Catcher in the Sea

Holden Caulfield would dig a cold, wet Beach Day

Not Riversdale. Te Paerahi Beach by @paul_taylor_photography via nzherald.co.nz

We’ll start with a field trip. This was Beach Day, a term-ending hurrah for my son’s then-Year 2 class out to Riversdale Beach on the windswept Wairarapa coast. The sign-up sheet for parent volunteers contained a stark bit of poetry: while the kids splashed in the waves, practicing their ocean safety, we, the parent volunteers, would “form a human chain around them” so they didn’t drift out to sea. I thought immediately of Holden Caulfield standing guard on the cliff’s edge in that fabled field of rye. I, too, dream of a clear purpose in this life. On Beach Day I reported for duty alongside my boy, togs and towel in hand.

Riversdale, or Motu-a-kairangi, sits out by its lonesome on the North Island’s extreme southeastern flank. It’s an actual town, if a tiny one, with a dairy, a lifeguard station, a knot of baches to rent, and just enough year-round diehards to keep up a school. To a formerly landlocked American, though, Riversdale is a portal to the howling void. Turn your collar and take a walk on the sand: ain’t nothing between your soul and the South Pole. Now, you can certainly strike the same pose in many of this remote country’s empty beaches, each with its own flavor of the sublime. Just here in the Wairarapa there’s Castlepoint up the coast, where a similar Big Empty vibe is tempered by the human drama of a lighthouse. Head south around the cape to Lake Ferry and you’re back in the Cook Strait, with the South Island’s snowy peaks floating like gods across water. But Motu-a-kairangi stands apart. The Maori name in translation: Where the sky eats the land.

After an hour’s drive through hilly sheep stations and clear-cut timber farms we stepped out of the bus under darkening skies. A cold breeze charged in off the water. (A fresh nor’easterly is the term of art here, I think? New Zealanders speak of wind with the wide vocabulary and grudging reverence of 19th century sailors.) We herded the kids into the cinderblock beach station, where the cheerful lifeguards diagrammed riptides on the whiteboard. We ate our packed lunches outside, chasing wrappers as they flew, then hit the beach. The rain was starting. Fat, cold drops fired sideways off the sea. Waves and clouds both turned that grim, gunmetal grey. Kids, parents, and teachers assembled shivering on the sand. The head lifeguard, a wizened-surfer doppelgänger for King Charles, grinned rakishly at the weather and shouted a few pointers, then, on his command, we parents marched into the waves to establish the perimeter. My god, that water was cold! We moaned in complaint as we pushed into the water and fanned out thigh-deep in that foamy flat between first break and the shore. Then we turned to face the beach, our backs to the rain and the Southern Ocean, our arms wide to catch the kids.

The story’s better if there’s actual danger here, yes? If we plucked a child from the riptide? The lesson was to be bodysurfing, I think. There were some boogie boards to share. We hollered encouragement as each wave of kids ran in, shrieked, flailed about, then bolted back to the warmth of the lifeguard station. The whole thing would’ve been canceled in the U.S., lest someone get sued for child abuse. In NZ, though, where to be outside, cold, and wet is both pride and duty of citizenship, this was just the year-end pizza party. “Jimmy’s getting blue in the lips,” one parent called out. “Let’s get him back inside.” My own son took his turn stoically, without questioning the wisdom of his elders or adopted nation. After a single freezing dunk he turned on his heel and strode resolutely off the beach. “Great job!” I called after him, though he couldn’t hear me through the storm. I was so proud of him. He could handle himself out there, and also knew when to call it off. Raindrops stung my skin. Wind whipped my t-shirt like a flag. The kids who’d brought wetsuits—old hands at NZ beach days—were still thrashing about in the water, some even catching a wave. Our human chain had held. I couldn’t feel my toes. I was wildly happy. I was a Catcher in the Sea.

Home safe and dry that night I went back to the book: there’s no human chain. Holden’s dream is to be The Catcher in the Rye, the only one. The quote in full:

…I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.

What’s his real draw here? To care for his community, or to be the lonesome hero of the frontier? And which was I seeking in the waves off Riversdale Beach? NZ and the US contain both urges, each to its own fashion. Did Beach Day baptize me as a small-town Kiwi parent, or a stoic Man Alone? Did I embody an American hero, or fulfill our most solipsistic teenage dream? If I claim local status here, would the Holden in my head call me a phony? I mean, aren’t these two settler-colonial nations sisters, in some faded-empire way? Stepsisters? Cousins, to borrow LeCarre’s word? How many degrees removed? Do they even read The Catcher in the Rye down here? Do they even read it in American high schools anymore? And wouldn’t any bloke in a Barry Crump novel just beat Holden up?

No spoiler here to say Catcher hits different as a grownup. Salinger’s commitment to his hero’s adenoidal teenage voice can run claustrauphobic and even maudlin at times. Mostly, though, the book is almost unbearably sad. The boy is broken, and the world ain’t much better. Holden only names his famous fantasy when his kid sister Phoebe asks if there’s one thing, just one thing, he “like(s) a lot”—and their dead brother Allie doesn’t count. Holden muses awhile, and answers only after he recalls, at some length, the ghastly suicide (or possible murder) of a bullied kid he knew at boarding school. Our lost boy is dying to care for someone—anyone, everyone—while simultaneously dying to escape to an imagined nowhere. Maybe he should just move to the other side of the world. With kids. And sign up for Beach Day.

But NZ isn’t nowhere, and Riversdale ain’t either. The Beach Day joy comes in part from crossing a border, but it’s not an escape, not quite. The great Seamus Heaney had a bit about writing poems from a “stepping stone” in the river between two known places, in his case the Catholic and Protestant towns of his Northern Ireland childhood. In Heaney’s spirit, then, I’ll drag this writing desk out into the spray off Riversdale Beach and let the wind take the pages where it may. In a sou’westerly, call this a Letter to America, with a hat tip to NZ country stalwarts The Warratahs. In a nor’easterly, call it a Letter to Aotearoa, cold and wet and a wee bit out to sea. (Heaney, as it happens, also has a beautiful poem about human chains, helping others, and the sweet release of death, but that is another essay.)

Maybe I’m overthinking all this. Reading Catcher this time I realized I’d forgotten the ending. Holden takes Phoebe to ride the carousel in Central Park. Just before she takes the ride, Phoebe asks Holden if he’s really giving up on his dream of running away—to Massachusetts, Vermont, “out West,” anywhere at all. He’s been going on about it all book long, to anyone who will listen, and in fact has already walked out on a considerable chunk of the novel’s other characters. Phoebe has just begged to go with him. But now Holden has changed his mind:

“You really aren’t going away anywhere? Are you really going home afterwards?” she asked me.

“Yeah,” I said. I meant it, too.

Then Phoebe climbs up on that painted horse, the one on the famous first-edition cover, and it begins to rain. This is one of the maudlin bits now—an emotional climax in the driving rain, c’mon—but this time it hit me like, well, a fresh nor’easterly off Riversdale. At the carousel all the other parents and caretakers run for cover. Our boy just stands out there getting soaked, watching his sister go round and round on the carousel, and realizes, suddenly, that he’s finally happy. “Damn near bawling,” even. And he, too, has no idea why.

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