Jade Cove

First published in October Hill Magazine, spring, 2022

The cold-water stabs at Rico, penetrating his bones. Wind chops, bites, and claws at his face. The unfamiliar coastline of the Pacific digs out the survival in him. As he floats south with the currents, he drifts back to himself as a child of 12, treading the same trail every day to Don Hilario's vineyard. Back then, he found his endurance by listening to the melody of the ocean, but today, a much louder drum beat down on him:

crash, boom, roll

crash, boom, roll

crash, boom, roll

Just an hour ago, Rico was a shipmate aboard a vessel growing “the empire on which the sun never sets,” and now, he found himself a castaway, among the ravaging waves of the sea, lost to fend for himself.

The day of the wreck was September 29, 1519, when the Castilian vessel, El Buscador ran adrift in the cold, misty fog en route to the Yucatan peninsula on a colonial mission for Spain. Rico and Alex, young lads in their early twenties, were commissioned to work on El Buscador, one of the ships assigned to the overseas expansion of Castile under royal authority by Spanish conquistadors. Unlike today, the Lost Coast of old Mexico (California) had no lighthouses for ships, skirting the coast to the South in search of El Dorado. The ship smashed into the rocky Willow Point, breaking the hull open, casting the men ashore, and leaving Rico to fight for his life in the rugged surf.

With a small lull in the battering waves, Rico hangs on to a piece of the hull and keeps his head up. He wonders how Alex fared in the crash and keeps a squinty eye out for his shipmate, but the current tugs him South away from the wreckage. With legs growing numb, he recalls those daily trips to the vineyard to work on Don Hilario’s estate, harvesting grapes and carrying the wooden jugs full of acerbic Spanish grog. To Rico, it was all vinegar, but his father swam in it. His father would repeat every morning,

“Rico, my son, remember to bring me a globe of wine.”

"Si, padre, por seguro."

Fearing the threat from his father, Rico would lament day after day. He would walk along the warmer Atlantic shore dreading another long day, picking, and packing at the estate. Sometimes he would walk along the black mossy rocks, jumping from jagged rock to rock, and other times on the smooth sand. Once, he picked up a greenish-black mussel shell, grotesquely mossed over on one side, but when he turned it over, it radiated a hologram of rainbow colors that made him hopeful. He held the shell up to the light in front of the horizon and heard:

The color of me is in the sea…

Wonderful music reverberated with the beat of the waves, crashing, and rolling on his feet. The sound of his father's voice would drown out. To his left, mussels aggregated on the rocks with a desperate swinishness for space. On his right, however, a symphony of discovery called him, where he escaped into possibilities beyond his 12 year-old mind. He heard more hypnotic chants:

when you don’t watch me

I send ground swells your way

pulsing my waves

like a young heartbeat

timed to pounce on your shores

a steel pulse beating the earth’s drum

to the rhythm of the tides

undulating in northern and southern hemispheres

Wave by wave, lyrics from afar would roll in. Barrel after barrel of

the sound would break as they crashed on the shore.

when I don’t hear from you

I crash onto your jagged, rocky reefs

rattling your beaches like mini quakes

howling winds and whipping sand

into your ears

sticking to your wax

engraining your soul

when you don’t taste me

I concentrate my tears

salting the sea more

parching your tongue

with a bubbly stew of sea

when you don’t touch me

I spring forth my living waters

and shine forth God’s light

through fanned-out pinwheel waves

unraveling my spirit

stored up in the deep

and when you don’t sail my seas

I always show you what you are missing

Still, adrift, the numbness creeps up to his waist. He kicks hard to avoid hypothermia. He scans the shore in search of sand but sees no gold on the shore, only whitewash hitting the rocks. As swift as the currents changes directions, he drifts back into his past again, this time, on a fateful day that changed the course of his life. One day when he arrived to work a few minutes early, he ran into Alex waiting for the gates of the estate to open for the day. Alex is waiting mischievously.

“Rico, I’ve been waiting for you. I found a few barrels of wine stored around the back of the barn that were left out of the stables. Why don't we take one of these to your father once a month instead of you swindling a jug a day? There have to be 20-30 jugs in a barrel…"

Rico laughs. “Eres loco. How will we do that, dumb burro?”

