PLACES; Eight Place Stories

by Ralph Bowden

  *****

  Waking at barely morning, I found myself doubled up and shivering in my sleeping bag, which was rated only to 40 degrees. It was much colder than that in the van. I reached one arm out quickly and turned on the heater. It roared purposefully, but its output took a while to penetrate the bag to my body. By the time the van was warm enough to crawl out, condensation fogged all the glass. I found and put on clean underwear, and my flannel shirt, overalls, and boots. Grabbing a jacket, I slid the door back and dashed to the portapotty. On the way, I looked toward where I thought I had seen the tent glow last night and confirmed a small, yellow pup tent. No nearby vehicle.

  Back in the toasty van, I prepared the simplest of breakfasts. The milk had an ice skim on it and the banana was almost black, but the cereal was untouched by the cold. I made do.

  The sun was up and the sky a pale, humid, early morning blue when I emerged again, in a toboggan, a scarf, and gloves. The beach. The beach. I needed to be there for the morning view, and hustled along the path.

  The surf sounded more active this morning, and I looked forward to absorbing some of its energy into my jaded spirit. Emerging from the pines, however, I noticed a person sitting on the dune-top boardwalk rail where I had taken in the evening scene yesterday. The person was small, either not fully grown, or, more likely, female, though there was nothing about the dress to indicate either. A tassel-less toboggan and gray scarf hid any possible hair and all face but eyes. Was this the tent dweller, who had beaten me to my morning on the beach?

  Clearly, the person was enjoying the view, as I had, and partly out of reluctance to intrude and partly from my reluctance to interact, I considered turning around and going out to the beach by some other route. There wasn’t much choice, though. If I went through the pine woods to the right of the legitimate boardwalk, I’d have to blaze a path not only through the woods but across virgin dunes in violation of the clear prohibitions, which I respected. I could walk back to the campground road and go out through the gate to the access road beyond. It paralleled the beach from the other direction. That would be a considerable walk, however. By the time I reached the beach there, the sun would be fully up and no longer casting the long dune shadows I was hoping to experience. The presence of the road was also offensive. Even if there was no traffic on it, the potential was there at any time.

  I waited a few minutes to see if the person would move on to the beach. Most people would, and she (if that’s who it was), was well equipped in boots suitable for beach walking. But she did not move. I would simply have to go by, and walk up the beach far enough to find solitude.

  She heard or sensed me through the boardwalk as I started up toward her, and looked around. I could see no expression, wrapped as she was in the scarf. Possibly she was interested in solitude as much as I and resented my presence as much as I resented hers. I would respect that, and limit any interaction to the civil minimum.

  She looked back out to sea as I approached, a good sign. Maybe I could get by with no more than a grunt. But five feet out, she turned again. No smile or expression on the few square inches of face I could see, but she did ask, “That your van?”

  I nodded. “That your tent?”

  “Yeah. What time do they come around?”

  I assumed she meant the ranger, checking the campground. “I don’t know. Just got here yesterday afternoon. The office is only open two to four.”

  “Um.” She didn’t seem about to say anything else, so I went on by, down the buried board walk to the beach, and turned right on the hard sand where the tide was coming back in. I was relieved. She wasn’t a talker. Nothing about what a fine morning it was, how cold it was, or questions about what I was doing here. In the brief few seconds of our conversation, I had gathered no idea of her age, accent, attractiveness, or anything else. That was fine. All I needed to know was that she showed no more interest in me than I in her. Our mutual solitude seemed assured.

  I hustled along, hoping to find a high dune from which to watch and feel the morning come on. I passed several because they were too close, and I would see her if I looked back. The one I finally settled on was probably half a mile from the boardwalk, and not as high as I would have liked. But it provided some privacy. The spot I chose to sit was just on the edge of the shadow cast by the nearby higher dune. As the sun rose, I watched that shadow retreat from me, surprisingly fast, thanks to the low angle.

  It was cold, though. The sand I sat on was icy, and sucked heat out of my bottom in a few minutes. I took in the view, the ocean, near and far, and the horizon, a crisp, fogless line this morning where the sky met the sea far out. Last night’s ship was gone, and I could sweep almost 180 degrees of uninterrupted horizon. Nearby, surf was somewhat more energetic than last night, but few waves generated any significant foam or crash. The weatherman would probably call this a 1-to-2 foot sea, fast chop rather than swells. The onshore breeze was clearly out of the north, and brought the surf in obliquely, so it rolled along the sand as it broke. Somewhere out there, more storm activity must have stirred things up. The water was gray, despite the blue sky, though as the sun rose higher, the sea would surely respond and reflect.

  When my frozen behind could take it no more, I stood. Looking back toward the boardwalk, she was gone. Far down the beach beyond, there was a speck, marching quickly in the other direction. Excellent. We had divided the beach between us.

  I needed to march quickly, too, and stir some blood, so I headed up the beach, trying to still my brain and channel my senses to appreciate the sights, smells, sounds, and feel of this, my native environment. I observed how the water my weight squeezed out of the sand returned into my footprints, the way the swash patterns changed between one wave and the next, how the little shorebirds seemed to know exactly where to sample the sand and the pattern of beak holes they left and the next wave wiped out. But beyond this kind of analytical observation, I reveled in the integrated sense of the whole experience. Some people get their highs climbing mountains or sheer rock faces, exploring caves, or hiking great distances through rugged country. Mine come from the subtleties of this usually benign merger of land and sea. Not always entirely safe, of course; there is no more violent place than the beach in a hurricane, and no more destructive phenomena than a tsunami. But danger is not normally built into enjoyment of the beach.

