Pulling Up Stakes

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We kids don't know much about the plan; we're not supposed to ask too many questions. If we do, my father will sigh, take a drag off his cigarette, and look away, disappointed again. It's not clear how much of the plan even my mother knows, though surely they have discussed it late at night after we have gone to bed. Perhaps it was these discussions that caused some of those muffled bangs and raised voices that seeped through the walls and into our bedrooms, infiltrating our dreams. We'd wake up in the morning to find a broken ashtray, the kid-size table turned upside down, chairs strewn about the living room as if left there by the tide.

Eventually we get all of our belongings into the truck, and the next day, after the boxes and furniture have been delivered to the friend's house, we kids are loaded into the back of the truck ourselves. My father has outfitted the camper as if it were a child's fort on wheels, with pillows and foam and sleeping bags, and we look out the windows as our city slips by.

Our first stop is a cold, foggy beach. My brothers and I are released from the truck like air from a tire, and we scatter to find driftwood for a campfire. We help pitch our five-person tent behind the dunes and out of the wind. Then we tighten the hoods on our blue sweatshirts and go to play tag with the thick, foamy surf. Signs warn of riptides, undertows, and sneaker waves, but we don't need signs to tell us we are not supposed to enter this water. Its danger advertises itself: Thick gray wedges curl into sharp peaks before smacking with a loud pop against the sloping beach. A chaos of churning white foam rustles through the pebbly sand and sneaks high up the beach. We run up, up, and away to the dry sand, where the thunder of the surf subsides, and we give in to gravity and geography and emotion, dropping onto that dark, pigeon-colored sand, faces to the sky. Back at the campsite, our parents are starting the stove and unloading food from the ice chest. We have no place to live, and no one, not even my father, knows where we are going next. But we have maps and sleeping bags and piles of comic books. We have flecked metal dishes-a different color for each of us-and a bulky can of kerosene. We have yelling and kicking and whispering. And we have this plan of my father's, to find Land.

And so we smile, my brothers and I, not at each other, but at the benevolent gray sky above us. And we move our arms and legs in slow, deliberate arcs through the sand, etching out the West Coast version of snow angels. Then we try to get up without smudging our wings.

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