My set-up and plan weren’t terrible, but each had fatal flaws. As a preface, just after I arrived I’d dropped my only flashlight into a tide-pool. Maybe I dropped it because I was distracted by the poetic urge to Beweep my Outcast Fate, like my poem suggests, but the only thought I can remember having was the "Oh shit" when I realized the light was taking on water. I repeated that imprecation when the sun sank below the horizon more quickly than I’d expected, and the billions of stars overhead didn’t brighten the beach in any way useful to a guy trying to operate twin stereo tape recorders from a log.

A more serious flaw still was the one I didn’t see at all. The stretch of foreshore where I’d set up shop was flatter than I’d realized, and the tide snaked up it more rapidly than I was prepared for. Cold, salty water was soon bumping aggressively against my log, and it wasn’t as stable as I’d have liked. I had just three safe minutes to make my recordings instead of fifteen. Before I could pack up and move to the higher log--perhaps this was when I paused to notice the White Snarl of the Breakers, or Love Slipping Away--the waves undermined one of the microphone tripods. I lunged to catch it as it teetered toward the salt water, my arm caught the strap of the Uher it was plugged into, and both the mike and the Uher made a brief, but terminal, visit to Davey Jones’ Locker.

I did rescue the other three microphones and the second Uher, and I even regrouped to record almost twenty minutes of perfectly usable surf ambiance later that evening. I did it by standing in the bone-chilling seawater up to my knees with the surviving tape recorder slung across my shoulders and two of the microphones held at arm’s length, still on their tripods, to obtain the maximum stereo effect. I half-rescued myself from a major fuck-up, in other words: half-fixed a bad situation I’d created through my own stupidity and inattention.

Thirty years later, I can see that this was a seminal moment in my life, one in which I’d acted characteristically: That little piece of slapstick-on-the-beach was me, then and today. I also note that as a writer, I failed the moment miserably. I wrote only a sappy nature poem about how many stars there are once you get clear of the cities, and how lonely and confusing it is to be in your late 20s and be attracted to every female you encounter who doesn’t have a horde of nose warts worthy of the Wicked Witch of the West. Those insights weren’t even news to me at the time, so why was I recording--and then for God’s sake publishing--them instead of delivering the deliciously revealing piece of slapstick I’d performed with the Uhers and the Pachena Bay tide?

The insights I might have gleaned from the slapstick had profound (and for me, permanently relevant) implications. They are, from the specific to the general:

2. The tides are caused by the moon’s gravity, not by ours;

3. Don’t run in the surf if you’re not prepared to get wet;

4. Don’t be stargazing unless you’re in a warm, dry location;