This beach is a mess.
It wasn’t like this yesterday, and now look. I don’t have to walk ten feet before I’m practically tripping over the refuse washed ashore.
Here is a plastic soda bottle, unearthly green and in the sand neck-deep. And here the sodden remnant of a ruptured mylar balloon has draped itself over a rock, its fuchsia curling ribbon wound into a web of seaweed.
Two paces more and it’s a plastic hair comb, also half-buried. A disposable diaper, bloated and blue. A pen cap. A plastic bag. A shoe. The rusting skeleton of a beach chair, planted haphazard and useless against the bulkhead.
All of this would be adequate; the man-made waste alone would serve to fill a full week’s clean-up (I imagine the black garbage bags, packed fat and gleaming, waiting to be carried away at the bottom of the boardwalk steps).
But it is not all.
This beach is littered, too, with leaves, sticks, branches–nature’s sorry cast-offs, her tragic contributions. What wind was here! It came bowling over the bay, forearms and biceps bulging, and seized the trees and rived them. See this entire branch down. The pale flesh of the rendered trunk gapes back at me from the hill.
No one can fix this.
Which is not to say I didn’t see it coming, though I wonder now what good it did me. All week the clouds were low, darkly hovering on the far horizon. I whispered Your Name– an incantation?, exhaling against the storm.
Which came nonetheless.
Its full approach was fast, clouds clustered and balled like fists, pummeling the air in dun fury. The water quickened, churning dark green and brown foam, each wave an empty maw exploding when its jaws clamped down– and then it was all scrabbling fingers grasping at the shore. Reaching for my ankles. My knees.
The gulls shrieked– “Abandon!”– and I went under, tumult of water, foam and rage pressed against my ears. Up for air, my sputter was–again– Your Name (but may I use it both to call You and to curse?). I coughed and seethed; the next wave caught me. The world all gone to lifeless green and white, churning foam. How was I supposed to breathe?
Was I supposed to breathe?
I couldn’t find my feet. Sand passed through my fingers; it grazed my forehead. My searching feet found bottom and were swept upward again. I was the plastic bag, the soda bottle–so much flotsam to the willing ocean–the raging and powerless plaything. Airless, silent, I called You nonetheless. Is cursing also calling? Where are You then– if, in fact, You Are?
Mercy.
Now, today, the storm is over. I waken belly-down on the sand, my face pressed into a piece of driftwood. The gulls cry–“Morning!” and I sit stiffly, this week’s memories clacking together like stones in my stomach.
I am caked with salt; my skin creaks under it. Sand mats my hair, my clothes, while the water meets the shore, all meek plashing, like distant laughter.
I stand. This beach is a mess.
My hunger has the taste of hopelessness. I step. I walk. I consider the garbage bags. Where to begin but right in front of me, I guess, and I try to tease the fuchsia ribbon from the seaweed.
Help, I think, and I remember my hunger. I try Your Name again. My mouth moves like this morning’s bay– all meek, drawn up in salt. I am all salt, all sand, all hunger. All mess, like this beach.
And what do You make, anyway, of half-hearted cries, shrieks sown with anger, Your Name laced with faith and disbelief, so little truth as I dare You to lift me from the waves?
What do You do with people like me (are there people like me?) faithless and heartless, who don’t play fair?
I can’t walk well on this mess of a beach. I am stiff with salt and sand. I drag my feet. I distract myself from my hunger with sadness, with confused and gnawing regret. I whisper Your Name– a habit? I catch myself. I say it again.
Not that You would be conjured. Not that You would be forced. Not that You would be anything other than Yourself– such that I recognize You, Unmistakable, as I round the side of this spit of a beach.
You have made a small fire; You have caught some fish. You are cooking on the hot stones You made with Your own hands. Scarred hands. You sit with your knees drawn up and Your face (dear) turned to the sea. And then You look at me and You say my name.
Here is some fish, some water. Better yet, Love, bread and wine. Never mind the beach.
So I sit, curled into Your side, thirst slaked, hunger answered, while You tease the salt from my hair. You hum, chuckle softly, and smile with Your eyes. The water plashing on the shore. No, never mind the beach.