“No problem, we can run-roll it down the beach! It’ll be fun,” Alex exclaims.

He continues, “We can bail out of Church early on Sunday while the landlords are in mass and come back here and ride a barrel to your house and hide it in your backyard."

The boys' hometown Galicia is the burial place of Saint James the Greater and is a holy place where all must attend Sunday mass unless they are sick or invalids, so the boys must attend church with their parents. They ask their parents if they can pass Bibles out to the invalids in the town who can't attend Church. Impressed with their boy's community servitude, the parents agree. So, the boys run over to the back of the stable and find the dusty wine barrels leftover in the back.

"Rico, let's tip this barrel over and roll it down to the beach. Then, we can run on it to your house." Alex bravely suggests.

“Let’s do it. If we roll it on the sand, it will have some cushion for the journey.” Rico adds.

“Come here, Rico. Push up on this corner.” The boys both take a deep breath and push up under the iron metal rim. The barrel shifts slightly but doesn’t teeter over.

Rico springs into action and finds a hoe in the stable.

“Let’s lay the hoe in front of the barrel, wedge the barrel in the dirt, and push it over the hoe from the top.” The boys push, pull and push harder. After ten seconds or so, the barrel creaks and tips over, hitting the ground hard and making a small cracking sound like wood splitting, but stays intact somehow. They roll it down the hill and into the sand.

Alex jumps on the barrel like a Jinete de Toros and balances slowly, stepping forward, rolling it along, and shuffling slowly. He falls off into the sand and gets up again. After a few attempts, he seems to get the hang of it.

“Rico, get up here and try barrel-running. “Eres un Jinte de Toro.” Once again, Rico obliges his friend as he does his kin. “Okay, hold it still for a while until I get the hang of it”

He jumps up and slightly bends his knees, curling his toes over the rusty rail and taking slow steps backward, propelling the creaky barrel forward a few feet.

“You’re a natural.” Alex encourages. Rico picks up the pace and rolls off the balls of his feet smoothly like a Flamenco dancer gracing the floor in reverse. Rico breathes in the salty air and hears:

The color of me is in the sea

“Estas bailando…you are dancing, my friend.” Alex rejoices. Rico keeps rolling along. He shuffles to the sound of the set waves reverberating across the beach.

Escaping the confines of the Church, they freely barrel-roll, surfing the Spanish sand and undulating the dunes foot by foot toward Rico’s house until he loses his balance and rolls over the front of the barrel, slamming his right cheek into the warm unforgiving sand.

Smacked by a cold Pacific wave, Rico comes out of his memory of that day as a youngster gallivanting freely. With his right cheek stinging with brutal cold, he realizes he was knocked off his floating piece of hull. The oak wood from the hull reminds him of the same wood from the barrel he stole with Alex. He finally stops drifting and anchors himself on a thick bed of golden-brown kelp outside a brilliant cove illuminating a radiant green. With little feeling in his hands and a heavy head, he strains to locate sand on the beach, scanning with blurry vision, a safe place to beach himself. He keeps his narrow sight focused on the small cove and drifts in and out of consciousness as he floats closer and closer to shore. The ocean currents finally release him up onto the sand. With some relief, he lifts his head, rests it against the sand, and slips into unconsciousness.

Elusively, a young native woman with bright white feathers, cascading her long brown hair, scales down the cliffside. She has five wolves beside her- two ahead of her, two behind her, and one right next to her as they guide her down the treacherous mountainside. The mystical girl hypnotically weaves her wolf catcher side to side, calling the wild beasts to come to her. She dances as they weave through her chant. She raises her spear to the ocean calling out to the hawk soaring over them as if speaking to the red raptor without words. The large bird swoops lower and circles directly over the seaman’s head and returns to the cliff tops.

