I hate birthdays, especially ones that involve chasing homicidal animals at the beach…
It’s my birthday and I’m at the beach. This is surprising, because I really don’t like going to the beach.
What’s even more unusual is the size of the crowd that has turned out to celebrate with me. My dad, my wife and a fair number of my friends are sitting around, picnicking in the afternoon sun of a late summer day.
I loathe being the centre of attention. This isn’t even a landmark birthday. I turned 40 last year and the pandemic gave me a great excuse not to have any kind of a celebration to mark the occasion.
Yet here we are, at a busy beach – more a Californian beach than a South-of-England beach – gathering under a gazebo, eating at a low plastic picnic table, napping on beach towels.
At least the weather is more to my liking: warm but not unbearable.
A VIP guest
I’m reclining on a towel in something of a private funk, looking at images on my phone – photos I took a while ago, of my own drawings.
Quite unexpectedly, podcaster and lifestyle guru Tim Ferriss approaches and sits down next to me.
He’s evidently an acquaintance of someone in our group. Or perhaps a friend has just spotted him on the beach and encouraged him to come and say hello to the Birthday Boy.
Maybe they’ve sent him over as a birthday treat, because they know I like his work. Nevertheless, I find these kinds of encounters acutely awkward.
I find celebrity encounters acutely awkward
He looks at my phone screen for a moment, nonchalantly, as if assessing the drawings that held my attention until a moment ago.
“Can I have your phone?” he asks. He picks the device up from the sand before I have time to answer. I sense that he has no real interest in my work and I’m kind of annoyed he’s taken by phone, but I have to be cool about it. After all, he’s famous.
Immediately, Ferriss deftly swipes away from the photos, then taps the screen a few times and I realise with dawning horror that he’s actually initiating a group Zoom call that will invite everyone on my contact list, all at once.
This is mortifying. Everyone will think I’m reaching out to them, that I’m narcissistic enough to spring a birthday Zoom call on them.
Playing it cool
I don’t feel angry at Ferriss – it’s evidently some prank he’s been put up to by my friends. Maybe they had good intentions but I am not happy about this; I’m a very private person.
He returns the phone to me and the screen fills with a mosaic of flickering squares: a random assortment of friends, family, people from my old job – anyone who was curious or simply free when the call came in, and wasn’t already at the beach.
I worry that I’ll be exposed as an anxious control freak
I’m trying to be a good sport about this, as I potter around the picnic area in my swimming trunks, but I know that people will see I’m struggling to keep my cool under all this scrutiny. I’m fretting that ‘the real me’ – an anxious, panicky control freak – will be exposed by this telephonic hazing.
I pin my hopes on the idea that people will just get bored and hang up, that they won’t stick around to see if more juicy moments of embarrassment are forthcoming.
I’m still holding the phone as I join some friends around the low plastic picnic table.
Before I can sit down, two tiny kangaroo mice, big-eared and springy – like those in the recent movie adaptation of Dune – come skittering across the table. One briefly skips onto the blanketed lap of a friend who has a young baby. Everyone is charmed by these beautiful, tiny creatures, including me.
But my joyful absorption in the spectacle is broken by the sensation of a jolting movement at my feet.
The Vulpine Revelation
Underneath the picnic table is a squat plastic storage container, which bangs twice against my feet, hard and insistent enough that I step back from the group.
Beneath the picnic table is a large fox, lithe and vivid
I’m shocked by what I see beneath the table: a large fox, lithe and vivid, with a gorgeous apricot coat of fur and snowy white patches on its belly and chin.
The fox has its muzzle deep inside the plastic box, which seems to be filled with tools. It is drying to drag something out of the container.
I realise with shock that it has its teeth around the wooden handle of a saw blade. It adjusts its grip and pulls the saw cleanly out and onto the sand.
Everyone is stunned by this spectacle. The charming desert mice have been totally forgotten.
I feel confident that I can deal with this. Foxes live down the road from our house. I regularly chase them back into the field, when their unrelenting shrieks wake my family in the night.
I feint at the fox – as one might at a skittish pigeon – to try and get it to drop the blade. That doesn’t work, so I grab a piece of wood from the floor and bang it against the springy metal of the saw blade itself, but the animal isn’t remotely cowed. It drops the hand saw, snaps at me and emits a low growl, bearing its perfect pale fangs.
This is not a city fox – it isn’t wary of people, it doesn’t know the rules. It lunges at me and I back off.
I can hear the worried exclamations from my friends, who think I’ve picked a fight with a rabid animal and am about to get mauled.
Then the fox starts dragging the saw away from us and up the beach, its jaw now clenched around the wooden handle. It manages to get a bit more purchase and begins to move faster.
