Jackie

The cottage we rented stood proud and pale atop thick wooden pilings just past the dunes of the beachhead which were feathered in salt grass and stirred by the winds of the Atlantic Ocean just beyond. Fenwick Island, New Jersey. The waves in their quiet thunder sounded in a rhythmic pulse like a time keeper of the world as our dog Anya bounded exuberant into the foaming surf yet having no concept of such a thing for she had never seen an ocean. This vast nameless thing of power, delight and beauty. And in much the same way I encountered my own unseen ocean. Something I had never beheld as well - I found myself in love with an older woman – She was 14 and I was 10. Her name was Jackie. It was 1977.

Never had I seen something like her. She was the daughter of friends we were vacationing with and her arrival was like that of sudden lightning. An electric tomboy full of storm and sparkle with dark hair framing her strange beauty and dark impenetrable eyes. Who was this creature? It wasn't just her beauty but the radiance of something ineffable and hidden. Fearless, unaffected and performing back flips all alone on the shore with total abandon as if the world didn't exist. Seeing her made me ache. A feeling new and foreign to me, like a strange tightening in my chest.

But what was I? This ungainly, self-conscious, pre-adolescent glob of a precocious child with nothing to offer other than my pretentious musings on astrophysics which was about as attractive as... pretentious musings on astrophysics. In my mind if I couldn't be attractive then I'd be smart...and let everyone know it. It was utterly obnoxious to everyone. Yet I wanted to connect with this being of fire but I didn't even know what that meant. It wasn't so much a fledgling sexuality but more akin to bridging myself to something sacred.

Jackie was kind to me though but like one is kind to a deformed puppy. As the families gathered for dinners she was always far away down the table and huddled with the kids her own age. An older more attractive boy said something to her and she'd laugh and there was that familiar tightening in my chest again. Another older kid next to me was passing the mashed potatoes and I told him if he ever wanted know anything about astrophysics he could just ask me. He stared at me confused for a long time then annoyed asked with an exasperated stare, “Do you want mashed potatoes or not?” Humbled, I quietly took the potatoes and decided that I probably shouldn't mention astrophysics ever again. Then the overwhelming sense of isolation came - that I had nothing of value to offer.

But maybe they did too in their own ways though it certainly didn't show. But what did I know at that age? This was the strange interstitial time of children coagulating into adults where everything is vague and rife with insecurity. This uncertain phase where we have no place to fit yet needing to know we have purpose but I just hadn't found mine yet.

But my existential identity issues were not going to fixed over a crab dinner and besides the week was drawing to a close and we'd soon be packing up and winding our way north to Pittsburgh. Jackie didn't owe me any attention and I resigned myself to the fact that she would remain forever this shimmering mystery.

Soon it was our last day on the shore and the day grew strangely cold as the westward wind picked up and sand skirted in sheets up the dunes hissing through the pealing white fence bound by rusty wire and then disappearing into the town beyond. Still we all braved the beach with blankets and jackets as no one dared to enter the frigid waves. The adults shared their old stories, plans of coming back next year and that we should all get together for Christmas. I was utterly bored and just wanted to go home. I looked up from my astrophysics book and there was a lone figure dancing in the waves. What? This was an insane person. NO one was in the water. I stared closer and it was Jackie. Of course it was.

I watched her from afar as she spasticly exited the waves in her red suit and wrapped herself in a thin towel shivering. She stood pensively looking inwards to some inner world in this pure raw vulnerability. It was like a sacred moment that no one else witnessed but me.

Just before the trip my father had purchased a Nikon F. It was the camera of war photographers, the brave ones risking their lives for truth and in this moment it held a vast and terrible importance to me. I picked it up without thinking and strode urgently down the beach. I had never taken a photograph before.

I stopped just feet away, her face still turned slightly down with the same inward gaze, a single strand of hair dancing in the cold wind - and I raised the camera. This would be the moment where most girls would turn away laughing off this silly child. But that didn't happen. Perhaps she was just waiting for me to go away, but maybe she saw something else, something deeper, something intentional, maybe even pure. I'll never know. Regardless she offered me a gift – she held her gaze, genuine and unguarded as if she never showed this face to anyone else in all the world. The shutter clicked softly, the sound lost in the hiss of the waves.

Every photograph bears an eternity. The moment captured now instantly a citizen of the past, never to occur again yet forever remaining. A story now held like a fly in silver amber lingering nascent in the dark of the camera only to be revealed in time through the alchemy of chemistry. I didn't take a second photo. I didn't need to. It was all there, this fragile little eternity. Little would she know that it was the 125th of a second that changed the trajectory of my life. This first photograph. I would never get a chance to tell her because I never saw Jackie again. And we are old now, older than our parents were at the time.

In time I would become a professional photographer and I would often look back at this moment, how it informed how I see the world through a lens to always find the eternities in others. In many ways I've been taking the same photo ever since. Ten-thousand Jackie's stored in countless folders lining shelves upon shelves. Every person, every face holding a ghost of that ocean. So thank you, Jackie. You may not remember me, but your gift forever remains. Cold waves, shutters and the birthing of measureless stories after you.