The Blurs
For a music video version of this vignette, click here.
The sand steams and it shouldn’t be this hot. Hot is relative, though. Here on the foggy Pacific Northwest Coast, it means upper 70s, little fog. A few miles inland it’s ten degrees warmer. In the city, it’s a heat wave worthy of an alert on the weather app.
But here, the sand isn’t used to the prolonged touch of the sun. The last wave or the last high tide worked its way between the grains and stayed there. The trapped water silently combusts. I wonder what else would undergo such a violent state change so quietly, but maybe the noise is drowned out by the waves.
The steam coalesces into haze that stretches to the horizon. It’s reminiscent of smog, but there’s none of that here. Not even much trash littering the beach. It’s easy to believe pollution isn’t something that touches a place like this, with sea stars on the rocks and anemones reaching their gauzy arms into the moving water. I know better, of course, because this very ocean houses the garbage patch.
Aerosolized salt makes the air taste metallic. Anywhere else I’d be suspicious that tang came from a manufacturing plant’s off-gas, but here I pull that air as far into my lungs as I can. I remember all the old English novels whose characters “took the sea air” as an antidote to maladies.
The steaming sand blurs the sea-to-sky horizon. The water floods over my feet, blurring the human-to-earth horizon. There is no cell phone signal so the movement of time has blurred the morning-to-afternoon horizon.
The barrier between water and earth is just as unclear. That distinction is both clean when seen from the window of a plane or a picture taken by a satellite. But down here, among the snails and the washed-up jellies and the misshapen shells, the boundary isn’t nearly as focused.
Where I am standing changes every minute: my feet are covered by the ocean but their soles rest on the land. Were I to be braver, I could be enveloped by that ocean. Were I not as brave, I could retreat beyond the water’s reach.
There are creatures who dabble in sea, like the birds who fly over waves or float on top of them. There are creatures of only the sea, likes whales or dolphins living immersed. Then there are the creatures of the middle space, the tidal zone where they are sea creatures and land creatures depending on the level of the tide. They are salty and then sun drenched. They are eaten by sea creatures and those on the land. They are assailed from all sides and they cling to rocks to try and survive.
As I bend down to study them, I am also washed by waves. The sand works its way between my feet and my shoes. Grains stick in the creases of my fingers. I am not as tough or as stuck as those tidal animals; I have legs that can take me away should I choose. If it were to rain or become unpleasantly cold, I could leave. They cannot.
I am here and not there. I am there and not here. I exist on a line between and that line blurs with each wave and with each breath.
Inspired by events at Kalaloch Beach, Olympic National Park, Washington.
on the land of the Elwha Klallam, Hoh, Jamestown S’Klallam, Makah, Quileute, Port Gamble S’Klallam, Quinault, S’Klallam, and Skokomish people (source).