The air is unseasonably hot for this stretch of northern California beach in June, where everyone expects the fog in summer to keep it cool. Then only the tourists are caught off-guard in their short shorts while the locals always carry sweaters in anticipation of the chill. This morning I am out walking RCA beach early and there is no fog; the view is clear for miles. The sun is up and I’m already sweating which is why I walk fast: I like to sweat. My body is tall and strong as I pick my way over rocks around bends where the tide, when it is in, consumes the beach, leaving no passage. For now the tide is low and leaves pools with pink edges and starfish, swaying circular fingers holding on tight that are like flowers and animals at the same time. There are tiny crabs, and kelp.
RCA is a wild, empty beach because it is so hard to reach. But I had walked easily across the meadow, then shimmied the steep rocky trail down to this place that mostly only townies know how to get to, and usually only surfers bother to hike the difficult path. Seven am, no surfers, one figure carrying a fishing pole walking toward me. I’m not even thirty (I’m young!) but there are times when I feel every step I’ve ever taken down rocky paths in the bones of my knees. This morning I don’t. I squeeze my flesh and think I should go on a diet, then assure myself this body cushions me as I move along the craggy beach, confident about my feet and knees, how strong I feel and take deep breaths and stop to examine a seashell that looks like a small breast, the way it curls to a center with a shining tip, the way it is round and so extravagant looking there in the sand.
The fisherman stops in front of me.
“There’s a body over there,” he says, and I look into his white bucket in which three silver sea bass float, eyes wide, not seeing. The man explains where the body is; he is on his way to call someone. He’s wearing hip waders, shuffling awkwardly with his gear, and does not say much except how surprised he was when as he was fishing he saw it from the water. He expected another dead seal or sea otter, he says, because of the size of the mound. But as he waded in he noticed this glinting off the surface of the water, then saw that the shining came from a ring on a woman’s hand.
“It’s not a pretty sight,” he says as he walks away. “You might want to turn around right here.”
I have walked on fire. I have no fear.
I keep going forward, in the same direction.
#
Five years earlier I went along as the photographer for my reporter boyfriend Lee when he was researching his Pacific Sun article on firewalkers. I was 25, maybe 24, and we were happy, in love, oblivious, laughing at the whole idea on the way over in the car.
“Any mother would tell her child not to walk barefoot over hot coals,” Lee said, and I agreed, walking on fire sounded like a crazy thing to do.
We sat there smug as the group gathered into a circle and we were told to introduce ourselves.
“I’m Jewel,” I began….
“Without words,” the leader ordered. I had to think about how to do that, and then I smiled and shrugged.
As the sun dropped behind Mount Tamalpais I listened and watched the others, and found I had to take my camera away from my face because Simone was not one of those silly New Age California types you hear so much about. We had joined a group of seekers not so different from us: reticent, easygoing men and women we liked on instinct. In the glow of everything Lee and I basked in our passionate love, arrogant, certain of our glorious future.
We all sat cross-legged in the dark around a blazing fire of hardwood and embers and Simone instructed us to write down our fears.
“The first part is to name your fear.”
Loving Lee, losing Lee.
“Next is to banish it.”
Simone told us to crumple the lists into tight balls and throw them in the fire.
I kept looking at my list – loving Lee, losing Lee – afraid to admit either possibility, then I watched the fears of the others shrivel into smoke, so I freely let mine go, too, up in flames.
Now, Simone raked the fire out from its neat round heap into a long bed of red coals, about ten feet from end to end.
“It’s five quick steps,” she said.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
“You have all that fear and you feel the heat for less than ten seconds. The fear is taking up more of your time than the thing you fear.”
#
My toes tighten inside my sneakers on the beach as the waves roll toward me. The sun has risen fully now over the steep cliff where sand and stones are ever-eroding, slipping down the hillside in a constant musical cadence much like the rhythm of the ocean that swallows the beach and reaches the cliff at high tide, twice a day.
Dead body? Here? On this beautiful beach?
#
Simone firewalking had slipped out of her shoes, stepped onto the hot bed of embers, and walked in a regular pace, five steps from end to end, across the coals.
Lee had declined, unconvinced, but I’d felt enlivened, bold, then fearless: I walked on fire.
#
I have no fear.
The corpse is face-up on the sand, seawater crashing around her feet and legs. Her clothes are torn; skin dry, purple, bruised; neck and arms twisted; deep gashes on her thighs; fists clenched. She’s blonde, around my age (!), and the look on her face, in contrast to the shape of her body, is serene. Her eyes are open, as calm as the fish in the fisherman’s bucket.
#
After firewalking everyone else had soaked their feet in big pails of cold water but my feet had felt fine as I made portraits of newfound friends. We all wrote declarations on index cards: “I have walked on fire. I can do anything.”
Mine is pinned to a bulletin board in my kitchen now but I want to turn around like the fisherman said and leave this woman to her fate in someone else’s presence, not mine. On the way home from the firewalking my feet felt burning hot. By the time Lee had driven us back home over the mountain, blisters had formed all over the soles of my feet, most painfully in the arches. I stoically stripped off my socks and said, “They’re just little blisters, they’ll be gone in the morning.”
But by morning I could barely walk.
#
The tide is coming in. The fisherman has not returned. The body is floating in and out on the waves.
#
I recall a Raymond Carver story where a group of men go on a weekend fishing trip and discover the body of a woman near the shore of the river, tangled in branches. Far from phones or civilization, having just driven a long way, they decide it’s not their problem; they’re tired; they have come to fish. The men play cards and drink whiskey; they sleep, wake, fish, drink, and eat; the dead woman remains in the river downstream from where they fish and they don’t report her death until the end of the weekend.
When the narrator’s wife hears the story she’s outraged.
“That woman needed you,” she tells her husband.
If I take no action, this body will be swept back and forth by the tide and she may be here when the fisherman returns with help or she may not.
I remember the morning in my childhood when my mother urged me to kiss my dead grandmother goodbye and how awful it was to learn how unyielding the dead are to touch, like stones or walls. How my blistered feet burned after firewalking, how painful it was to stand on the bottoms of my own feet, how Lee mocked me as I became an old lady who had to walk with a cane, leaning on that stick like a third leg.
#
I was fearless then. Now I am afraid.
Reluctantly, cautiously, then boldly, I touch her. Tenderly, I unwrap sea kelp from around the throat then dare to outline the lips with a fingertip. The skin is rubbery, strange, not alive; no blood pulses, but she’s not bones or ashes yet. I examine the ears: dried peach halves dehydrated by salt water. Diamond stud earrings, what will become of them? I fondle the gems then the face: bruised cheek, crushed forehead. The eyes stare; I stick my finger on her eyeball (peeled grapes) and no one blinks.
Do the wounds suggest she was killed then left on this remote beach to float unnoticed out to sea? Or did she get here on her own volition, by jumping off the famous bridge? The beautiful body has scraped past all obstacles and rests beside me here in the sand. Getting acquainted without words, I hold hands with the dead. As I imagine her life, I foresee my own future: high tides and crumbling losses. I come to know my own death.
Waves splash and spill foam so I slide my forearms under the shoulders to move her farther up on shore, but she is too heavy to move. Now I know the meaning of dead weight. The tide rides her hips. I don’t want the body taken by the ocean. She needs to be here to be found. I stay with her and wait.