Four Days at the Sea in August

Once a year I go down to the sea. A friend from the ski school has a flat near Tarragona and keeps asking, and I can't say no every year. The drive takes three hours and drops a thousand metres. My ears pop somewhere past the tunnel, and then the air turns heavy and smells of salt and hot parking lots.

I am not good at the sea. There is nothing to inspect. The waves do the same thing over and over without needing a torque value, and after twenty minutes of watching I catch myself looking around for something to tighten.

A Chair With a Loose Arm

On the second morning I found the lifeguard's wooden chair half-buried at the tideline, one arm wobbling. I had a screwdriver in the car — I always have a screwdriver in the car — and I fixed it before anyone asked me to. The lifeguard, a boy of maybe nineteen, watched me the way people watch a dog do something strange and useful.

Give me a broken hinge and I stop being a tourist.

In the water I lasted nine minutes. It was colder than the meltwater in the spring above Arinsal, which I did not expect, and I said so out loud to nobody in particular. Then I lay on the warm stones with my hat over my face and did the thing I am worst at, which is nothing, for about an hour.

At night the town was loud in a way Andorra la Vella never is. I walked out to the far end of the breakwater where the fishing rods stand, and sat, and listened to the water hitting concrete on a schedule I couldn't calculate. Apparently not everything has to be on a schedule. Only most things.

The sea keeps no maintenance log. I found that I minded, and then I found that I didn't.

I drove back on a Tuesday, up through the tunnels into the pines, and the temperature dropped eleven degrees in twenty minutes. At home I opened the window to let the cold in, because I had missed it, and set the old watch on the table and wound it, and slept like a man who has finally been handed a list.