Scott D. McLean, MD

The onshore wind they call a stiff breeze. Here on the Gulf Coast, this comes in from the south and seems undiminished among the dunes where we are hunkered down for a couple of days. Certainly is different than Kamloops, but we love both.

How is it that my pronouns have shifted from the singular to the plural? Those who know me well can attest to my agreeable status as a confirmed bachelor, a he him kinda guy, but pronouns are the least scary of our contemporary labels. Even for a class B recreational vehicle like me, a late-model Ford Transit Trail who is considering wallpapering the garage with all of the recall notices that Big Daddy Ford keeps sending me. Yes, going with the plural since I am so close with my overlords, Paula and Scott, that we seem to have had a sort of mind meld. We have each other’s six. We finish each other’s sentences. We sit in silence at our ease, faces in the sea breeze.

Habeus corpus. Ubermench. Meshugana. How curious the spontaneous attractions of these  words. They swirl in our mind like flotsam in the whirlpool. Perhaps we can avoid that, but we still wonder how to swim against the tide. Now that’s pretty tough for me, cause even with my big tires I can’t do the backstroke. The kiddie pool is fine.

One of my drivers is re-reading “Basin and Range” by John McPhee. The prose is strong and inventive, a pinnacle of clarity, now all the more clear as we have lingered there, the mountain west, among the escarpments and jagged ridges thrust up through some fault of their own.

 An excerpt:

“We move on (we’re in a pickup) into dusk – north up Pleasant valley, with its single telephone line on sticks too skinny to qualify as poles. The big flanking ranges are in alpenglow. Into the cold clear sky come the ranking stars. Jackrabbits appear, and crisscross the road.”

On the beach at Port Aransas, the grains of sand whisper, “We once were mountains – and will be again.