It's the ocean, again

This was not a boy I knew well. But he was a member of Emma's band, and I had conversed with him, helped him with his uniform, watched him joking and watched the girls from the color guard capturing him and painting his face (he didn't object: it meant that several girls were paying intense attention to him for fifteen minutes). Charley played the drums. He was a freshman in high school. He disappeared while body surfing -- I don't know any more than that. The waves have been pretty high most days lately, which is why they've been crowded with surfers and kayakers and cormorants.

Three years ago it was Shalimar, a bright and lively tenth-grader, washed off the rocks during a storm. From day to day, the ocean here seems so benign -- the giver of life, the home of the kelp forest and the sea otter and the big sea lions that bark all night. Not that I don't get the creeps when the tide comes in while I'm standing on a narrow strip of beach. Not that I don't take the warnings on the cliffs seriously. But it's only when a beautiful young life goes down in the waves that I really think about its other side.

You can't tell them to stay away from the water. It's the most beautiful thing we have (which is saying something, around here). But it's impossible to be all right with them being lost in the waves.

Look, this isn't my tragedy, all right? I'm not the mother of a boy who's here one day and not here the next. I can sit here and write about it as if it were a story I was crafting.

Though I damn well object when writers do this -- toss off a child just to drive home the power of the ocean.