Part 11
The tides run the channels with an almost sentient, purling calm during the burning days of summer and early fall. They lift into marshy shores and over sandy flats, and then subside. Sometimes the fog comes on in the afternoon and the deep foghorn groans through sheets of silver under the wind, a low curtain moving on and parting slightly here and there, the sunlight showing intermittently. Tiny black snails move over the flats at low tide, some absolutely still, others moving slightly with black antennae protruding and their feet probing forward. Small fish dart in the pools and hover in the tidal currents. There is an over-all mewing, chuckling, and crying, with an occasional “huh, huh” from a gull flying slowly overhead, as the light shifts with the breath of wind over water.
Gray and white ring-billed and herring gulls, occasional laughing gulls with black heads and red legs, and terns, preen, stalk, stand off in the distance, and fly up intermittently. Ringed plovers run hurriedly forward over the sands and through the shallows. A yellowlegs, tall and limber, stalks, bobs, and probes along an edge of the shore. Black-bellied plovers, big-headed, short-billed, stocky by comparison, trot through the waters, standing up straight at intervals, while the yellowlegs suddenly races back and forth on its hunt for food, turning back on its shadow. These shore birds fly off fast when disturbed, crying out, the black-bellied plover with a sweet whistle of its own.
Gentle rising and falling of the tide over ribs of sand; swirling fogs; burning sun with spokes slanting down through clouds over the rim of the world, letting in calm soft lights, green and pink and pearly across sand and rivulets and pools, or cruelly glittering diamonds over the water. Light and water and wings flow in and flow past, the motion of ages, all actions being synchronized, as the hovering and diving of the tern is synchronized with the fish it catches, part of the indefinite combinations of things in a universe of motion. Over these waters and receptive sands life crawls or flies, dives, halts, stops, and starts, wildly, with quick hearts beating, or scarcely a heart at all, blind, or vibrant with sight, probing with accuracy and speed or merely moving at random.
They are all elements in a great exchange--this ardor and play of one instant in time, an instant that is equal in importance to all others. I stand here at the apex of one day. Here out of a thousand years is another advent, another chance for action, another use for sight, in the beautiful agreement of all contrary, separate, and divided things.
I remember one evening at Morris Island in the latter part of August, with the day beginning to fall and the surf’s dull roar sounding from the sands of the great beach, a beach behind me, still beyond me, still in a sense not walked. The tide started to ebb, flicking lightly against the shore, lapsing with the evening as if the sea had an easy courtesy of its own, and with the smoky sunset low on the western sky, the waters moved out over gray sands. There was a perfect symmetry to the evening. Terns flew over, light, airy, floating with a swallow’s beat, but deep, sure, and strong. Little sanderlings and red-backed sandpipers, half-seen in the dusk, ran through reflections in the shallow waters at the edge of the tide, part of its coolness and flow, the little waves in banked rows rippling. The birds tripped forward and dipped to the mirrored salmon, copper and crystal in these waters, in a communication. The terns trilled harshly and sometimes their bodies trembled as they beat up against the light wind and changed position. A single herring gull stood still on a hummock at the tide’s edge like an Indian in a ritualistic acceptance of darkness coming on. The order of change and constancy began to take light’s fire and warmth and its colors away, in the graduated motion of the sky, along with all flying elements like the terns, like thought, and the unimagined combinations of being. The wavelets edged out. The sanderlings started to flit off and disappear. Finally there was no turning back the authority of night.
Transcriber’s Notes
Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Illustrations have been moved nearer to the text to which they refer.
Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.