Late on a late September afternoon I got out of the car and started to walk slowly, as I had done so many times that year, across the long sandy stretch of barrier beach toward the unseen sea. I came to the little wooden footbridge that spanned the shallow tidal river. Its two-faced current now flowed gently southward, its depth ebbing with the tide. Here, all summer, blond-haired children had run their stick races, dropping twigs or bits of marsh grass over one side of the bridge, then dashing to the other side to see the winner emerge. Their imaginations made a great tunnel of the four-foot width of that bridge – a safe tunnel with a predictable exit, and yet one whose unseen currents could sort out and change in a matter of seconds the order and fate of the passive sticks.
The children were gone now, though the alternating currents of the stream continued in their lunar rhythms. The sky was in a state of brilliant instability so characteristic of this land. At a very low altitude thin-bodied sheets of cloud raced madly out to sea, while higher up, majestically aloof, a cumulus layer, like a fleet of flat-bottomed boats, floated in slow whiteness in the opposite direction. Amid all this the sun periodically broke through and splashed in broken patterns on the sand, pursuing the cloud shadows across the plain and the sculptured dunes of the beach. It was as though the heavens were engaged in a playful, or at least thoughtless, kind of end-of-the-season housecleaning.
The wind was clean, new, and sharp with the salt of distant spray. It scattered sand, light sticks and dead straws of beach grass. It compelled the living beach grass clumps to draw circles around themselves in the sand, as though marking off a new domain and a new episode in their endless struggle for survival. At the same time it subtly moved the dunes which threaten always to bury whatever life they foster.
All this flurry of inanimate activity discomposed me. I felt like something left over from a bygone season, that might be swept away capriciously, deposited in the sea or buried in the sand for a dark and mindless renewal. I wanted things quiet and still, solemn, even gray - something to feed my inarticulate need for a sense of finality, of closure, which, it seemed, could only be fed from without. There are, after all, no endings or beginnings to human things unless we make them in our imaginations, and the imagination can only feed on facts, can only create from and transform what is there.
I walked on, over the bridge, across the wide central plain of the beach, on which only a trace of beach buggy wheels were left in the moving sand. And then, about a hundred feet from the final rise of dunes, as though to startle expectation, the sea threw up an unbidden gesture. It leaped up through the narrow cleft in the dune: a sudden surge of wave that reached out toward me, gained for an instant the irresistible shape of a hand before its lengthening fingers sank, turned to foam and dribbles, and disappeared into the sand. It was a moment's apparition, an arm spawned, shaped, thrust, amputated and buried in the space of a few seconds. And that was all.
Nothing followed. But it was something, and it would have to be enough. I turned and headed back to the bridge, the capricious wind now at my face, now at my back, but in the end undirected and uncompelling.