The mysterious woman sees Rico, a curious seafarer with short, treacherous, and salt-crusted blond hair. She wonders if he is a pirate like the other swashbucklers, she has seen sail by her enchanted cove. She doesn’t know about his history of the derailment, working with the conquistadors in search of El Dorado. He had been sailing with the Spanish vessels since he opted out of a jail sentence for stealing barrels of wine from Don Hilario’s vineyard. - Yes, the boys got caught that day when they stole the barrel from their employer’s estate and gallivanted freely while supposedly handing out Bibles. The estate overseer saw the boys steal the barrel and head for the beach. He chased them down, captured them, and chained them to the fence until the Don returned from Church. A theft was punishable by serving jail time for adults and work service for juveniles. Because of Don's status as a high official in the monarchy, he assigned the boys a job on a Spanish fleet El Buscador to recover stolen loot taken from Spain as their payback to the lord. Rico felt obligated to pay his boss, but he also wondered what it would be like to man his ship.

The native sees the soggy castaway asleep on the shore and commands the wolves to go sit along the base of the rocky cliff where she descended the trail.

'I have nothing for protection, not even my cutlass,' Rico thought. He sighs with relief when he notices the wolves retreating to the cliffside. She walks closer to him. She appears to float with the wind, emitting golden rays of sunshine through black strands of hair. Behind her, giant boulders on the cliff-side, radiate a green hue, illuminating the cove. Rico climbs to his knees. The woman steps forward. Small grains of jade glow from her toes. Rico’s eyes skim upward, circumventing her tan calves and escalating higher up to her smooth inner thighs when she abruptly stops him with her spear. Alarmed, he stops gazing, stands up and takes a few steps backward. Her eyes blaze a million golden-green sunsets he’s seen reflect off the glassy horizon. She says nothing, but he succumbs to her beauty and hears:

I bite my lip to hold back words

all I need is here

our gestures calm the stirring ocean

ghosts behind our heads speak as friends

reunited from a lost voyage in a disillusioned sea

muttering syllables ramble in

fragmented phrases

muffling the language within

music plays while static scratches the surface

capture, clench, and hold this melody

I listen desperately

She sticks her spear in the wet sand and folds her hands around his, blowing warm breath on his frozen hands. Her touch warms him, opening the valves to the chambers in his heart. He begins to feel on course. He is curious if she is some brave native’s wife, or even worse, a chief’s daughter. I wouldn’t want to be caught with a chief’s daughter. He would surely take my scalp, Rico thinks. Her beaming smile continues to warm him even more. He feels thick sand grains on the tips of his toes, and some in his heels. He takes a step closer to the woman when suddenly the alpha wolf at the base of the cliff growls and kicks aggressively with his paws on the gray-green mountain gravel. The wolf snarls at Rico but the native woman raises her dream catcher. "Sonoco" to the wolf and he silences. Rico is impressed with her command of nature.

The woman cups her hand, and charades the motion of drinking water, and points to the cliff at the end of the cove, and motions for him to follow her. She guides him to the spring. He follows and gets back some warmth in his feet. Rico drinks for a few minutes, quenching his thirst. Still delirious, he can barely stand, so he sits back against a large serpentine rock with support for his back. The squaw squeezes her fingers together, lifting them to her mouth in an eating fashion, and points to Rico, asking if he’s hungry. He nods. She firmly motions for him to wait, walks back to the wolves, and hikes up the trail with the pack. While the woman is gone Rico dozes off to sleep for several minutes and wakes to a tingle on the surface of his arms and legs. With his hands and feet finally thawed out, he stands and explores the beach. He twists his feet side to side in the dry black sand. A wave crashes on the shoreline and rolls up the slope to his feet. When the water hits the sand, it turns from black to a sparkly jade green like the woman’s toes. He studies the cracks and crevices of the mountainside and realizes there are huge chunks of dark-green rock falling from the cliff onto the beach and turning into translucent sand. This must be the jade that Alex used to talk about on their journeys to China in route to trade spices and gold.

If only Alex knew about this, Rico muses. He had always carried on about how the women were different here and how the color of the minerals was brilliant. He loved the earthy minerals more than gold because they were surprises along the way and not a means to an end. But Alex would do anything to get his hands on this jade.

