I finally emerged at the base of a steep bank of golden sand and clambered upward on all fours, filling pockets and shoes. The Oregon dunes are of the finest, cleanest, and most uniform sand found in America; constantly moving, forever sifted by summer winds and washed by winter rains, and extending in some areas for miles without tree or bush or flower, too orderly to be the work of haphazard nature and too immense to be the product of man, they present an unreal world to even the casual observer—to my already cockeyed eye, as I achieved the crest of the bank, the dunes presented a terrain forbidding in the extreme. He trudges toward that bed’s embroidered spread, heedless of his feet in his trancelike walking (Halfway to the sea, completely alone on a bare, sweeping field of sand, the little boy vanished . . .) and feels disappointed when he reaches the dunes’ edge: What had I imagined might happen, here in broad daylight out on a completely featureless field of sand? (vanished— into close and musty dark, vanished down into the black and moonless earth itself!) At the edge of the dunes where the beach began, a sun-silvered pile of logs separated the sea’s territory from the territory of dry land, like an absurd wooden wall. I climbed across it, wondering what I would do to distract myself and pass the hour until it was time to meet Viv . . . When he reaches the beach he hopes that the terror provoked by the dunes will subside, but it hangs on and follows him down the beach like a piece of the clotted black clouds, crackling and hissing a few feet above his head. Pot hangover, he insists. Nothing else. Just get the old mind elsewhere. Come now, man, you can ignore a little old pot hangover ... To while away the wait I sailed rocks at the droves of sandpipers that stood motionless at the edge of the water, beaks to the wind like little weathervanes each mounted on one thin spike. I dug after the little pink-shelled sandcrabs and tossed them to the careening gulls. I rolled over humps of beach kelp and watched the blizzard of insect life that resulted. I ran full tilt along the foamed edge of the waves for as far as my poor tar-infested lungs would carry me; I engaged in frantic screaming matches with the gulls; I rolled up my cuffs and tied my shoes to my belt and splashed in the surf until my ankles became swollen and numb . . . but every word he sings, every jump and gesture, seems to be an act making up a ritual for conjuring some fierce fiend out of the earth, a ritual he can’t stop because every act calculated to stem its onrush to success turns out to be another part of some subconscious ceremony necessary to that success. As he comes closer and closer to the climax of this oceanside sacrament, it occurs to him that all his wild maneuvering might be reenactments of childhood frolic: No wonder I’m getting the psychological jitters; why the deuce not? I’m sprinting hell-bent backwards. I’m taking a running jump at the womb. That’s all it is. Along with pot hangover. That’s all (Gradually, as the shock of the fall subsided, the little boy tried to move. He looked directly above him and found that he could perceive the passage of stars through a round hole far above his head, and as the wind shifted to blow from the rocky cliffs to the north at Wakonda Head, he found he could hear the angry pawbeats of an ocean frustrated at being cheated of a rightful prize by a hole in the ground) and all I need to do to overcome it is find something of this tune to associate with. He looks about the tuneless beach frantically . . . and just then my eye happened to fall on a first-rate distraction: a car stuck in the seaside sand a quarter-mile south of me, down the beach, almost to the big breakwater jetty where I was due to meet Viv. And there was something very familiar about the molding and primer job on the car, familiar indeed; a first-rate way to pass the time, if I am correct. (The boy lay at the bottom of a huge tube. A tube down into the earth. One of the chimneys of Hell! the boy thought, recalling old Henry’s warning about devil’s stovepipes out on the dunes where unwary wanderers might fall. Clear to Hell! the boy remembered and began to cry.) So I rolled down the pants legs and replaced the shoes and hurried down the beach. I was right, it was the carload of samaritans. My old friend the driver stood smoking calmly in complete disregard of the beseeching and baleful look of his sandlocked car, which stood trapped and helpless in the waves. He sighed at my approach. A cigarette package was rolled in the sleeve of his Dayglo pullover and his hands were thrust in the back pockets of his Levis. The skidding tracks along the beach told the story: they had driven to the Coast Guard station and down onto the beach, high on root beer and ripe for action. They had squirreled closer and closer to the ocean, taunting the tide, daring the waves, kicking sand in its gleaming teeth a............