Through the Night and Wind excerpt

With only a few weeks left until the release of Through the Night and Wind, I've selected a few more excerpts to share. The following is from the eighth chapter.

We hauled ourselves up onto the swimming platform and sat there for a while, watching tiny schools of minnows and sunfish dart here and there, mostly ignoring our presence just as their brethren had at the Baths and the Caves. My dad’s chest glowed a bright crimson and looked as though he’d been out in the sun without sunscreen for days on end. I poked him with my index finger, watching as the spot flashed bright white, then slowly faded from a pinkish hue to red again.

“You okay?” I asked, laughing as I recalled the look on his face the instant before he hit the water—a mixture of subdued terror and casual indifference as he likely realized there was nothing he could’ve done about it at that point.

“Nothing a cold beer won’t cure.”

“Bad news,” I said. “We’re almost out.”

“Lucky for us we’re less than a hundred yards from a veritable cornucopia of beach bars. What do you say?”

I didn’t hesitate: “Let’s go.”

We spent the next few hours bar-hopping along the white sand beach. Some of the places were relatively upscale establishments, with air conditioning and wait staff; others were how I imagined Bomba’s would appear—rundown little shacks that appeared as if they’d blow over in a stiff breeze (or even a gentle one). We’d taken the dinghy ashore, paid our mooring fee and enjoyed bottles of Red Stripe at Rhymer’s Beach Bar, then criss-crossed the beach, stopping at The Big Banana Paradise Club and Stanley’s Welcome Bar. We sipped Bushwhackers while reclining in lounge chairs, watching a trio of surfers negotiate the rocky reef off to our right at the bay’s eastern point. Observing them paddling out, catching a swell and cutting back and forth across the waves’ faces was certainly impressive; it reminded me of the Pacific. I knew that I’d be back in Santa Barbara in two days and was eager to enjoy the familiar pleasures of home.

The more thought I gave it, the more I realized that when I thought of “home,” that same mnemonic slide carousel dropped in images of Santa Barbara, not Naperville. It showed me the sun rising over Stearns Wharf as I paddled into the brilliant yellow aurora of daybreak; it showed me cruising north on the 101 through wine country; it showed the same fiery ball sinking into the violet Pacific, leaving an impressionistic ruby sky in its wake. It didn’t show me the impeccably groomed outfield at Wrigley or a blurred visage of an El train whizzing through a blustery, inky midnight. In the past week I’d grown to accept the fact that just as my father had left Illinois behind and cast his lot here (or wherever he was destined to wind up), I was growing accustomed to the fact that after two years in California, I had begun to think of it as home—and not just home in the sense that it was some other folks’ home, a place that I was simply passing through on my way somewhere else, but my home.

Note: here's a photo of Cane Garden Bay from one of the aforementioned beach bars.