A Hero's Guide to Summer Vacation

Your Most Humble Narrator Begins
It should be said that Gonzalo Alberto Sánchez García never considered himself to be the hero of his own story. He was an observer. Quietly recording what he saw and experienced but never caring to play a central role—­not even in his own life.

Like with every journey, though, the protagonist hardly ever realizes they’re central to the story until later. After much prodding and poking, they finally understand and accept the terms of their role. But it takes a while, and there are steps to get there—­let’s call them phases, or guides. But first, a little background.

Gonzalo had spent most of seventh grade in a kind of daze, as it were. Yes, middle school can often be overwhelming. It zooms by like a high-­speed train, going so fast you’re terrified to even use the bathroom for fear of what might happen if the train suddenly stops. It. Can get. Messy. So you don’t use the bathroom on a train. And you don’t use the bathroom in middle school. Ever.

Gonzalo learned right away what happened if you used the dreaded toilets of Montverde Middle. Wet toilet paper stuck to the bathroom ceiling. Strange markings ran up and down the stalls. And a smell lingered on his clothes for days. And that was the first week of school! Imagine what it smelled like after the first grading period?

Terrible toilets notwithstanding, there was hope that things were going to get better during those first nine weeks of seventh grade. His father’s diagnosis looked promising. And other than holding off on going to the bathroom for an entire school day, Gonzalo seemed to be on the road to a successful start to the school year. He enjoyed geography, especially landscapes and the way the mountains shaped the earth along the coastline. And he loved art, Ms. González being his all-­time favorite teacher.

He tolerated most of the other subjects in school. Except language arts. He wasn’t a big reader of books, and after spending all of elementary school disappointing people because he wasn’t actually named after his famous grandfather’s fantasy book series, he was ready to shed the expectations of his purported namesake.

Unfortunately for Gonzalo, however, the first nine-­week grading period ended, and things took a turn for the worse. A terrible thing happened, and a fog began to encircle his brain. Then his grades suffered. He nearly failed science, his father’s favorite subject.

That’s when the drawings came. And the more he drew, the more he withdrew. By the time his mother dropped him off at his grandfather’s house in Mendocino for the summer, he had barely passed seventh grade. He spent most of his time converting photographs of landscapes he took on his iPad into terrifying drawings of monsters—­the most frequent being a creature with menacing green eyes emerging from the fog. Those eyes still follow him everywhere he goes. Grief knows no hiding place.

Things had become bleak for Gonzalo. But every hero needs to see the bottom of the ocean if they ever want to learn how to swim up to catch a new breath.
And so we open on the middle months of summer vacation. In a fog-­induced landscape surrounded by dead seabirds­ and only an iPad to keep our hero company. What should have been the relaxing calm of summer is now the opening act of Gonzalo’s journey. And each part should get him closer to recovering what has been lost. It’s also possible that the monsters of his own creation will drown him in a gross middle school toilet and flush him down the pipes of his own grief and despair. To be honest, it can go either way. Your humble narrator is merely here as a guide. I have no control over the proceedings of this story, and all I’ll offer is an occasional observation. Summer is here, and Gonzalo’s story is underway. There’s no turning back now.


Part One:
Departure

Gonzalo Speaks
I’m perched on the cliff, feet dangling. With my iPad in hand, I take a photo of the vultures having their fill of carrion covered­ by the misty fog below. I take out my pen and transform the photograph into an original drawing:

A giant sea creature rising from the fog. A messenger bird trying to get home. It’s traveled a thousand miles, only to fail just as it reaches the shore. The sea creature’s scavenging minions pouncing on the fallen messenger. The fog giant retreats into its watery kingdom. The bird loses again.

I add color to the landscape but don’t write words. I don’t like words much. I used to write my observations down all the time. My dad taught me how on our weekly trips to the canyons or the rocky beaches just north of our Santa Monica house. “Make an inference of what you observe, G-­bear.” It seemed like everything in nature was my dad’s lab. “Use the scientific method,” he would tell me. Not anymore. Drawing what I see feels better. Or taking a photograph and changing it to what I see.

The wind howls, and I look up. My grandfather waits for me on a higher cliff.

“Breakfast is ready,” he says, letting the wind carry his words down to where I sit.

I put my sandals back on and tuck my iPad into my bag before standing. I pull my yellow hoodie over my head and dig into the front pockets. I move to the steep wooden steps that lead back up to his house.

“Is your plan to catch pneumonia?” my grandfather calls out. I look, and he just stares.

