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.
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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
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