It's the ocean, again

[ritaxis]

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.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

That's so sad about the boy lost in the sea. I know he's not your boy, but any local death causes a ripple of sadness, especially when the victim is so young. With us, sadly, it's mostly car crashes that kill the teens. G lost one of his students last summer. But when my daughter was about 10, one of her classmates was swept away in the river and drowned. There is such a tremendous power in water and mostly we just don't realise it.

Re using the death of young people gratuitously in fiction, there's an interesting bit in David Lodge's How Far Can You Go? where he says (of the death of a small child in a road accident):

I have avoided a direct presentation of this incident because frankly I find it too painful to contemplate. Of course, Dennis and Angela and Anne are fictional characters, they cannot bleed or weep, but they stand here for all the real people to whom such disasters happen with no apparent reason or justice. One does not kill off characters lightly, I assure you, even ones like Anne, evoked solely for that purpose.

One of the things he's doing in that novel is seeing how far you can push the illusion of reality in fiction without actually breaking it completely, but I feel he has a point and I really hate it when characters are created just to be killed and the author seems to revel in their deaths.