  I walked for probably four or five miles, until the state park ended and private development took over the sand. Rows of huge three- and even four-story mansions with sea views abruptly replaced dunes. They were virtually all empty now, and ‘For Sale’ signs decorated probably a third of them. I could spew gallons of vitriol over this kind of desecration, and the sick values and economic incentives behind it, but there was no point. I simply turned away from the abomination and headed back where I came from, slower. It was better to appreciate the positives protected by the state park than to fume over the grossness of the free marketplace.

  The sun was high, now, in a brilliant blue sky, but had done little to warm the air. I kept my hands gloved, though I did sample the water temperature once (considerably warmer than the air), and once even stopped to rescue a small crab that seemed to be in distress of some kind. I couldn’t tell – was it sick, old and dying, or just disoriented by repeated lashings from the surf? I used a shell to move it up-beach, temporarily out of the surf, hopefully to recover. The tide was still coming in. It would be high by the time I reached the boardwalk.

  Thinking of the boardwalk brought back thoughts of the person sharing the beach with me. The boardwalk was roughly in the middle of St. Cecelia Beach. A major inlet bounded her end. Unless she stopped somewhere, we might well meet again at the boardwalk. To avoid that, I climbed a high dune and scanned the beach ahead. There was no speck, no sign of any human. She may have given up earlier, from the cold, perhaps, and returned to her tent. In fact, with any luck, she might have packed up and hiked or paddled off before the ranger came around and required her to register.

 
; I continued on to the boardwalk and went back to my van in the campground. The yellow pup tent was still there. Okay. I was determined not to think about it. Not my concern. After a simple lunch and a stretch-out rest to warm up with the heater, I intended to go back and do the other end of the beach.

  My plans, however, ran awry. I fell asleep to the comforting, isolating roar of the heater. When I woke, I checked the van’s radio clock, and found it was nearly 3. The sun was still shining brightly, but the angle was well down. I hurried straight for the beach, hiking briskly.

  The tide should have been receding, but a stiff onshore wind was keeping it to the high tide mark, leaving no hard-packed sand to walk on. The soft sand above was more tiring. After 20 minutes, I began to question my plan. My initial pace sweated me up inside my jacket. The moisture seemed to suck out the bodily heat generated by that same pace. I had not pulled on longjohns this morning. My pants were reasonably heavy, but open at the bottom around the boots. Cold breezes kept coming higher up my legs. If I had some cord, I might have cinched the pant legs tight, but this was a remarkably clean beach, with almost no wash-up trash – one of the reasons I came here.

  I lasted an hour, probably no more than half way to the inlet, before yielding to realities. I needed to get out of the wind, so cut over an old, unauthorized dune path to the access road and along it to the head of a trail that would take me back through some pine woods to the bay side of the narrow barrier strip. Walking was easy on the mulched path, and the dune ridge and trees cut the wind. Though the sun was quickly sinking and had never done much to thaw the day anyway, it felt warm here in comparison with the beach.

  The salt meadows that opened out in front of me as I left the pine trees were also a kind of land/water transition. But this environment didn’t have the same effect on me as the beach, where land and ocean confronted each other directly. Yes, the water on this side was still salt, or at least brackish, but it was enclosed, rather than free. Land had captured it, tamed it, stripped its potential to roar and pound. In a hurricane or storm surge, of course, the water back here could rise and assert itself over the land, but without the drama of surfside.

  My trail wandered along the edge of normal high tide, between solid land and salt marsh. Today, with the onshore wind preventing normal drainage, water was high and there were squishy places where the maze of marsh channels almost touched the trail.

  Probably a mile from the access road, I came to a boardwalk pier that extended out into the marsh, intended as access for bird watchers. The marsh was a rich environment for water fowl of all kinds, though I saw few today. Those that could migrate had already left for the season.

  I walked out the pier several hundred feet before a small pavilion and floating dock ended this incursion into the marsh. Pulled up on the dock was a two-person, open-water kayak, turned over and chained to a post. It would have been half a day’s paddle to here from the nearest landside put-in I knew about. Not that the bay, once it opened out beyond the salt marsh, was wider than maybe a mile, but there was no road making the land side accessible. The old kayak was scraped and dinged. The person sharing St. Cecelia’s with me was probably an experienced kayaker and camper.

  The sun was now well down. Shadows had lengthened and merged. It would be dark in the pine trees and a considerable distance to my van. I turned and headed back along the boardwalk pier quickly, kicking myself for not bringing a flashlight. Just as I reached the trail again, the person emerged from the pine trees, head down, following her weak flashlight. She jumped a little when she caught sight of me, hardly 20 feet away.

  “Oh.”

  “Your kayak?” I said.

  “Yes. It’s still there?”

  “On the float, turned over and chained to a post,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said again, and I could see she was deciding whether to take my word for it or go check for herself.

  “You headed back to camp?” I asked. “I’ve no light.”

  “Come on,” she said after a moment, turning and setting off into the pine trees. Her flashlight was pretty dim, but I could follow her along on the trail without much trouble. When we reached the campground, I peeled off with a “thanks for the light,” the only words either of us had spoken on the hike in from the pier. Our compatibility struck me as a little funny, that neither of us had the slightest interest in communicating with the only other human available. Perverse, perhaps, but it suited me, and evidently her too.