The waves growl high and their white manes are toppled by the charge of the high tide hunting the beach. A few seconds of ferocity flattened out into a frothing line in the sand; a furry that fizzes out into the thinnest of watery thoughts.
My wife runs off down the beach, a declining figure becoming a near-future worry and an anxious question mark. She runs southwards where an arcing white whale marks the Nestucca river as it steams into the sea. I stand by a fossilised spine of wood spearing the sand, darkened by a forgotten forest. The storm-stripped trunk is too big to roll in the surf like other lesser logs, so now it lays beached, a slowly rotting memorial to the forest it was torn from. Sanderlings play chase with the surf, stabbing the just-wet sand until new waves flurry them up beach with dismissive hands. They scuttle back and forth through the seconds, robotic legs a blur under white bellies. A tired calligrapher paints drooping lines of geese spelling northward, outlining the darkening sentence of winter. White commas punctuate the space around Cape Kiwanda’s prehistoric painted cliff. The seaward clouds begin to clear. The sudden sun promises to dismiss the seasonal cynics. Midwinter exclaims another year. The relief of my wife’s returning figure in the distance. The crescendoing percussion of waves and surf sucking back on the sand as the tide turns. An hour later we sit reunited in Cafe Stimulus and watch the fury of the white hands waving above Cape Kiwanda: a few seconds of bursting fists, then the hand brought scraping down on the Cape’s extended leg of land, a temporary white waterfall weeping away into the wet rock. How can anyone stand to listen that constant base thump of the sea, the throb of a tsunami promised in every evacuation map, pointing hand, safety. How can anyone relax in those dune-heaped homes on the edge probability, the mocking wind accompanying such temporary, typically human hopes. One day the shaken sea will rise and one great hand will wave us all away, leaving only Cape Kiwanda and white water weeping into wet rock.
0 Comments
I remember it clearly: driving slowly uphill to our new home on Bramble Walk road. The snow was falling thick around us and Dad was nervous about the 1974 Mark II Ford slipping on the icy road. The snowflakes splashed against the windows, smearing a view of white meadows and snow laden trees.
I was four years old and we were moving from our temporary home with our paternal grandmother to a bungalow on the edge of Epsom. Epsom Common. A phrase that belied its countryside appearance with open meadows bordered by a tangled wood. This was the first time I remember seeing snow, so much snow whirling around. A true blizzard. The fairy tale woods were coated; a Narnia of endless white to explore. We stayed in the car while Dad unlocked the front door and made sure the path was safe. I don’t remember any of the first days of moving in except snapshots of the family legends: panic at the frozen pipes and using large sheets of cardboard to shovel the snow off the path. Our new, modest home sat perched a few metres higher than the south facing meadow, which resulted in an epic windswept drift of snow higher than my brother and I. Imagine the fun we had diving in and out of the snow, sledding down the tiny incline - a hill to us; building vast snow bases and having snowball fights with relieved parents. Bramble Walk inactive, the cars are stuck to the spot and piled high with snow. The houses were still, the bare trees silent with their stationary birds. What a welcome to the home for the rest of my childhood. As an adult, every time I see giddy flurries of snow drifting past the window - white puffs swirling through orange lamp light and quietly whitening the city - seconds snap back decades. My mind blurred by the busy greyness of adulthood is cast back to childhood, this snowy beginning. A smile nudges the adult aside, reminds me that happiness is found in these memories. Going to sleep looking at the drifting snow, you can hear Peter Pan tapping at the window. I wake up in the middle of the night and a single star is winking at me above the apartment block roof. Photons fired out thousands, maybe millions of years ago, skimming through space at imaginable speeds, slipping through solar systems, sneaking past planets - one true line not diverted, just a little bent by the occasional nudge of gravity but always returning to its purpose.
Now ancient photons enter my eye and fizz an image down my optic nerve to my brain: a star, a burning giant of gas billions of years old exploding with a light brighter than a million suns; then dying and leaving its elemental afterlife scattered through the drifting dust. That dust coalescing into rocks and rocks crunching into a planet that eventually means I can inherit those same elements in my body, every body, every form of matter around me. We are all literally and symbolically children of the stars, bonded to distant celestial objects through an ancient timeline of unfathomable fortune. The image refocuses on that particular planet being formed in a Goldilocks Zone from gravity-sticky lump of rocks and luck, smashing together, sticking, spinning in just the right place to make our home. Not too hot, not too cold. The image evolves: four billion years of evolution, from blobs of plasma to wriggling life, from stumbling reptiles to shivering mammals. Continents crunching as they cruise through the eons. The image gains humanity: millions of my ancestors living and loving short lives for me to be here, in this bed, looking at starlight and feeling the glaring truth: on the long road of Order to Disorder - a journey of trillions of years uncountable in this fleeting human mind - I am but a flicker, a tiny finger of light and heat, hardly noticeable in this minuscule moment of almost endless time. Yet I am a flame nonetheless, with heat and light and mass and worth. So I must shine, shine as bright as I can, all the brighter for what little light I am. I smile and thank the photons for teaching me, reminding me. What they lack in mass they make up for in wisdom. |
AuthorA poetic-essay style blog with a limit of 365 words. 365 like the days of the year - my name being one of those days! Archives
March 2020
Categories |