I was in Santa Monica, Calif., for a day last week, sampling baked figs at the farmers' market on the Third Street Promenade, a sweet, sunny day that makes an old Midwesterner like me a little nervous. We fear seduction. Some days in California are so tender and delicious that a person could abandon all commitments and wind up living in blissful stupor in some cult devoted to the worship of the sky.
I have work to do. I haul it around in a black case the size of an anvil, and when an hour or two opens up, in an airport or hotel, I dig in. I don't lie on beaches, looking up at the sky. It's blue in Santa Monica. You don't have to look at it for long to figure that out.
My hotel was on the beach, so I headed back that way, crossing the Pacific Coast Highway on a pedestrian bridge. And there, 50 yards south of me, police cars and flashing blue lights. The northbound lanes of the PCH had been closed. A car sat in the middle lane, its rear end smashed in brutally. And south of it, a yellow tarp spread on the pavement. A body lay beneath it.
Then eight cops and EMTs lined up on either side of it, like pallbearers, and then they spread out a long white sheet that they held as a screen while the yellow tarp was pulled away and a police photographer took pictures with an enormous camera. A man in a dark suit bent over the body, studying it closely. The eight men stood quietly, hardly moving, and they looked straight at each other. They did not look at the body. It was a still-life scene, except for the flashing lights and the southbound traffic passing: eight men standing at attention, guarding a body, and two men moving with great delicacy around it, gathering evidence.
A blue sky over Santa Monica, and on the beach people lay on towels, sunning themselves. A few swimmers in the surf. Inline skaters out on the sidewalk and joggers, grunting about the presidential campaign. A day in which you've witnessed death takes on an aura of fragile loveliness. You breathe the salt air and you savor this on behalf of the dead and note the pencil-line delicacy of the long cane poles of the Japanese fishermen on the pier, the two triangles of white sail taut with wind on the distant boat, the skinny boy in blue trunks swinging high on the flying rings on the beach and soaring to the next set of rings. You see the portly man wade into the water and shudder and you feel it, the shudder of mortality. And visions of the fallen one stay with you.
