There’s No Such Thing As a Predictable Fall Fling

There is nothing like the mundane to keep life from zipping by too fast.

With such a thought in mind, I went to the beach a few days ago to throw a Frisbee for my dogs. Just about any dummy can throw a Frisbee if he or she is blessed with a sound body, and just about any dog can bring one back. I was not after a challenge. What I was after was some sense of routine and repetition, some indication that I might be spared the awesome velocity of autumn because, quite frankly, it seemed to me that life was approaching warp speed.

Fall is my favorite time of year for all of the standard reasons, plus a few more. Never does the concept of change seem more obvious than in the fall--even the trees know enough to drop their leaves, and the lizards on the fences keep shorter and shorter hours. I can feel a sense of great acceleration during these weeks, almost hear the powerful but inaudible sound of time roaring forward. I know for a fact that whoever I am when I go to sleep that night, I’m likely to be someone else when I wake up.

As an Orange Countian of many years, I long ago grew tired of the axiom that there are no seasons here. We have seasons; they’re just harder to find and they don’t always keep a tight schedule. They’re subtle, refined, even secretive sometimes, but only the dull in spirit could miss those lovely passages where the languor of summer pivots into the increased urgency of fall. (I was on a tennis court at Top of the World in Laguna when I first noticed fall this year. It came in a clear dry gust of breeze from the east, a harbinger of the Santa Ana winds and of a coming season as distinct from summer as is an angel from an anvil. It was still, I believe, September.) So, if someone mentions to you that Orange County has no seasons, suggest to them that they probably have no soul and ought to go home so those of us who appreciate understatement can find more parking places at the beach.

At any rate, this particular fall has seemed unduly foreboding to me, in terms of all that has changed. New President. Canadian World Series winners. New heavyweight champ. The clerk at the T-shirt shop wanted to know if I was her classmate Ian Parker’s father. I fingered my size XL purchase, wondering how I had gotten this old and still managed to be nobody’s father. Just a short three years ago, someone had asked if my father was the author of those books that take place in Orange County. “Yes,” I answered, “and I am his ill-behaved teen-aged son!”

So, the Frisbee trip to the beach was to be an exercise in the predictable, the knowable, the absolute. Anyone who has spent any time with a dog knows what experts they are in these matters. Not only are they wholly content with habit, but they forget 50% of what they learn each day as they sleep, so they inevitably wake up in a state of wonder and constant happiness. Wouldn’t you?

It was a magnificent fall day: a sky cleared by mild offshore winds, Saddleback Mountain appearing close enough to touch with a finger, Catalina Island smog-bound to the west. The waves were the tail-end of a west swell, neat little breakers too small to ride but perfect in their form. They were pretty enough to take home and put in a china cabinet. The breeze blew mist off their faces that vanished in the dry warm air, and their report was quite loud because a small wave breaking on the shore is louder than a large one breaking farther out.

The bright orange disc flew over the water. The dogs found it in the soup, cavorted, brought it back. I threw it again, the exact same way. They did the exact same thing. Life was beginning to slow to an understandable speed, to unravel in comprehensible units of time. I liked this. I threw the disc again. They brought it back again. Order! Routine! Continuity!

People seem to develop a more refined taste for disaster as they get older, so naturally I began to worry about the twin calamities that can befall us in autumn--fire and flood. I recently received in my newspaper a flyer put out by the Orange County Environmental Management Agency, which featured on its cover a rather foreboding picture of our flood of 1969. The title of the flyer, “Staying Ahead of Floods,” made me look close at the photograph to see if perhaps a tiny person was trying to outrun the onrushing hemorrhage of water. (There was no such person.)

Inside the flyer was a section explaining the 100-year flood zone, which I had always assumed was an area due for a flood that would last 100 years. Not. The real meaning of this term is much less interesting and I’ve forgotten it by now, though I distinctly remember being ordered by the bank to get flood insurance on my house or they’d turn me out onto Ocean Avenue with the other homeless souls who cover their pitiable and unloved bodies under newspapers to try to stay warm at night.

At this point, I was rescued from flood worries by the dogs, which, I now noticed, were not so much retrieving the Frisbee as fighting over it. Dogs have certainly learned from people that any object is more valuable as soon as somebody else has it, and this dark principle seemed to fuel them into greater and greater heights of antagonism. It was a mock battle, of course, but the female finally gave in, as she usually does, and wandered off to greet a stranger, which left the conquering male with a suddenly valueless plastic item hanging from his disappointed face. Once I stole it from him, the game was on again.

But certainty and predictability were not to be. From somewhere totally out of my vision--the direction of the boardwalk, I believe--streaked a greyhound of such speed I could hardly tell what it was. It claimed the Frisbee mid-air and banked south. It was vanishing like the taillights of a runaway truck by the time I could muster my sluggish brethren to give chase. The race was long and arduous, and would have been hopeless if the bullet-like thief had not caught up with his mistress and delivered the disc to her waiting hands.

My loyal retrievers, thrilled by this change of routine, attempted to blitz her. But she flicked the toy toward me and it blended for a moment with the lowering sun, then zoomed past and hovered over the sand, out of reach, poised in the air like some B-movie flying saucer with a message for Earth.

I made a heroic stretch to catch it, trying the casual fingertip-snag in order to impress the girl, and the Frisbee, of course, hooked immediately around my fingers, whipped off at a 90-degree angle and hit me in the head.

Traipsing back toward the truck, later, I realized that most everything had gone against plan, that fall had triumphed again over predictability and that the sight of that girl’s arm unfolding the orange saucer my way was the least expected and finest moment of the day.

I immediately began to wonder how to repeat it. But you could go back down to that beach every day for a million autumns in a row, and it would never happen, quite like that, again.

Serendipity is too fine a thing for mass production.