When I lived in New Hampshire I would sometimes spend a lot of summer time at Hampton Beach. I am usually been a winter person and still give my allegiance to that season. But as I've gotten older I also seem to find solace in the ocean's majestic changeability and the sun's healthy warmth, giving less of my heart and body to the stark purging contrasts of winter. I still like the double underline of a good Robert Frostian New England snowfall, but it can also seem too reductive now, its baptism too harsh; water and sun seem capable of more myth, more vision, less unnecessary endurance.
When I say "the beach," I really mean "the ocean" because people who go to the beach differ from people who go to the ocean. First of all, they may not say this, but beach people know that the beach cannot be trusted. After all, the beach is a shifty place, familiar but untrustworthy, where we cannot leave our footprints or build our houses, where sand is a limbo material somewhere between solid and liquid. So when they set up shop on this margin, beach people bring their inland with them, establishing little municipal units with volleyball nets and towels, re-creating the separations that have made their (span id="i">terra very firma. When, or if, they go swimming, they act like astronauts on space walks, tethered to sunscreen, umbrellas, books, music, all there to greet them when they return dripping water like sparks. People who go to the beach, like people who go camping in RVs, never really want to leave home, never really want the taste of risk in their mouths.
Ocean people, on the other hand, feel a different pull. People who go to the ocean look for baptisms the beach can never provide because they seek something other than their own reflections. For ocean people, the beach stretches like a warp thread and the ocean pulls the weft of their lives back and forth like a shuttle, weaving them across boundaries, across elements, across clouded vision.
Imagine a warm August night, an hour after sunset. Imagine walking down the slope of sand planed smooth by waves, and then into the water itself. The four elements of earth, air, water, and fire (at least the pale fire of stars and the moon) breathe together, conspire tightly, and swimming in the radiant darkness feels closer to what we must have felt when what we evolved from had its first nerves, a three-dimensional sensuality. We can know in some elemental way that the ocean that molds itself to our bodies is our cousin, that our blood and salt water share a common salinity, that who we are is primarily water and the tidal movements of water. At these moments it's possible to feel translated, connected, at home in the universe rather than baffled and frightened by it.
Yet unlike the dolphins and whales, our species is not going back; our ocean is air and the verges of stars. So when we come out, as we must, we shift gravities, from wholesome buoyancy to restless curiosity, from timelessness to calendars, from renewal to abrasion, from the certain embrace of water to the silken impermanence of air.
This is the rhythm of life for humans, graced and cursed as we are by consciousness, to move through the gauntlet of history until our raked flesh demands rest, then to search out rest until our urge for doing goads us to rejoin history, shuttling back and forth, drawing weft tight against warp, fabric among fabric.
For now my life is cities and ambition. But it would be good to live by the ocean at some point, to be lulled constantly by the waves and reminded of origins.
(October 1995)