We went down to the beach side. It's sort of hot and muggy, all the time, and when Hurricane Katrina went through it pretty much uprooted everything off the beach, leaving debris and foundation and a strange smell of death. Things change little in two years, I've learned.
It's not like I haven't been to a beach in a while; on the contrary, we go in Florida every couple of years, but you get used to soft, hot sand on your feet and clean waves and clear-cut shorelines, you kind of forget that a beach is just like anything else and not all of them are beautiful.
There wasn't much of a shoreline. It lay jagged, small bodies of ocean water separated by the land, like small islands. The waves were low and the sand where the tide is highest was packed and muddy and cut with the lines of the waves. We found two hermit crabs, scuttling their way across the beach and hiding in their shells for little afternoon naps. We took pictures in the shallow waves and fell into sink holes, and I wouldn't go back in the water as I watched the dark, inky cloud of mud rise and swirl across my vision. We found two dead crawfish and Queen Arachnia almost stepped on a jellyfish floating, like it was suspended in time, in one of the cuts of water across the beach.
We came across a jellyfish, fully intact, laying in the sun, too far away from the water to reach. We took a picture and I saw it shutter and move, breathing, as if it were gasping in the air. It was evening and I wondered if the tide would rise enough to wash it back to sea before it died. QA filled a hermit crab's shell with water to dump on the jellyfish. The crab poked it's eyes out of the shell, glaring and silent.
We trudged from the water and across the beach, my mind heavy with bitterness that this awful city didn't even have a decent beach to offer; it gave us, instead, cuts and isles of dirty water and black sand and death.
I caught a flicker of movement in the water. The water rippled again. Before long, I could see the sliver bodies of hundreds of minnows, scales silver in the sun, leaping from the ocean that before offered not movement or life beyond the summer breeze. QA found a flopping minnow on the shore and in one solid scoop tossed it into the water. They danced back and forth, leaping from the water and landing in streaks, hundreds of little splashes, so alive.
1 comment:
I ain't Shakespeare either...but that jelly fish was toast...and the hermit crab had it comin'. Besides, he seemed happy enough after he posed for my frog shot on the beach.
Hope you also remember the most important thing we saw on the beach that day. Though betrayed and beaten by nature, reeking with the smells that accompany the ravages of devastation among the living, the children played in that tainted water only 100 yards away, the hermit crabs scuffled through the sand, sporting their new and improved homes, the little silver fish danced from puddle to puddle, void of any envy for clearer, less scarred waters, and the beautiful trees that had once grown near the beach front had been transformed into carvings that saluted the life that populated the once beautiful waters of that little stretch of land. By the time we went home, despite the lingering smell of the recent past that clung to my nostrils and warded off any craving for sea food I may have otherwise been tempted to indulge, I enjoyed my small microwave dinner knowing that only a half a mile away…just along a scarred and abandoned shoreline, life was proving its humble determination…not just to continue, but to truly live. I'm pretty sure was the most important thing at the beach that day. That and the funny sink hole that you fell in.
...and the daggon hermit crab is fine.
Queen Arachnea
Post a Comment