Cold. Penetrating deep cold, but exhilarating. On shore wind as the air rises over the still warmer land, and the ocean air rushes in to fill the vacuum. Cleansing. Lung filling. Soul filling. A sharp breeze comes over the water picking up moisture and is scrubbed as it comes. The air streams around and over Bluff and Stratton Islands in the harbor, loading up from beyond the horizon where the earth curves out of sight, past the Azores, past the edge of the world. Cold, clean, pure, merciless, but without bias or favor.
The sun begins the day’s work out of sight in the east over the rocks and low scrub and a few trees on the wooded point at the end of the beach curve just north of the open sea. Pink-orange and red gray, the clouds reflect the refracted light before the sun makes its morning arrival. Then it does, and we must stop staring at the blinding intensity.
Gulls – American and European herring gulls, ring-billed gulls and a few larger black back gulls join them. Gulls swoop and glide a foot above the beach looking for a landing spot even before full sunrise. Heartbreakingly graceful. One standout wheels back at a nearly impossible angle, pivoting almost on its wingtip, barely clearing the sand, rights itself in a perfect pirouette, glides effortlessly another twenty feet, finds its spot selected with no observable distinction from any other spot, and with a slight change of pitch of wings drops gently on the beach, settles with a brief flourish and straightening of feathers put away like a cloak, more compact than their full spread would suggest, a brief quivering like an elegant woman settling into her chair in a premium restaurant at a choice table. She doesn’t immediately pick up a crab or a clam. Just turns into the wind, stands and waits patiently a couple of feet from the tidal flow. Waits for something not apparent to anyone else. Stretches its neck, looks skyward, parts its bill, and cries out in the unmistakable gull call.
Four surfers and a paddleboarder work on their competences in predawn twilight three hundred yards north down the beach. The surfers take their turns following the wave break that they each ride not quite parallel to the shore. All are skilled. No one puts on a wetsuit when it’s forty five degrees and spends their precious time before work begins for the day by plunging into the surf with their long board tethered to their ankle if they are not serious. They call everyone dude and employ an esoteric vocabulary like a casually organized fraternity, united by a love for their frigid, perfect, wet, plunging and surging sanctuary. When you speak with them occasionally, they are unfailingly polite and friendly. Will talk with strangers about the quality of the waves like they have known each other all their lives. Maybe they have.
Another half dozen or so of us on the nearly empty two mile beach got up to catch the beginning of the day; two are in bathrobes and wrapped in blankets. Some stand or lean on a fence. Several in heavy sweaters, stocking hats, and high ankle hikers are dutifully walking their dogs. Another is meandering slowly, barefoot, but sweater clad, on the edge of the water where the waves finally peter out looking for shells or sand worn beach glass. A guy with a hoodie is running with his very large dog. Maybe a Newfie – hard to tell at distance and murky light. He’s quickly covering the ground south towards the long wooden pier with multiple single-story, now closed, gray shingled souvenir shops. The pier protrudes five hundred feet out into the open ocean. The runner is probably headed home to grab some more coffee and drive to the office. The rest of us are alone. An older woman, slightly portly with glasses and a kind face sits in a high backed beach chair with an expensive looking camera trying to catch the light. She’s barefoot too. Maybe she’ll paint her photo later. Watercolors.
The laughing, drinking, partying summer throngs have abandoned the jostling crowded sidewalks and have gone home to New Jersey or Quebec or Hartford. Many come every summer for a week or two like a ritual. Expensive vacations, but not out of reach. Not the Hamptons, but not an inflatable pool in the backyard either. Most of the restaurants, pizza places, and French fry stands are already boarded up for the coming winter. But not all of them. The Beach Bagel breakfast counter stays open year round for the regulars and a few hearty bargain seeking tourists. Bacon, egg and cheddar on onion bagels and more; the conversations of townsfolks about the baseball playoffs, the depravations of the now ruined Patriots, the latest expensive embarrassments of town council mistakes, the planned wedding of a daughter in the spring, arthritis, the foolish boss where they work. The waitresses tease and are teased back in familiar ribald jesting. Familiar faces, too. Relaxed and at ease with each other and the routine, although they may not know all the names; customers are comfortable with silence too, staring into their coffee.
The beach begins a slow recovery and gives itself back to the full time residents who love all its seasons and don’t mind its moods. A recent storm eroded some of the border beach grasses, pushed up flotsam far up on the sand towards the wind fence, a couple of large broken branches that look like white pine wash in and out on the waves, a bent unbuoyed lobster trap rests fifteen feet beyond the farthest breaking waves.
The waves have been breaking endlessly on this beach for a million years or at least for ten thousand since the last Ice Age covered everything here under two hundred feet of glacier. The waves come in gray green, surrender to gravity, pick up the wind, foam white at the crest, cascade, slowly subside and recede. A nanosecond after they fall, I see them; a second later I hear them with a tiny delay. Sound follows light. For a million years the rhythmic breaking proceeds. Not silent, but not jarring. Restful. Sleep on the beach if it was warmer. The voice of the world.
The gulls gather in small groups facing the north Atlantic. No unguarded sandwiches or chip bags on blankets to pillage. Gone for the winter. Picked clean. The gulls too are comfortable in silence. Waiting.
So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. Genesis 1:21
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