee. He stops mid-step, gives a small shrug, walks in the diner door, and sits down across from me.

“O.K.,” I say to myself as I now look across at him, ‘how am I going to handle this?  What are the other diners thinking about the drifter that I’ve just invited into their midst? And the diner staff, how are they going to react?  Have I just taken in - or been taken in by - the town panhandler?’ 

The waitress approaches. Well, I’ll soon find out what I’ve just done. I needn’t have worried.

“The usual, Art?”  He nods and smiles, and she heads off for a cup to fill from the coffee pot she carries with her almost as if it is a part of her anatomy at this time of the day.

Well, clearly Art is not unknown in town, I realize. My worry at embarrassing myself with diner staff and patrons is behind me but I still face what to say.

His coffee comes and we continue in silence as he doctors it up with cream and sugar. I consider the weather or his find-of-the-day along the beach as topics to launch a discussion. But he is the first to speak.

“They’re following me!” he declares.

I look quizzically at him. He reveals no outward signs of fear or concern. His features are relaxed, and his shaven but ruddy face displays no visible signs of annoyance. My only conclusion is that he’s on the lighter side of normal.

He interrupts my speculations by repeating again, “They’re following me.” This time he motions slightly with his head toward the window beside us. I follow his cue and as I do, I see three small blond and crew-cut heads bob down out of view. At that instant, I realize I know a lot more about this stranger than I had thought.

“Beachcomber!” I hear myself say softly.

“Yep,” he replies, not realizing, I suspect, that I am speaking to myself, not to him.

I try to recover. “Do you find this a good beach to explore?”

“’Bout like most,” he volunteers. “Pretty good weather along this part of the coast most of the year. But beachcombin’s always best after a storm.”

He has no hesitation, I realize, about passing along the tricks of his trade.

A man gets down from a stool at the diner’s counter and walks past us toward the door.

“Mornin, Art!” the man says. “Stop by the shop later today and see me if you can.”

“Will do, Woody,” Art replies.

“Who’s that?” I inquire.

“Woody’s the Rockaway barber,” Art answers. “I do ’im odd jobs, and he keeps me shaved and shorn.” 

Later I learned that Art was responsible for the well-kept planters in front of Woody’s barbershop. It was Art who collected and cultivated the assortment of coastal wildflowers – blue lupine, white Queen Anne’s lace, crimson columbine, and reddish-yellow Indian paint brush - that bloomed for Woody from early spring through late summer.

“You’re pretty popular around here,” I say, realizing immediately that my sampling consists of only a waitress and a barber.

“Been comin’ ‘bout every summer since I got back from ‘Nam,’” he says. “Nice people, the folks that live here regular. I do jobs for the summer folks as well. They pay best. But it’s the beach I love. Always something new out there!  Beachcombin’s not what people think it is. Most folks don’ have the time for it anyways.”

“Right,” I say, and ask about the three young boys. “Are they an annoyance? Do they bother?”

“Nah, they’re right smart. Second summer they’ve come here with their folks. Run into ‘em every day, jus’ ‘bout. Curious, tha’s all. Sometimes I catch ‘em doin’ mischief and need’a shoo ’em off.  Never do no real harm though.”

I smile. Then I begin to recall for Art another beachcomber who had roamed these same beaches years before.

***

That beachcomber arrived in my life with a tap on the back door of my grandmother’s ocean-front beach cottage.  It was toward the end of one lazy afternoon a few idle days after my mother, sister and I, along with my aunt and my two cousins, had arrived from Portland to spend our summer vacation on the Oregon coast. At the time, in the late 1950’s Oregon, I was no more than ten years old, my sister about seven, and my two older cousins in their early teens.

It was Grandmother who opened the door, exchanged greetings, and stepped out on the back kitchen porch to talk. From our vantage point at the kitchen table where we were assembling a picture puzzle, we could only catch fragments of a conversation which we sensed was about food. Shortly, Grandmother came in to retrieve one of the two pies she had baked that day and set out to cool. For an instant we caught sight of a man about my father’s size and age.

Mother was the one who asked, “Who was that, Nelly?”

“A beachcomber,” Grandmother replied. She said no more, and her two daughters-in-law seemed to understand and sought no further explanation. 

We kids had been instructed not to inject ourselves into adult conversations uninvited.  Grandmother’s rule! Even when Father left work and drove out from Portland to spend weekends with us at the beach, he still deferred to Grandmother and we were expected to comply with her instructions. It was later when we were alone with Mother readying ourselves for bed that we could seek a fuller explanation about the stranger at the door.

“What’s a beachcomber?” my sister said, saving me the need to display my ignorance.  “And why was he at our house?”

