Thalassophile or Logophile

Can I be both?

Standing at the trailhead atop Cascade Head amid fields of wild blackberries and elk pellets, I cried. It was hard to explain why, except that I mumbled to Mark how the river and sea, dancing in the sun, and the sands they teased out, were unreachable, indestructable to only themselves. If a part of our lands and waters remained untouchable like this, there was a part of us that did as well.

Could I locate that in me again?

I was twenty-six when, with exuberance, I first greeted the Pacific waters of the Oregon Coast. At twenty-eight, that same patch of ocean returned the favor, bestowing on me a bit of car sickness while my eyes glazed over rollicking waves, viewed from the back of a swerving van. I neared thirty years of age, unaware of a life rollicking in me, when I agreed to commit wholy to the sea.

Those instances continued.

Atop the cliffside now, one memory returned fully to me.

My husband, Devin, had been living on the coast for weeks. Passing through the Three Capes Loop, I stopped the car. Below us, Cape Lookout’s thick strands of beach fended off bay and sea. I too warded off my timidity. I began to believe. In what? Before knowing I was pregnant, I wanted to hang glide, soar, from that launching point. Alone at night, with only the sounds of deer chomping on brush below our home, I felt stirred to write. And I was convinced I had found me—that part that had remained out of reach.

A fire burned in my soul that could only be quenched with water, and a certain salinity.

I possessed a desperate thirst to see water, to be upon it or near it. Growing up near Lake Erie, I rode my bike five miles to the beach and drove past the cool blue lake every day to reach my father’s shoe store. Moving further south, sometimes the Ohio River sufficed to quench. In Blue Mind, Michael Merzenich says, “If you want people to care about the water, take them to the beach….do it twenty or thirty times…because each time, they’re going to incorporate their positive feelings about it into the person that they are.”

This past September, an antsiness grew like a tsunami inside of me, until finally it crashed as I landed on the Pacific’s shore. Rest hit me. Calm and clarity too. I always saw a more clear reflection of who I was in the ocean, than who I might be in the mirror.

It’s taken me all of 25 years to come to know this term as a thalassophile, a lover of the sea. I could not exist without some nearness to it. And I would trade most of my life for it.

In fact, I had, but it had been so long since I wrote deeply of that place which called to me. I longed to reach back to that particular writer—one who technically no longer existed. What would drive me back to the person who thought she was untouchable? How would I, in a sense, attain that level of competence, to more or less attain an “individual studies” degree in writing as a thalassophile?

My abiding love for the Oregon Coast was not completely about my love for Devin, for Davis, for the times my sisters and friends occupied the driftwood log beside me and sung out of tune songs around a sizzling fire, or even for smoky, peaty pinot noirs consumed and twisting trails traversed with my favorite adventurer, Mark, at my side. My love for that shoreline was about a love for me. For the person I allowed myself to be.

Arriving at the coast as a fresh-faced twenty-something, my neighbors were loggers and fisherman. The opposite of the go-go tech world I had left behind, the cornucopia suburbia had offered to us and we absentmindedly absorbed. I had no real world experience living next to those with such vastly different life goals. They cared about beauty in preservation and survival as of a way of life. Hair? Hardly. During our most recent trip, I went an entire week without washing my mane. It’s healthier than ever thanks to its absorption of sea salt air, the occasional sea kelp accidentally rubbed into it, and my dose of proteins fresh from the sea.

When, daily, you stand at the base of scarred bluffs, where homes easily fall under the spell of the ocean and the storms can roll you over at the drop of rain, all else crumbles away. Amidst that education in rugged, rural, coastal living, I could only hope for a small life.

Once you lose access to this magnificence, what you learn when facing such raw splendor again is how you will give up everything. That also includes the thing that makes you a writer. That tacit agreement made within yourself. Because, despite pitches and subs and agents chased, and the sagas and essays, and poems and pithy quotes birthed, once they’re outside the writer’s womb, they are no longer of you. Not in the same way the water is of you, and you are of the water.

This is of course a pipe dream. A writer can no more turn off their spigot of words than the ocean can stop the relentless drumbeat of its waves.

Can you inhabit it all, chase a larger dream, one that turned you on in those years you were untouchable? One that touched something deep inside of you, where an ounce of sea foam snuck into your crannies or a dragon toe of a barnacle clung to your life? One that lets you return to being this person of the coast, that gives you permission to write the story you imagined, but were never strong enough, good enough, until maybe just now, the sea gods consulted with the writing gods, and gave you permission.

For a few years after I left that coast, I prayed to go back. The response was always, “not yet.” What if the time is now, to return, not in body, but in soul? Where the writer lives, so too does the thalassophile. Even the beloved Jane Austen wrote in Sanditon, her unfinished novel, “…no person could really be in a state of secure and permanent health without spending at least six weeks by the sea every year. The sea air and sea bathing together were nearly infallible.”

What if it took me the span of my life to produce one work that answered for all the rest, before the universe claimed me too? Wouldn’t that be the best little life?

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Coming into a busy fall, there’s plenty of offerings to keep you moving forward in your writing, and life, plus one foodie event on the books (see below).

October

During the week of October 16th, I’ll be presenting I’ll Have Some of Yours (the long-delayed book tour has begun) at various Promedica/Arden Courts locations around Cleveland. Visit my website for specific locations.

October 21

REGISTER NOW. Limited seating. The Italian American Museum in Little Italy, Cleveland, will host Waking the Ancestors (through story), a two-hour writing workshop to explore our Italian American ancestry that has informed and inspired who we are. If you have a writer in the family in the area, encourage them to sign up.

October 21

The Mercantile Library presents one of my favorite authors, Erik Larson, for its annual Niehoff Lecture. You might recall Erik from one of my earliest COVID blogs, inspired by mantelpieces and pansies. Read more here.

November 4 - Confluence of Craft Workshop

Join me, along with my writing partner, Tina Neyer, as we co-lead a day of filled with lectures, exercises and time devoted to the craft of writing. Our location overlooks a beautiful bend of the Ohio, just enough to stretch your imagination. Time: 9 - 5 p.m. Cost $200.00. Email amjwick@gmail.com or tina.neyer@gmail.com for details and sign up information.

November 8

Pauletta Hansel and I again are offering our quarterly FREE, virtual caregiver writing experiences, through Giving Voice Foundation. Next up, Nov 8 from 10-12 p.m. Learn more or register here.

SAVE THE DATE: November 19

In time to prep your appetite for Thanksgiving, I’m partnering with a local restaurateur and wine shop for a sip and storytelling event. Check back here for details on signups!