The Beach: A Photoessay
Feb. 20th, 2006 12:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienThe sea is deep blue under the sunlit sky, grey-green under cloud; dawn lends it an eerie azure glow. Sometimes, a thin mist clings to the headlands at either end of the bay.
When the breakers come to a peak, they are green as old glass, sometimes veined with dark lines of kelp; then they curve over and collapse, roaring down their own slopes in avalanches of white foam. Droplets bounce up in an ephemeral, sparkling curtain along the crest, sometimes making brief rainbows. Each long ridge of water breaks in several places along its length, and the white spreads out like a zipper opening until two sections meet.
At the edge of the beach, the green turns brown with churned-up sand, and the foam makes intricate patterns; receding, parts of the wave run back on a slant and collide with other parts, spawning smaller waves and little rushes of froth, and the shore is not a straight line but an irregular zigzag. Where the water has just been the sand reflects the colour of the sky, blue or a slate-grey that looks almost purple. Sometimes the waves leave outlines of their furthest reach in tiny dark fragments of kelp. Fine, criss-cross ripples grain the freshly-washed surface.
The gulls cruise by, dapper in grey and white, gliding low over the water and eyeing me as if I might be a source of food. Little groups of sandpipers, long-beaked as snipe, run in and out, flirting with the edge of the sea, sometimes running out into the surf and riding it back. When they take to the air, their wings are striking, banded black and white; at rest, they're sand-brown, dull as stones. A smaller species runs faster, closer together, scurrying between the larger birds as if they didn't exist. These are winter visitors, willets and sanderlings that spend their summers north and inland, but they seem perfectly at home here, expertly keeping time with the rhythm of the waves.
Dry, the sand makes a soft, pitted surface; every footstep slips sideways and carves out a slant-sided pit. When it's still damp, if I put my feet down flat and carefully, I can walk leaving only shallow impressions of my soles. Birds leave faint impressions of their angled toes. Tiny round holes reveal the presence of life under the sand. Wet, its colour is pinkish-brown; dry, it's paler, almost white in some lights, but every grain has its own shade. Kelp lies in tangled heaps or calligraphic scribbles; the leaves are wrinkled, leathery, brown-green; each bladder is a little teardrop-shaped balloon, gleaming bronze. Here and there a gull's feather accents the design.
The air is moist, heavy with the salty, fishy scent of the sea; the wind is chilll. It's February, after all.
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Date: 2006-02-20 05:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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