Rico wonders when the woman will return. He glances up the trail to the edge of the cliff but sees no one. He keeps searching the cove and comes across a shell that looks like a large clam with the curved side facing up. He picks it up, turns it over, and an array of rainbow colors levitate from the abalone shell, and he hears:

No matter how far you travel over land and through the sea, the truth is you are near me

Rico wonders if he is still sleeping. He grips the shell tighter, slicing his index finger on a worn-out sharp edge of the abalone shell. Blood drips from his finger. He picks some cruciferous plants from the cliffside and rubs soothing plant jelly on his finger, which stop the bleeding. A few minutes later, the wonderful Native woman reappears with the alpha wolf. She glides down the stairs with a bundle of venison and blackberries in her hand. Rico hears the same melody again. He eats until he is full. While regaining his strength, he marvels at her beauty. Her eyes poise perfectly like emeralds on an obsidian ocean of black shiny hair. Momentarily, he forgets that he is a young Spanish conquistador, a castaway from his ship and lost in old Mexico. He extends his right hand out gently grasping her left hand, but he feels pressure on his finger where he sliced it on the shell, which she doesn't notice. The alpha wolf growls and trots closer to her but she commands him to stop. “Toe nook, Ha," she says, and the wolf retreats and sits.

Rico grasps the abalone shell and pulls it close to his heart and then gestures to give it to the woman. The Native woman smirks and nods her head side to side in a “no”fashion. She walks on the sand, pacing around for a couple of minutes, finds a black jagged rock with sharp edges and holds it up to Rico's heart in a charade with a question, pointing to his chest, “Your heart?”

"No," he says, but must demonstrate to the Native of another tongue. He wonders, she must think I'm a pirate. He finds a stick on the beach and slowly sketches out a female figure in the sand. The figure has a necklace, a feathered headdress in her hair, and a sketch of a wolf next to her. She resembles the Native woman. The Native woman smiles, indicating she recognizes that he is referring to herself. She reciprocates with a drawing of a man with wide shoulders, hoop earrings, and a sword sheathed in a swashbuckler’s attire. Feeling misunderstood, he scratches out the sword, swashbuckler, and hoop earrings. Then he takes his stick, sketches a big heart in the middle of the male figure, and points to his heart. While he is on his knees in the sand, the Native woman slides over to him. Her soft illustrious hair blankets him with warmth and bliss. She reaches out to hug him when suddenly he is jolted out of his sleep.

"Rico, we found you! We have been searching for the beaches all day for you. I am so happy we found you." Rico's eyes droop, and disappointment overcomes him. "No!" he screams back to Alex. "No, where is she? I was just with her. She was reaching out to hug and kiss me." Rico scans the sand next to him where he drew the sketch of his heart but sees no sketches or drawings anywhere on the beach. He sees no wolf paw prints nor elusive Native female footprints. There is no sign of his beautiful squaw anywhere. She has vanished as quickly as Alex startled him out of his sleep.

"Where am I?" Rico asks. "We were cast ashore two miles north, and you must have drifted overnight and into the morning and landed here on this brilliant cove,” Alex explains. “And look, you have a bump on the right side of your head. You must have hit your head in the wreck! I am glad you are fine now, or are you?" Alex jokes.

“I want to go back to sleep, she was so beautiful!”

“Come back.” Rico pleads.

"You are lucky to be alive, mi amigo,” Alex reassures.

“But I saw one of those women you always talk about, Alex.”

“Ah, you must have dreamt of a seer, or a mermaid,” Alex continues.

“No, she was a Native woman with white feathers and wolves and green eyes, just like the color

of the sand and the rocks on the cliffside.” Rico describes.

Alex looks around at the sand, the rocks, and the cliffs, realizing where Rico got beached. “You hit El Dorado verde, mi amigo!” This whole beach is full of North American jade. Rico gets up and smiles and laughs, “Of course, mi amigo!”

The boys fill their bags with chunks and chunks of brilliant green jade and head back out to the dingy boat waiting for them to return to the recovery ship and head back home. As they are getting into the boat Rico hears:

Although it may seem I have gone away

And left my soggy castaway

Gaze into the radiant rocks of green

And sing along so blissfully

About stories of getting stranded ashore

And being saved by her Native in a land of lore