The situation worsens
I watch for a second, stunned and amazed.
The metal teeth are heading towards to ankles of beach goers
The blade skims along, leading with the serrated edge, a few centimetres or so above the sand. The zigzagging metal teeth are now heading towards the ankles of oncoming beach goers, young and old.
I spring back into action, genuinely worried about someone getting injured. I grab a small, light hammer from the box and begin chasing the fox like a madman.
I feel like the fox is my responsibility: he stole the hand saw from my birthday party, after all.
I’m quickly able to catch up. I run alongside, and gingerly try to negotiate around, the fox and its trophy. I hold my breath for a moment as a mother and a toddler just barely succeed in dancing out of the way of the jagged blade.
I can sense the sheer disbelief and fear around me.
I manage to strike the blade down out of the fox’s mouth for a moment, but again the fox lunges and snaps at me. I feel like I’m mere seconds away from an awful fate – the creature is unbelievably fast and belligerent.
The fox takes off again and I can hear my friends and family shouting at me to leave it, that I’m going to get seriously hurt.
The lone pursuit
The chase moves on up the beach, ever closer to the shoreline. Now there are far fewer bystanders to worry about but I’m not making any progress in catching or disarming the creature.
In fact, sometimes the fox can no longer be seen at all – it is so spry and supple that it actually disappears beneath the silty sands. It tunnels effortlessly into the surface, just as a seabird might dive beneath the surface of the water to catch its prey. All I can see is that gleaming panel saw, skidding across the beach, as if propelled by an unseen force.
The pursuit continues. The water deepens and the crowds thin out completely. I’m knee-deep in the surf, trying to keep track of my quarry, when I feel a pain in my leg.
Has the fox bitten me, or have I upset some other creature from the shallows?
I feel a hard lump forming on the side of my right calf. I look down and see a small swelling has already appeared. It grows rapidly to the size of my thumb.
I squeeze the growth and a lozenge of pale driftwood emerges, cleanly, from under my skin, like a pip squeezed from a ripe fruit. I toss the object into the sea and continue the chase.
By now we’re a long way from the developed, populous part of the beach.
We’ve come to an uninhabited area – the beach narrows, and is taken up by the wreck of an old wooden structure. It looks like a sunken and storm-tossed pier, or the remains of some abandoned sea defences.
A chase through the wreckage
There are piles, pillars, cross braces and something like a mangled jetty protruding from the deepening water. I’m forced to climb up onto these ruins to continue the pursuit.
My monomania would frighten Captain Ahab
I continue on, driven by a monomania that would frighten Captain Ahab.
To the left of these contorted wooden scaffolds, I notice a towering stack of black cars: wheelless, rusting husks dating from some time in the 1950s. To the right of me there is a dense wall of mangroves and other foliage. This place has undoubtedly been left to nature.
I climb through the perilous scaffolding, convinced I can keep up with the fox and the hand saw as they move through the water below me.
Then, I remember the group Zoom call. I pull out my phone and look at it. The call is still going. Predictably, many people have become bored and hung up, but the main image on the screen is of a small group of my closest friends.
They’re in some kind of indoor adventure park, playing a version of crazy golf that involves hitting a comically oversized ball with an equally oversized club.
I feel left out. Why wasn’t I invited to this? It looks fun. It’s my birthday, after all.
I suddenly realise that I’ve become distracted; I twist around and look for the fox. The water is high and caramel-coloured, utterly opaque, and I can’t make out where the fox is. I see things moving in the water, things that might or might not be the handsaw skimming the surface, or might be fish darting through the waves.
It seems best to make for higher ground.
The view from the watchtower
I clamber up some scaffolding in a vain attempt to find a better vantage point. As I scramble upwards, I lose my grip on the hammer, the only weapon I had, and it clatters down through the structure, ricocheting off the beams before disappearing beneath the water.
The noise of the tool plopping into the sea registers like the tolling of a final bell, as if to indicate that the chase is at an end.
I realise the world is calling time on my impotent and farcical attempts to eke out a victory over the fox. Nature always wins in the end.
I haul myself up onto the platform of a rudimentary watchtower.
The Zoom call is still going, and looking at the screen I have a sudden and sad realisation that my mother is stuck at home, totally left out of the afternoon’s action, the good and the bad.
Feeling deflated by this epiphany, I walk back along the structure and turn away from the ocean toward the town beside the beach.
I see that dusk is now falling. The sun is beginning to set and is casting a red-orange glow, already turning the buildings before it into hazy shadows.
My birthday has gotten away from me. I’ve run and run until I found myself alone here, distant from everyone I know, on a ruined structure with nothing to show for myself.
