Huntington Pier

Posted on March 19, 2006 in Encounters

Mindy and Garth went to Huntington Pier with me Saturday afternoon. I felt woozy for no explicable reason and my ears froze in the wind. My left ear, near where I had had surgery on my neck, felt cold in the inner part of the floppy part, but numbed along the rim. Vertigo and acrophobia plagued me as we walked along the suspended, marine avenue.

Huntington is one of those long piers held up by leaning concrete pillars that never look especially stable to me. Give me straight wooden pilings any day: even if the best engineer aligns those huge rods so no big wave can ever dislodge them, if they don’t look straight, I don’t feel safe. My irrational mind believes that mussels at the tideline are a sign of rot. Each bivalve secrets acid or presses tentacles through the solid reprocessed stone. One jump by an acrobatic teenager in the wrong place and the whole construction falls flat into the shallows. Such is my panicky delusion.

Garth arrived late. Mindy and I stopped to talk to a fisherman who’d been reeling in foot-long sandsharks using squid for bait. He told us that he’d learned to tell the little kids that the fish he caught and kept were sleeping. Mindy leaned over the rail as he talked, but nerves kept me away from the side. I worried that I had not taken my morning medications. This hydroacrophobia (fear of water when suspended thirty or more feet above it) and the wind held me to the middle of the walk. I begged Mindy to go back. Enroute I showed her slight bulges that registered as a perilous height in my mind. I wasn’t over the top as far as my illness, but I didn’t wish to press it into a frenzy.

We met Garth on our way back and stopped to talk to a pair of techs who were installing a camera for Hollister, an Ohio-based chain which profits from selling a California beach cachet at premium prices. “They charge seventy, eighty bucks for a T-Shirt,” one of the fellows said to me. “Have you ever bought one?” he asked his partner.

“I never bought one,” said the partner.

“No one buys one,” said the first fellow. “Look. There’s a girl wearing one now.” We turned to see a chesty red sweatshirt on a seventeen-year old march past.

I was glad to get off the pier. As the green ocean reached its high tide and the sand rose to brace the slab, I felt my phobias being dragged off towards Catalina. We walked into a surf store and checked out the new cloths. Garth found a line of shorts that he swore no guy would ever wear. And we saw none on anyone.

When I got home from my trip, I checked my pills. Sure enough, I had not taken my morning meds. The last slot in the container — all the sleep-producing night meds — was empty. Ah-ha.