“A beachcomber is a collector,” she explained. “He looks along the beach to see what the ocean has washed up. You kids are beachcombers too, when you go collecting shells. That’s all it is. A few people, like that man, hunt along the beach for things they can sell, or trade for something to eat. The man who came to our door today had some interesting things he found on the beach. Your grandmother exchanged one of her pies for a few of them.”

“Will he come again?” we asked almost in unison.

“Your Grandmother Nelly did say he was looking to do odd jobs. So, maybe so.”

Beachcomber did come again, regularly over the summer, sometimes with something to sell, sometimes to do some clean-up or patch-up chores around the cottage and the yard. And when he came, he always surprised us with treasures he discovered washed up on our shores. We marveled at his unblemished volcano-shaped limpets, and whole electric blue mussels and delicate razor clam shells of which we kids were only successful in finding fragments in the sand.

One day he brought a large piece of fishnet he found wrapped around some gnarled driftwood. Grandmother hung it swag-like across the top and down the sides of the cottage’s oceanfront window and into it she hung the expanding collection of marine specimens Beachcomber brought us.

Among the most sought-after treasures to discover along our stretch of beach were Japanese glass fishnet floats. These fragile hollow round balls had torn loose from Japanese fishermen’s nets a world away, explained Grandmother. They had drifted for months, even years, in the Japanese ‘Kuroshio’ ocean current, before they washed ashore along Oregon’s coast at the end of their nearly 6,000-mile Pacific journey. Transparent green, blue, or amber, the most common floats were the size of baseballs. Very occasionally, one as large as a basketball would reach our shores. 

By the time they arrived on the capricious ocean currents, these hand-blown glass balls were dull and opaque and hard to detect, hidden buried in the mounds of kelp seaweed that accompanied them to shore. Beachcomber had a special eye for finding the glass floats and the patience to polish and restore their gleaming shine. Over the summer several of these exotic crystalline balls found their way into our fishnet window display. 

Beachcomber brought more than just exotic beach finds into our lives that summer. He helped us do our chores, clearing weeds and cutting back the sharp, waist-high dune grasses that encroached along the narrow pathway that led from our cottage down to the soft sandy shore.  He also trimmed back the leathery-leaved salal shrubs that competed with the huckleberry bushes; he attached dangling gutters and re-stained the weathered yard furniture. Beachcomber, a soldier in the Second World War he told us, proved very handy at the tasks Grandmother assigned.

Asthma and an irregular heartbeat had spared Father from active duty during the war. He never put on a uniform but put in his time at the Portland shipyards, as foreman of a crew that assembled merchant marine cargo ships to supply the U.S. Navy’s Pacific fleet. My uncle, who had just completed medical school, married and started a family, postponed his medical practice to join the army medical corps and go off to war. He never returned.

Grandmother had another rule. No mention of The War in her house or around her. Ever! The war had taken one of her sons and she would not dignify it by discussion. This dictum was hard for us kids to follow. In the 1950’s, reminders of the war and war heroes were everywhere - in comic books, in magazines, as toy soldiers on the dime store shelves. All of these were banned from Grandmother’s cottage and, to the extent she could control us, from our summer activities. The sand dunes and tall beach grasses provided wonderful settings for playing war, but such re-enactments had to take place far from Grandmother’s sight and hearing.

Outwardly, Beachcomber had a quiet somber manner that led others to believe he was hard and insensitive. As his constant summer companions, we knew him differently. 

One early summer morning as we cousins headed from the cottage down to the beach, we saw a small crowd of people gathered around something on the sand just above the water line. We approached and pushed our way into the human circle to where we could see. In the middle of the crowd was a large black bird, a cormorant. The bird had a broken wing which dangled limply at its side as it lay crouching and subdued on the sand. 

In the air, these graceful creatures amaze with their arrow-like dives into the sea to snag their “catch-of-the-day.” On warm afternoons we could see through Father’s binoculars the colonies of cormorants on the distant cliff-side ledges of the rocks that loomed up just off shore, their wings spread out like dark angels holding vigil over the churning surf below. Unlike other seabirds, Father explained, they lacked sufficient oil in their feathers to retard the water and literally had to dry themselves out in the sun and breeze after diving for dinner.

Injured and washed up on shore, this majestic bird, up close, looked both pitiful and grotesque. Its soggy and disarranged feathers were a mess and from its craggy and mottled head extended a hook-tipped beak along which were rows of vicious-looking teeth-like ridges. The cormorant’s disposition matched its appearance. It would have nothing to do with the well-wishers who attempted to inspect its injuries and administer aid. Instead, it struck out defiantly at any hand or foot that approached within its reach.

Finally, after much mumbling among members of the gathering, a consensus began to form around one troubling proposal.

“Put it out of its misery!” we heard someone say. Two young men stepped forward and, while one waved his arms to distract the bird, the other slowly circled around behind its back, an open pocketknife in his hand ready to lunge.

Suddenly, there was a jostling in the crowd and we saw Beachcomber break his way through. He quickly threw his open burlap collecting bag over the unsuspecting creature to subdue it and gathered it up in his arms. As he stood and headed up from the shore some in the crowd reacted with dismay and disappointment, cheated, we supposed, of their chance to see a more dramatic ending to the event.

“No way you can help that critter,” said one.

“Well, we know what you’re going to have for supper,” shouted someone else.

We kids also wondered what Beachcomber would do. “Where are you taking it?” one of us shouted as we ran to keep up with him.

“To your place,” was his reply.

“Grandmother won’t let you do that,” we warned, excited but worried that the bird would be no more welcome at our cottage than it was among the crowd on the beach.

“We’ll see,” he said.

We ran on ahead to alert Grandmother to what was coming, and just as we predicted her reaction was swift and strong. “Not here! He’s bringing no wild creature here!” she proclaimed.

Beachcomber entered the sandy front yard of our cottage, and we readied ourselves for the show of wills that we were sure was about to take. He approached and stood at attention in front of Grandmother as she towered above him on the porch landing.

“Got a wounded soldier here,” Beachcomber declared as he held his squirming bundle. “Needs some patching up!”

Fearlessly or foolishly, Beachcomber had invaded Grandmother’s emotional minefield. She at first was silent, almost shaking, we could see. We waited paralyzed, certain that Grandmother was about to explode. She stared directly down at Beachcomber, his disheveled young troops and the bundle in his arms. Then her head rose and her gaze seemed to focus above us and, for a long moment, toward the beach and beyond it to the ocean and horizon.

Finally, abruptly and to our bewilderment, she adopted the stance and voice of a commanding officer, shouting orders from the porch railing in rapid succession.  

“Over there, on the picnic table!” she pointed over our shoulders. “We can see to it there.”

“Girls,” she commanded Mother and my aunt, “grab that white beach towel from the clothes line! Spread it out on the table!  Get some gauze and tape from the medicine chest! And some iodine if you can find it!”

“Children,” she glowered down at us, “look for some sticks! Not too long, and as flat as you can find.”

Our yard quickly took on the appearance of a makeshift army field hospital. Grandmother and Beachcomber bent over the broken creature like surgeons, one firmly holding the belligerent beak to prevent its moving while the other wrapped the wood splints in place with gauze and tape. Our mothers brought water and disinfectant to cleanse the open wound of dirt and sand where the wing bone had protruded through the skin. We cousins stood by as surgical orderlies cleaning up any mess on instruction from the attending physicians.

An abandoned rabbit hutch under the eaves of the cottage became a temporary recovery room where for the next few days the bird sat subdued and motionless, incapacitated by the splint and harness that strapped the broken wing to its side. It showed little response to Grandmother’s nursing and to Beachcomber’s daily efforts to feed it by dangling live minnows in front of its beak.

We began to fear that starvation might finally do it in. Beachcomber was more confident. “Them birds can go a long time not eating,” he assured.

Then one morning a week or so later we went out to find the cormorant standing erect in its cage.  Its feathers had dried, restoring a measure of its former dignity. Grandmother and Beachcomber no longer needed to coax it to eat. It ravenously devoured just about any scraps of fish or meat they poked through the wire chicken mesh of its cage.

“It’s eating. It’ll recover now,” said Beachcomber.

A few more weeks passed, and with only small resistance from the bird Grandmother and Beachcomber replaced the wood splints and binding with a less constraining bandage. “The wing bone is setting well,” Grandmother said. We could sense in her voice a note of pride in hers and Beachcomber’s medical handiwork.

Finally, one morning toward summer’s end we awoke to find the door to the rabbit hutch open and our feathered patient gone. 

“The bird’s back free,” Beachcomber explained later that day. “It can get by on its own now.”

A few days later Beachcomber came to announce he was leaving as well. “Summer’s near over,” he said. “I’m headin’ north. The salmon are running and there’re good-payin’ jobs at the canneries. Maybe again next summer ...” And he was gone.

And so, our beach vacation ended as it had begun, in empty idleness.

***

Art had sat in silence listening to my tale of a beachcomber who walked these same ocean shores a generation before him.

I begin to wonder what he’s thinking about me, who at first was at a loss for words and then opened the gates of his childhood memories.

He stands to leave. “Be on the beach in the mornin’?”

“I suppose.”

“Come early! I’ll show ya a stretch that’s always got good stuff washed up. Most folks don’ know ‘bout it. Thanks for the coffee.”  He gives me a half salute and heads out the diner door. As I watch him stroll off down the boardwalk, I see the three blond-haired heads emerge from the crowd of vacationers and tag along behind.

My coffee is now stone cold, and the newspaper no longer holds interest. My thoughts are on tomorrow morning and walking the high tide line with Beachcomber.