One morning a few weeks ago I drove to the beach to check out the surf. There was dense fog, and the surf, though convulsed, seemed low - only three-to-four-foot-high breakers. Then I realized that, due to the fog, I was only able to see 100 feet or so offshore, and that these low waves were secondary breakers. The larger waves were breaking further offshore, beyond my line of sight.
The disparity was heightened by a large, loud and universal under-roar offshore, as if there were a wave factory just beyond the wall of fog, pumping out breakers continuously and sending them in – as in fact there was. That constant beating of the invisible, offshore waves had a rhythmic, pumping quality to it. I felt as if I were standing in the engine room of some huge ship – a container freighter or mega-cruiser – with the enormous pistons pounding and echoing off the hull walls, creating an arena of pulsing, thrumming, universal sound.
The tide was near low, the beach a wide curved arc of smooth clean sand, bubbling in the wash of the waves’ withdrawal. The wrack line lay at the base of the cliffs, composed mostly of wreathes and braided tresses of golden-green rockweed, indicating the depths to which the storm had clawed the bottom. A moderate congregation of gulls stood facing the wind, and a handful of dunlins probed and raced over the white sands, as if time were running out.
As I headed north, I stopped and chatted with the lone fisherman who was surf-casting into that chaos of white and gray green. I greeted him saying, “I didn’t know they bit when it was this rough.”
“Oh yes,” he replied, “This is how they like it. Stripers are very sensitive to air pressure; they feed more when it’s low. Fellow made a killing right here earlier this week – of course I wasn’t here.”
I wished him good luck and headed north.
As I walked along, an old song from the '70s that I had heard on the radio driving out here resurfaced. It’s hypnotic repeated refrain – “On and on, on and on” - intertwined itself into my mind, my walking pace, the underlying rhythm of the waves, and the fog-obscured stretch of beach ahead of me. The beach stretched out endlessly before me, and it seemed that it was that next stretch of beach just ahead of me, obscured by fog and hidden by the curve of the shore itself, that was a template for the future – for the future, after all, is that which is hidden from us, withheld, even as we approach it. I think that is why we have such a great sense of possibility out here on the beach. The future seems so much nearer, accessible; only a few more steps along the sand and we will reach it: On and on – On and on – On and on.
