Coastal Photo Sampler

© 2023 Steve S. Saroff

some with words... so keep scrolling...


Fourier and memory –

One winter when I was studying mathematics I worked for a scientist who taught me to look for patterns in the waves that pounded the Oregon coast. We talked about storms on the other side of the world, and watched for the rare, high waves which he explained to me formed by the chance meeting of small combinations.

He gave me a thin book written by Fourier, a French mathematician, who explained that complexity could be understood by the pure cycles of simple things. Like a single note from a flute, or the ripple from a pebble dropped in a calm pool.

This professor I worked for sought out chaos and the reasons coastlines become devastated in storms. I would go alone to rocky beaches during the largest storms, and set up his instruments at low tide, and then sit in a small trailer full of computers and wait for the desperate water.

It was always more than just raining. I had to lean hard into the wind to keep from falling, and I fell sometimes. In the trailer, I would drink bourbon and read about the calculus of sine waves, my wet hands covered with sand and salt, and wait for low tide.

I was also trying to understand the chaos of my life, so I would think back and find a few pure memories — mornings baking bread, or walking in the moonlight on a spring night, or reading to each other from books of poems.

Sometimes in that instrument trailer, buffeted by the storms — nothing peaceful — the bottle empty, I would write short stories, trying to prove Fourier’s theorems by breaking memories into simple parts. — Here was the day we met. — Here was the first kiss. — Here was a box of her books in the back of the car. — Here was that kitchen, that morning of baking bread.

Looking back I still wonder where the chaos came from, just as I still wonder about where the eroded land goes, the grains that were rock, that math that explains everything so beautifully, and so, so wrong.

– Steve S. Saroff

The chapel at Sea Ranch has heard many quiet prayers. Looking towards the center of our galaxy tonight, that core of far-away, wondering where answers come from, and asking where questions go...

A good life - There was a room with a view, and at night, I would watch the stars move around my injured sleep like wolfs circling the sheep I had lost count of. There was no door left to lock and your memory came and went looking for that lost shoe or hairbrush or one more story. In the mornings the room became my town, and I would shove my failures into a stuff-sack of success and stumble towards the daylight and closer to a good life which had always been waiting just for me to forget. - steve saroff, from The Long Line of Elk: Poems and Artifacts

In this place where house lights are turned off and dimmed down, and when the moon has set, and if the cat-footed fog slides back to the ocean, there are hours of quiet peace. Like this.

Before her, what did I do? I gave away my ideas, my time, my soul. I walked the ridgelines of the North Hills, then drove to South Hills, to drink martinis alone. And I watched old tv shows, stayed in bed till noon, and wrote letters to broken loves, and waited for the replies that never came. So I made porcelain cups and pots, drove to the deserts and took memories of stars, like the photographs I had once taken of ruins, then drove to the ocean and drew sketches on sheets of fog. This morning she brought me coffee and food, opened the blinds, laughed about the weather, told me of her plans — another bookshelf today — and then she asked, “What would you do without me?” She knows. - steve saroff, from The Long Line of Elk: Poems and Artifacts

Writing Sampler

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(c) 2023 Steve S. Saroff & Saroff Corporation www.saroff.com
Author. Start-up consultant. Adviser to artists, writers, and a few good actors.