Vibrant Village ™

Remember me? I was there.

Yesterday we went to see the sea, riding the see-saw of the ferry from Harkers Island over to Cape Lookout National Seashore.

The sea spanked us as the boat thumped from the wham of the waves.  As land and human habitation faded away, other lives revealed themselves.

Two shaggy little horses, standing on a hammock in hock-deep sea faced us, frozen statues, nostrils flaring to test whether we were friend or foe.  The cinnamon-colored stallion stood with legs firmly planted, his blond mane and tail lifting in the fresh wind.  Wild and free, clearly he was not a horse of the pasture, hay and grain but a true sea-horse, eating of the marsh grass, with unkempt coat, his ribs faintly outlined on his slender body.  Bridle, bit, saddle nor spurs had marred his body or broken his spirit.  No servant of man, this sea-horse was free-horse of sea, sky, wind and waves.

There were pelicans, too. These graceful masters of  air current, gliders supreme, made us laugh as their grace turned into clumsy kerplumps of splash into the water in their fetching of fish. A lone cormorant came flapping by, flapping slowly, laboring, seeming out of the ancient past, a bit of the Terradactyl in its shadowy darkness.

Smells of land and man dropped away, the scent now of salt air and salt marsh. Elemental aromas, these, perhaps a window into our earliest past when we first crawled from the sea onto land.  Is this why the sea calls to us?  Have our cells been imprinted with memories of when we, too, had gills and fins?

Our ferry draws up to the dock and we unload our gear, shoulder the backpack and beach umbrella. We amble down the long, wooden walkway to the sea.  The quiet is complete.  No cars, sirens, powered lawn equipment, saws or dogs bark.

We choose a spot with a dune to lean against.  Alan plants the umbrella anchor and twists it into the sand.  He slants the umbrella into the wind and we place the beach towels for maximum shade. I unpack our picnic provisions.

The whole-grain bread is slathered with honey dill-mustard, the pungent Asiago cheese and ruby-ripe tomatoes are cut and piled on the waiting bread.  I  slice each sandwich neatly in two.  We chew while sea-gazing.  Seasoned with a light dusting of sand, our meal is a bit crunchy, but no matter, it is after all, called “sandwich.”

We open the tube of  potato chips and ingest salt.  Must have salt by the sea, it's crucial, or so it seems to me.

Chewing and gazing, we're lost in time and place.

It all drills down to the sea.  No need for words, only the warmth of the welcome sun, so long absent through the winter.  The rhythm of the surf, regular as a heartbeat, soothing, quieting my mind, my thoughts floating as gently and aimlessly as the wind-blown sea-smoke. No deadlines, no to-do list.  No oughts or shoulds.  For today, we have vacated.  For today, we are on a vacation. The sea whispers in the background, “relax.”

Replete and sleepy, my husband, Alan, lays down, places his canvas hat over his eyes and is gone away into his Alan-world.  I lean back against the dune, opening the pages of a book about a beach house owned by five generations of a Boston family, self-described by the author as 'Boston Brahmin's'—the upper crust of old New England Boston society.  This is a perfect beach book, describing as it does, along with family, the sea-scape of the rocky Cape Cod shore of Buzzard's Bay.

I lift my eyes from the book and look out to sea, a clear band of what color shall I call this sea in front of me?  Cerulean?  Neither turquoise nor navy, today the changeling sea's a rich broth of blue-green, reflecting the cloudless sky.  No rocks here.  No family drama or weathered beach house.  Only our little island of beach towels and green and white striped umbrella.

In the distance, four young people, coupled by twos, do their ritual Spring courting dance of girls being lifted and threatened to be thrown into the still cold sea.  Their feigned squeals of dismay drift back to us.

Oh, how perfect are their young bodies, as lean and leggy as the sea-horses we'd earlier seen. Yes, I remember when I was so, too, flat-stomached and Alan all slender sinew and muscle.  Now both of us have grown round and ripe, matured with life and Asiago cheese. No matter, it's the wheel of life turning round. Roundness is fine.

I awaken Alan, softly snoring, and invite him on a beach walk.  We rise, fighting gravity's pull and off we go.

We walk by the surf fishers, we walk by the prone bodies basting, covered with oil, and turning pink and red.   We walk far to where it is just us, beyond the people.  Just us and the sea and sand and sky and the sandpipers doing their quick dance with the surf, legs in motion in a quick step of blur.

And I turn to Alan, remembering.  Remembering our honeymoon by the sea in Cape Cod.  Our ramshackle rental in Provincetown at Capt. Jack's Wharf, fishermen shanties turned into rentals, built out over the sea on a pier. At high tide, the sea came lapping under our weathered and worn silver-boarded room.  Using a pulley on a block and tackle, we could open the whole front to the elements. And there was a loft with a skylight.  Underneath the skylight was a bed just right for cloud gazing—and honeymooners.

Remembering, I open my arms to Alan and he comes to me.  We come close for a kiss,  and just as our lips meet, Alan suddenly gives a yelp and leaps into the air and we look down and the sea has found us and Alan's feet, encased in sock and boat shoes are deep in sea water and my bare feet, too, are immersed in the cold lapping of the ocean.

We laugh.  It seems the sea recalls those early days of ours- could it really be forty years ago?-and has said, 'remember me?  I was there, too.  And here I am again. I'm always with you.'

Yesterday, we went to the sea.  Yesterday, the sea came to us.  It was good to embrace an old friend.

Patricia Frank loves words and uses them whenever she can.  She's also the editor and publisher of Vibrant Village, an on-line magazine that celebrates the best of small town America.

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