I was 14 when I first heard Jackson Browne’s 1972 hit, “Rock Me on the Water,” on the radio in my brother’s car on the way to school. That same afternoon, I used two weeks’ allowance to buy the LP at TG&Y for $4. Alone in my little bedroom with the flower power bedspread and the Surfing-Snoopy-Cowabunga poster, I would play the song “on repeat” by manually picking up the tonearm of my baby blue record player and carefully placing the needle in the space after track three of side B of Browne’s self-titled debut album.
And for 50 years now, and as recently as yesterday, I have periodically gone back to playing the song on repeat (much easier to do now) to delve into its meaning anew. It is something of an anthem to me. And it just seems to improve with age.
Back then, as a precocious teenager, the appeal of the song was three-fold. I was a self-proclaimed “surfer chick” (more of a groupie really since I didn’t actually surf), and the beach was my stomping ground. Getting “to the sea somehow” was all I cared about at that age. I was also a devoted little Jesus person — an enthusiastic disciple of the burgeoning Jesus movement of the early ’70s. The religious references in the song — a seabird “gliding in one place, like Jesus in the sky,” and standing “before the Father” when his life is over, appealed to the little evangelist in me.
But mostly, as an angst-ridden ninth grader, the notion that the water could “soothe my fevered brow” was irresistible. The song checked all my boxes.
A decade later, sitting on the jumpseat of a Boeing 727 late at night while all the passengers slept, I cued the song up on my Walkman, and wept with homesickness, feeling like one of those “homeless souls” Browne empathizes with in the third stanza.
I kept coming back to the song during all my years away from “home.” Though I lived happily (and sometimes unhappily) in wonderful places around the world — Costa Rica, Manhattan, London, Los Angeles, Seattle — I always, always felt an underlying longing to “get back to the sea somehow.”
And I did. My little house in the dunes is the materialization of a childhood dream and lifelong yearning. The “sisters of the sun” wake me every morning and draw me to the shore to greet the dawn. In 12 years, I have rarely missed a sunrise.
Except during the COVID lockdowns. For two long weeks, I was legally prohibited from setting foot on the beach in my own backyard. Officers in ATVs enforced the order. It was such a counter-intuitive restriction during this time of sickness and forced isolation. The shore is such a healing place — and yet, we were all “lost inside our houses,” longing for connection.
Today, I recognize the sociological themes Browne addressed so poetically in this plaintive call to action. “It’s not about religion, it’s about society,” he said in an interview. It’s about paying attention to what’s happening in the world coupled with humankind’s “inner search for meaning.”
“Oh, people, look around you,” he begs in the very first line of the song. Though he wrote the piece in the tumultuous era of the Vietnam War, it could have been written last Tuesday. I squirm at his gentle rebuke: “You’ve left it for somebody other than you to be the one to care.”
With so many dire social and political issues vying for our attention these days, it’s hard not to feel inundated. I think Browne expressed feeling overwhelmed by it all as well — and torn between his belief that our collective hope lay in fellowship with one another, and his personal need for separation from the fray. He looked to the sea for renewal, for clarity, for comfort.
“I’m gonna leave you here,” he sings, “and try to get down to the sea somehow.”
And so am I. It is dawn and the sisters of the sun are here. That seabird is hovering. “The wind is with me now.”
There is hope.
Sharla Dawn Gorder is a Pensacola Beach resident and columnist for the Island Times newspaper. She is the author of “My Vices Collide; a Celebration of Being a Little Messed Up,” and is currently working on her next book, entitled “Crayon Dawn,” due out in October 2024.
