04:52 PM CDT on Friday, October 16, 2009

About halfway through our year in California, I saw a body floating in the waves near the beach a few blocks from our house. The waves were gently carrying the man toward the shallow water and then pulling him back out beyond the rescuers' reach, over and over again. Apparently he had been dragged out to sea by a rip current.

I stood on the bluff watching the firemen try to pull him from the surf. It didn't feel right to just walk away, as if it didn't matter that someone was slipping away from his life. People paused all along the bluff, quietly trying to figure out what happened. There was a surf kite, the surfboard that goes with it and a small pile of his things on the beach – his keys and wallet, perhaps, things that would soon be called "personal effects" and handed to someone with a heavy heart.

A special beach rescue team eventually arrived and pulled him to the shore, but it was too late. A T-shirt used as a pillow during the mouth-to-mouth attempts was placed lightly on his face, and the people on the bluff slowly started to move on, the vigil over.

I had been walking by the beach that day hoping to feel something in the ocean's crash and whisper, its eternal rhythm, which would ease my worried and worn-down self. We had moved back to our home state after nearly a decade in Texas, and, with each passing month, we seemed to be further and further from where we wanted to be at this point in our lives.

Up until then, each move seemed to walk us forward on life's path: apartment to first house – an old bungalow down the coast from San Francisco with indoor-outdoor carpet in the kitchen – to our nearly new place in El Paso with incredible views of the Franklin Mountains, to our large, modern house on a double fairway in McKinney, where we sank our roots deep into the Texas prairie.

When we first walked into the place we rented in California's Half Moon Bay last July, we tried to be upbeat. This was a voluntary move, after all – a promotion for me and a chance to be near family and friends again. We laughed about the dorm-sized rooms, opened the windows to let out the funky, stale smell, and started to settle in.

We knew it would be an adjustment to scale back our lifestyle, but we didn't know the U.S. economy would tank at the same time, leaving us with an unsold house in Texas, a derailed career for my wife and public schools for our daughter that were more pink slip than blue ribbon.

Whatever had been propelling us along our path seemed to downshift, sputter and stall at the western edge of our world. By the time I saw the body floating in the Pacific that late winter day, I was wondering if we'd ever get our lives back on track.

You can't see rip currents when you wade into the ocean. Everything looks fine, like any other day at the beach. But if you get caught in one, you suddenly feel your feet losing their grip on the gravelly sand and your body being sucked out to sea by a powerful force that can swallow you and drown you quickly, especially if you fight it. The way to survive, they say, is to swim parallel to the shore until you're out of the undertow and can make your way back to land.

The water looked fine when we decided to move back to California – a little choppy, but not dangerous. We jumped in and swam out a bit, and before we knew it, we were far from the shore. No matter how hard we tried, we just kept getting pulled further and further out. Somehow we remembered to swim parallel to the shore.

My wife finally landed a part-time job, we rented out our house in Texas, and we squeezed our budget even tighter to stay afloat.

We made our way back to shore in late July, arriving in Texas exhausted and grateful for another chance at the Lone Star life. We were finally – finally – back on our path and back with friends who never once made us feel foolish for trying the California dream one more time.

Darrin Swartz-Larson of McKinney is a former Community Voices volunteer columnist. His e-mail address is darrinslarson@sbcglobal.net.

(Dallas Morning News, Collin County edition, 10/18/09)

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/localvoices/stories/DN-east_larson_18edi.State.Edition1.2a33cef.html