Beach

 

Walking on the winter beach we do not think of them, the few, as a cloud of electricity, a milky way of flesh, a ganglion of extremities. Those few who, we think, brave the cold wind and grey sky, though brave is an assumption, as they walk enjoyably if earnestly along the environment. Later, at the house, we dream away triads of the walkers – a tower of ivory, a tree of freedom, a geometry of expressions – in the mind’s eye, during the creamy third coffee. The grey-blue of ocean and general atmosphere and further approaching rain squalls are affective causes, a traditional landscape, a salutary reminder for the walkers who tread the wet sand at this time of the day. Weather vanes spin rapidly, while the beach scrub responds to changing conditions in the way it’s grown used to. Driftwood is charred from a beach fire and seaweed runs in dishevelled lines where dry meets wet, sentences requiring disentangling by surf spin. Our companion canines are classic to this scenario, chasing a sodden tennis ball, skirting incoming foam. He she is a bundle of fur, leap of limbs, an advertisement of rainy day. The paws print abstract poetry into the half-liquid called sand. It won’t be an age before it’s erased, one sweep of water the colour of blotter. Higher calculus, political editorial, historical intuitions do not catch the mind of the walkers caught in the sea wind between a strand and a hard reef, their thoughts turned to colours of the visible variety, at a temporary loss for words. It is a medium of all mediums, a fountain of configuration, a balancer of shoals that dares to glide upon a surfboard down the dark turning of the closing waves. There are no surfers today, only the few walkers who for some reason or other have left their warm houses on steep slopes to, as they say, walk the dog, stretch the legs, clear the head a bit. Tomorrow and tomorrow for surfboards. History however itself intervenes in the form of a largest of all blackness, a giant of underwater cooees, a presence blowing its stack into finest water mists thence falling forward toward the deep from a standing upthrust into air, some metres from shore. Fortunate are the few who in their nonplussed trudge witness this new south whale, thoughts vary as to the type, angling itself just below and just above then the grey surface, creasing white splashes. We understand this sight, so distant so close, that soon enough will vanish towards the horizon, an adjective in search of a collective noun, a big mention become a memory over dinner, vanish where a massive blackness advances and rain will obscure the tracks. They are scampering through the ti-tree, the coats of many colours, their eyes of water gleam, their paws of dig-fast, with trailing behind them the now anxious jogging triads we know so well. Alone, only later, triple rainbows will emerge.