When I started writing this letter I was sitting on the beach. If I was writing a normal essay, I would probably have started by sketching pretty little scenes of beachside bliss. I’d mention the mountains with their receding snowcaps, the salmon jumping and glittering, the low brown heads of sea lions floating in the sound. What I would probably not focus on is the loud, screeching freight train within earshot. The train rumbles just over a bluff that protects the beach, carrying industrial cargo, specifically the wings and plastic-wrapped fuselages of Boeing jetliners waiting to be assembled at a factory. It is not statistically improbable that one of these planes, manufactured by Boeing, will one day take off and then immediately tumble back down to Earth. I of course don’t want that to happen. If it must happen, however, then maybe the plane could be completely empty, and spiral down so that it magically crashes on a specific building in a nation’s capital – preferably through the roof of a certain circular room. Such a thought makes me smile, here at the beach. But I wouldn’t put that in a normal essay!
I would also not write explicitly about the man who lives on the beach. He is something of a local legend. His house is a drab olive-green blanket tied around broken branches. The man only occasionally emerges, often to hang some laundry or wash himself in the ocean. But it’s a great shock when he walks about, mostly because he is always nude. Each time this happens I, along with possibly everyone else on the beach, am pummeled with a startling realization, one that sets everyone’s eyes darting wildly back and forth: