Page 60 of Keeping Secrets

The act of driving, the music inside and the beauty outside, Keely there next to him… all of it soothed his anxieties to the point that he was able to leave them behind, if only for a little while. For the first time in weeks, each breath came easily. He was content just to be.

Then he parked, and they stepped out into the whipping wind. Keely’s eyes met his over the roof of the car, and they smiled. The easy contentment of the drive shifted into a new excitement, an urge to get moving up the trail.

He shrugged on a thick jacket and pulled a hat down over his ears. “Ready?”

“Let’s go!”

“I have room in my backpack. Do you want me to carry your food and water?”

“It’s okay, I can carry it.”

“I know you can, but you might as well toss it in here. I don’t mind.”

“Okay.” She put three containers into the backpack – the desserts were bulky but not heavy – and slipped her water bottle into a side pocket. “Thank you.”

“Happy to.” He locked the car and clipped the keys onto his pants. “Let’s go!”

It was a long trek up the coast, moving parallel to the beach up a dusty trail lined with scrubby, desperate-looking plants. The wind whipped their words away, making conversation next to impossible, but he didn’t mind. He let Keely go first to set the pace, and her long legs ate up the level trail. He walked along behind her and enjoyed the view.

Finally they reached the elephant seals. Brown lumps in the distance at first, but eventually they got close enough to see them clearly. The trail dead-ended at a roped-off line meant to keep park visitors a safe distance from the gargantuan sea mammals. There were a few other tourists there, snapping pictures and bundled against the cold.

They were downwind from the seals, and the usual cacophony of noise reached them clearly. There was the drum-like sound of the males warning each other away across vast stretches of beach and the incessant squawking of the babies, like hungry hatchlings. The mothers were mostly still, basking in the sun, but occasionally one would get up and move in a prodigious waving motion, looking like water made solid as they wormed their way across the sand.

“They’re huge,” Keely breathed. She stood so close to him that her arm pressed against his.

“They don’t call them elephant seals for nothing,” he replied.

“I mean, I knew they were big, but wow. I thought the name was more about the crazy nose that the males have. I had no idea how huge they were. They must be bigger than walruses!”

“They’re nearly twice the size of walruses,” said a park docent who stood nearby. His dark blue windbreaker moved and crackled in the restless air. He looked close to seventy with a white mustache and wind-pinked cheeks. “Southern elephant seals can grow over twenty feet long. The northern ones we have here can reach about sixteen feet and five thousand pounds.”

“That’s amazing,” Keely said.

“The pups are nearly four feet long when they’re born.”

“Eesh.”

“They spend nearly all of their lives in the water, and they can hold their breath for over an hour and a half. When they’re at sea, they can swim up to sixty miles in a day and dive to depths of five thousand feet.”

“Five thousand?” a woman on the other side of the docent exclaimed.

“Yes ma’am, though dives of one to two thousand feet are more common.”

“How extraordinary.”

Keely bumped her hip into his, and Travis looked down into her bright green eyes.

“The seals are amazing,” she said, “but I can’t feel my nose, and I’m starving. Is there a place we can get out of the wind?”

“I know a place.” He took her hand in his and led her back down the trail. When he felt how cold her fingers were, he put her hand between both of his and rubbed some warmth back into it. Then he looped behind her and took up her other hand. “There’s a beach down here where we can find some shelter from the wind.”

They backtracked a little ways and then took a small trail that shot off of the main one. It was nearly invisible unless you were looking for it, and he was happy to see that the small cove down below was empty. They picked their way down the steep switchbacks and nestled into the northern end of the cove, where the cliffs blocked the wind completely.

There, out of the wind, the winter sun was warm enough that he took off his hat and jacket. They settled down with their backs against the sun-warmed rocks, nothing in front of them but a stretch of empty beach and crashing waves.

“This has been the best day,” Keely said.

“Agreed.” He pulled out the food that he had packed. He wasn’t much of a cook, and the food from the Bottlenose didn’t travel well, so he had essentially put together a charcuterie board… without the board. There was cheese and salami, crackers, apples. He felt a bit silly offering ingredients up to a chef, but Keely tucked in happily.

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