The wind whips through the cliffs, and I can’t ignore the chill. Maybe sandals were a bad idea. It shouldn’t be this cold in July, but it is.

I click on my watch and check the weather. The temperature has dropped to fifty degrees. My feet are frozen, but the warmth of the hoodie feels good. I wiggle my toes, remembering why I like to wear sandals in the cold weather. I want to feel the cold. But not entirely.

The garbage can on the way up to my grandfather’s overflows from years of being uncollected. It’s just out of sight, and my grandfather never seems to venture very far from his house, so maybe that’s why the trash has never been picked up. My dad once told me the garbage in landfills has no real place to go. It often stays there for years, birds circling the millions of pounds people discard every day.

“We do our part,” he used to say, “and try to find ways to help people limit the impact on the environment. That’s why we research, G-­bear.”

My mom still calls me G-­bear, and I haven’t found a way to tell her I don’t like that nickname anymore. It’s hard to tell my mom that I don’t like something.

My dad told me a hotel once shared land with my grandfather’s house. Before he bought it and sent everyone away. Now the land and the property sit empty. Overgrown bushes, uncut fields, and scattered redwoods. Maybe that’s his way of limiting his carbon footprint. He grabbed as much land as he could afford and let it get overrun with weeds and bushes and wild grass and unkempt beaches.

I climb the wooden steps, careful to avoid the poison oak that creeps from the sides of the stairs. At the start of the summer, I drew the oak leaves as venomous vipers trying to strike as I walked up and down the stairs. But after that first murre dropped out of the sky, my interest turned to the clouds.

“Buenos días.” I greet my grandfather in Spanish, but my lack of practice probably means that I don’t say “good morning” the way it should sound. When I finally reach his house, I’m nearly out of breath.

“What’s bueno about it?” he grumbles. “Your breakfast is going to get cold.” He pauses to point at my sandals. “Como tus pies.”

Without saying another word, my grandfather disappears through the sliding glass door that leads to the kitchen. I take one more look at the horizon. A few rays of sunlight break through the mist, reflecting off the rocks slick with salt water and moss. The small cave where the tide had once almost swooped in and dragged me out to the freezing water catches my eye.

I had tried to maneuver through the mossy rocks to reach the cave. It had been about a week since my mom dropped me off in Mendocino. When I saw the cave for the first time, my instinct told me to explore it—­or maybe I was looking for a hiding place from my grandfather.

I don’t know my grandfather. Not really. He once gave me a card for my birthday with a check for one hundred dollars. I was in the fourth grade, and I tried to forge his signature from the signed check. I used it to sign one of his books and presented it to my teacher. She couldn’t believe it. I was a hero for exactly one school day. Then my mom found out and made me apologize to Ms. Martinez in front of the whole class.

I never understood his fame. Why would anyone care about someone who wasn’t even a real person? My dad taught me to look at facts. Observe the world. Make deductions based on evidence. On research. Come up with possible solutions and test them against a hypothesis. A fictional character wielding magic made absolutely no sense. But the kids in my class loved my grandfather’s books. And my teacher had posters all over her classroom. So I pretended he signed a book even though he never signed books, not even for his only grandchild. And I got caught, and Ms. Martinez never really forgave me, even though she’s a teacher and isn’t supposed to have least favorite students. After the whole forgery business, my grandfather only sent cash in an envelope. He never sent a card again.

That little cave turned out to be dangerous. By the time I got to it, the tide had already crept in. I was only at the mouth of the cave when a wave crashed into my feet, making me slip and nearly get drawn out to sea. I caught myself just in time. Not wanting to risk another swell, I quickly moved back to the beach.

That’s when I saw the first bird rolling along the edge of the water. It looked like a penguin. I did some research and later corrected my hypothesis. It wasn’t a penguin.

Then I remembered my dad telling me something about algae blooms and the birds starving. I think I remembered he said, “Mark the things you see in nature and study them, G-­Bear.” At least I think that’s what he said. The exact memories are getting hazy, like the fog in this place.
When I tried to observe what happened to the murres, to do what my dad did and document and hypothesize on the cause and effect of their deaths, the only thing that came out was images of monsters devouring the birds and littering the landscape with their carcasses. My father would have been disappointed, for sure. I’m not a scientist. And my dad isn’t here to pretend that I am.
I take one more picture of the beach. A drawing for another moment. But first, breakfast is getting cold, and my toes have had enough.