Pacific 15 comments

By Kelly Foster

About eight years ago, my father was heavily sedated after undergoing an operation to correct a deviated nasal septum. My mother and I sat on the opposite side of the room from his bed, reading while he slept.

When he awoke, he looked over at us, and asked me in a groggy voice:

“Kel, have you ever seen the Pacific Ocean?”

“No, Dad.”

He proceeded to ask me three more times. I proceeded to tell him no three more times. And then he fell back asleep.

When he awoke the second time, seemingly more lucid, he asked my mother if he had said anything strange.

“Well,” she told him, “you did ask Kelly if she’d seen the Pacific Ocean.”

Rather than laugh at himself, my father simply replied with absolutely no sense of irony, “Well, has she?”

I don’t know why my father, so close then to his subconscious mind, was so concerned about my having seen the Pacific Ocean unless he had already perceived what I was not ready to know at the time: I was utterly miserable.

I had married young to a man who did not love me. I had stayed close to Mississippi, a state for which I’d only ever felt ambivalence. I was teaching at a school I absolutely abhorred. I’d never traveled to Europe. I’d never been on a road trip alone. I was 24 years old. I was stuck. And I had never seen the Pacific Ocean.

But a lot can happen in eight years.

I have seen the Pacific Ocean—from Oceanside to Monterey to Washington State. I’ve seen it from underneath a waterfall on the Na Pali Coast. I’ve been to Europe twice. I’ve sat on the roof of my communist bloc flat on many an evening and watched the sun set over the twelfth-century rooftops and cathedral domes of a beautiful Slovak village. I’ve driven through Shenandoah, Yosemite, the Mojave Desert, the Hudson Valley, Canada, California’s 101, New Mexico, Colorado. I’ve learned to navigate the Rockies, the Sierras, Blue Ridge, Alleghenies, and Cascades.

I’ve climbed Moro Rock through pea-soup fog. I’ve hiked the frozen white birch forests of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. I’ve slept outside in minus 10 degree weather on the Berkshires’ Mohawk Trail. I’ve watched each season arrive and depart from the shores of Walden Pond. I’ve eaten fresh-caught lobster just outside Acadia National Forest while the sun dipped before me brilliant and red. I’ve prayed in Chimayo. I’ve ambled down Bleecker Street. I’ve been barefoot in Times Square. I’ve collected chanterelles in Oregon. I can navigate any public transportation system in the world without a hiccup.

I’ve become so accustomed to the peripatetic life of my last five or six years that I occasionally forget that there was really once a time in my adult life when I never thought I’d see the things I’ve seen.

I took my first solo road trip about a month after my divorce proceedings began. I drove from Virginia to North Carolina to visit friends. It was crisp and January. I’d been snowed in for five days before by a bad ice storm. I got on the highway. Then all of a sudden, there was Shenandoah, clean and resplendent. I pulled the car over on the empty shoulder of the road. For twenty solid minutes, I sat stunned by what I saw and for the first time, I knew in my bones that I never had to be where I’d been again. I never had to sit in an empty apartment waiting for a husband that would not come home. I didn’t have to attempt to mend anyone or attempt to believe unbelievable excuses. There was simply Shenandoah. And all that silence. And me.

Long before my marriage and divorce, my parents and I used to take walks around the neighborhood at dusk. Often they’d talk about my future. My dad would always caution me to travel, to do what I wanted before I got married.

I didn’t follow his advice back then. Perhaps I should have. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I had.

But even if it’s come late to me, I’m so incredibly thankful for the grace of these years—for the beauty that’s broken me and the beauty that’s built me up. I’ve come to love the America I’ve seen, and I think the best of America is so like the best of my father—always warm, always honest, always willing to forgive, always open to adventure and to new faces, always ready to embrace.

If I ever have a daughter, I will walk with her at dusk. I will tell her to see the world before she gets married. I will tell her not to pin herself down before she really wants to.

I will tell her to see the Pacific Ocean.

I have.