Beach Walks

At my request, Mary shook me awake at about seven this morning. The room was dark, the guys still asleep, but we had agreed to take a morning beach-walk together, and neither of us knew how soon the sun would be rising. I threw on some aqua shoes, grabbed a Clif bar and a bottle of water, buttoned up my jacket and was ready to go. Mary and I slipped outside into a nippy breeze and a sky that glowed with a rainbow of pastels. The distance from our hotel room to the ocean is less than a block, and we soon stepped into the fine white sand of the beach and began walking. 

After a few minutes, I pointed out a flock of seagulls far off on the eastern horizon. As Mary and I watched them, the uppermost tip of the sun leaped into the sky, a vivid pink that had us both staring for a moment until we remembered what our mother told us about not looking at the sun. Over the course of a few seconds, the massive pink orb had cleared the rim of the ocean and spilled golden light all over the water. 

Mary and I walked for a few miles, picking our way between the shells, watching the pelicans float in the waves like little brown sailboats, feeling the sun transform the world from golden to white, as the waves took on a green translucence and the ocean turned a soft marine blue. It was a good morning.

~Lisa Shafter

P.S. Here’s the blog about my morning beach-walk that I took the last time I visited North Carolina, a year and a half ago:

August 11th, 2010

A sunrise is nothing special. It happens every day, all day long, in some part of the world or another. But today I am 998 miles from home on the westerly rim of the Atlantic, which means that I have set my alarm to 6:00am in hopes of catching this ordinary phenomenon. I wake up surprisingly alert, eat two granola bars and step outside the hotel door.

The sky is the dim indigo that precedes the dawn: the color that makes nightmares dwindle into shadows. I stride down the sidewalk, past buzzing yellow lights, across the prickly grass and onto the wooden steps leading down to the beach. A damp and salty wind washes over me, making me shiver. In the minute it takes me to get from the door to the wind-painted sand, the sky has lightened. Pale pink stripes ornament the eastern firmament, promising a sunrise behind deep gray clouds. I begin to walk in that direction, toward a distant pier.

The sand clings to my feet and the waves fill my ears with a comfortable white noise of thunder and sibilance. I watch the sandpipers scurry along the tide line in a familiar routine: first they outrun the rim of each collapsed wave, their legs a blur too fast for the human eye. When the foam reached its peak and recedes, the birds dart into the shadow of water and drill for invertebrates, their beaks moving like tiny jackhammers. I see one squat in a skim of water and ruffle his mottled brown wings, starting the morning with a salty bath. 

Eventually the light begins to take shape. Wisps of cloud, the brushstrokes of an Impressionist painter, glow with pastel pink and gold. A splash of neon orange above the dark cloud-bank signals that the sun is creeping its way heavenward. In early morning, the ocean is colorless, gray upon shifting gray, but when the waves spill onto the shore, an extraordinary thing happens. The dull water transforms into a sheen of pastel sunrise, turning the whole beach into a vast glossy rainbow. In fading glory the waves light up the shore, then vanish into the sand. 

I’m almost to the pier now. It stands dark against the sunrise, hazy where the waves assault the pylons. I glance out at the waves again, then down at my feet as the   foaming water gallops over them. That’s when I feel warmth on my face beneath the brim of my crusher hat, and look up.

In an instant the sun has broken free of the dark mist, a hazy golden-orange globe hovering between two cloud-banks. Despite all my mother’s warnings about going blind, I find myself staring at first the orb, then its twin reflected in the backwash of the waves. I am silenced, eyes burning with the light. Before my retinas wither into ash, a shroud of the dark clouds billows over the sun again. I’ve arrived at the pier.

The corridor between the algae-stained wooden pylons has always reminded me of a magical tunnel from a fantasy world: it seems a narrow slice of the ocean, with waves forming out of nowhere to pummel the manmade structure. It’s a wonder that the crudely-carved wood can withstand the force of a body older than the world itself. I glance left and see a solidly-built man in his thirties wades beneath the pier, holding a metal rod with interlocking metal triangles on the end, forming some sort of stiff net. I ask him what he’s catching. “Sand fleas,” he says. “Cool,” I reply. “What are sand fleas?” He points to a bucket nearby and I look in to see a heap of what my family calls sand crabs, or sand fiddlers.

“Sand fleas” or “mole crabs,” as they are often called, seems like an unfair name for such pretty little crustaceans. Averaging the size of half a thumb, sand crabs’ shells are almond-shaped, gray with all sorts of color variations from subtle dark mottling to pastel purple and pink. Their pale legs stay tucked under their bodies, and tiny heads sport translucent eyes the size of pinheads, mounted on stalks. My sister taught me to catch them by watching the wet sand in the wake of a retreating wave: if the sand appears softly crosshatched, as if scored with many tiny Vs, then it’s probable that the crabs are burrowed beneath the surface, tiny eyes poking out to wait for the next wave. I’m fond of spotting their hideouts and delving my hands into the sand around them, letting the waves wash away the excess. If I’m lucky I’ll be rewarded with two palms-full of wriggling marvels tickling my fingers. I always let them go quickly, dropping them onto the tideline, where they burrow backwards and disappear into their habitat.

I take my leave of the crab-hunter. Noting a golden rim on the uppermost dark cloud in the east, I decide it’s time to turn back, since I’m not wearing any sunblock— I dare not face the ocean sun without protection. I turn and walk out of the thin shadow of the pier, gazing out at a chalky blue sky to the west. A few distant cumulus clouds give the horizon some flourish, but otherwise it is hazy and unbroken. I walk quicker, splashing through the shallows as the tide crawls up the bank.

The first sign that I should look behind me is the warmth on my calves, then the clear definition of my shadow stretching across the sand. I turn. The top half of the sun peers across the cloud-bank, simmering in gold so intense that my eyes feel scalded. The shape of an orb can’t contain the light: it spills out onto the clouds, pooling like liquid, ready to break its banks and flood the skies. A stillness overtakes the world. The waves grow muted; the sandpipers pause. Weeping has remained for the night, but I know what the morning will bring. I hold my breath.

With one final shimmer of suppressed joy, the sun breaks free of the cloud-bank. Sunrise. The clouds burst into flame. A column of light, shimmering like the heavenly host, in an instant pours down the receding waves and rushes over me. Just before I am overwhelmed and blinded, I catch a glimpse of the sky and ocean as one, a tapestry of molten gold.

With stinging eyes I turn away, blinking away the purple blotches swarming before my eyes. The sandpipers skitter along the shore, then take flight over the golden ocean. I am staggered, confronted by transcendent beauty that has swept along the rim of this planet from the moment God charged the sun to bring us daylight. Feeling small and unworthy and unspeakably blessed, I hurry back along the beach to the safety of my room.