Living is More than Work

It didn't happen right away.

I had to go back to the car for a second armful. As soon as we had our belongings on the beach, Trish left on a long walk with Sadie, while I immediately began tying rigs for my two surf rods. An eight-foot rod I created a simple bank sinker fluke rig for, and for an 11 foot rod I tied a circle hook to 30-pound leader material by snell and rigged fish-finder style. Killies for fluke. Fresh live surf clam for any black drum.

I got deeply absorbed in sitting back and watching the two rod tips closely set apart, the dimensions of shapely clouds overhead against deep blue sky of striking and unexpected interest to me. I'm certain this experience helped me get where I was going.

Some of the time I got up and tried casting for fluke, having cut off the three-ounce bank sinker and going with a couple of large split shot, but the only hit came after I got a killie way out there by that heavier weight and let it sit. I felt surprised, because it took awhile, and I figured peeler crabs would have got the bait.

I had wanted to sit and watch, rather than reel the rig in at the probable moment. I could have done more heaving of killies, but it wasn't too long before the wind shifted suddenly, blowing in from the northeast, temperature dropping drastically all at once, biting flies disappearing in an instant, and surf getting rough, but not very. I figured any fish might move in close. I wanted to be involved with working the bait, rather than letting it sit, though I could have cast the bank sinker and retrieved it by lifting it and letting it drop, though that would have felt heavy. Much of the time I cast a double-split shot weighted killie and let that sit. The split shots held bottom.

The sun getting low but not yet close to setting, this is when I reeled in the baits and took a walk, finding myself very focused in a relaxed way on what was right in front of me. After a hundred yards or more of this, I looked up and around me, and that's when it happened. All the garbage taken in day after day at work evaporated like magic. I was nothing but everything I saw and felt around me, feeling as free as I might ever want to feel. It's not that I was thinking of work at any time earlier during the outing. I hadn't thought of the place since the day before, when I was there. But I did think of my job at the supermarket soon after my defenses had fallen, and felt dismay that a shield came back up, though I went on thinking, realizing that--no doubt--when I'm finally done with stupid jobs, I will heal.

It might take only a day at that.

Stupid jobs, that is. I realized, as I often have, while heading back to our station on the beach from this walk, that writing is work. It's a job, too. I thought of something Ayn Rand wrote (The Ayn Rand Column) and detested her words. That people with "real" careers, or however she put it, don't like to go on vacations. All they really want is their work. She's some example, because she suffered her elder years depressed. I've inferred this from My Years with Ayn Rand, a memoir by Nathanial Branden, and I've also found Jeff Walker claims this explicitly in The Ayn Rand Cult. To do nothing but work is to miss the point of life. Because no work, including writing, is a sufficient end-in-itself. It should be obvious that work is a means to living. Living is more than work.

And I caught a fish today. They always look like a joke when they come into the wash. Skates. But I feel respect for any catch. Mine took a big bloody chunk of bunker I had cut with my Spanish War Knife. I had put it out near the end of our stay hoping for a bluefish, and though I would have much preferred a keeper fluke, or a bluefish like the one a friend caught on Island Beach the other day, or even better yet, a black drum, the only disappointment I felt about the state park was the 8:00 p.m. closing, though I came to quick terms with that.

As we packed to go, a tern dive-bombed for something right in front of us. We saw it come out of the water with a baitfish wriggling between its beak.

"That's a good sign," I said.

Trish said, "They're not leaving." A number of other people on the beach were clearly going to stay later. "You want to stay?"

"No. Let's stay within the law. We'll come back in September."

No restrictions then on staying into dusk


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