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| A variety of shells washed up along the rim of shore, Wallops Island |
Listen, from the sandy edge of this secluded barrier island. What can you hear? There is something familiar and something new about the crashing fall of every wave. One after another, they tumble past one another. Each one is anxious to speak their piece. Yet once they reach me, they cycle back. I hear only a constant battering; the ocean speaks a language too old for me to understand. I listen for the music of its voice as I watch each successive wave pile onto the beach. To my amazement, I notice that the sea has left its own fingerprints in the sand. What at first seemed like a barren flat hides its own intricate pattern of memories. Impulsively, my feet carry me down across these flats searching for the clues they’ve hidden. To walk across this soft beach is to pace through memories older than comprehension and mysteries beyond solution.
Many before me have looked down on sands similar and yet never truly the same as these. One such observer, Rachel Carson, recorded her own glimpse of ocean’s story in The Edge of the Sea. Of these memories, she wrote, “On all these shores there are echoes of past and future: of the flow of time, obliterating yet containing all that has gone before”. With her words in mind, I land my foot clumsily into several sharp fragments of the past. The surf stirs these broken tombs of old clams around my ankles. True to Carson’s word, the time for these creatures had passed and their graceful shells now wash away obliterated. Just as one cannot read a story from a single word, these playthings of the water offer me no clues to the story behind these echoes. I shall leave this mystery in the possession of the sea. My feet growing sore from their sharp edges, I step into shallower water.
I travel onward and upward. Tiny holes riddle the wet sands just outside the waves. If I stop to gaze into these holes, I see nothing but the darkness of the space in between. I pass them by. Here, I come to an area where the borders of the waves are clearly defined by lightly colored ribbons of sand, snaking in and out of each other. I follow these wavy lines, perceiving in each space between, the echoing boast of one among many stampeding waves. At one moment, the surf creeps close enough to me that I may observe as each one draws their line for the future with the sand that they carried. Every wave’s print comes from the sea. And when the mark is erased, its memory is entrusted back to the sea. Here, a little more of the story is revealed to me.
One more wave tugs at my foot. I crouch down to listen to what it has to say, but it runs away from me. A rainbow swirls in its place. The colors separate into tiny chips that burrow themselves between my toes. I watch the water bring them to life. This is “that fleeting instant” Carson describes, “when the water of a receding wave flows seaward like a thin stream of liquid glass”. Tiny living strings wriggle through the water. As the wave departs, they rest in small, moist crevices. I wait for the wave to return, but the ocean will no longer come out to speak to me. Instead, it leaves me to study the message it had left behind at my feet. Looking down, I watch as each of these morsels—these tiny surf clams—struggle to disappear beneath the surface. After they had gone, it would seem, even to the famed Rachel Carson, it would seem “that one has seen nothing except in imagination”. The living patch of sand is once again a memory.
Perhaps I shall never truly understand the mysteries washed along the seashore. However, I have been offered a tiny glimpse of the life beneath the memory. How much more can I not see? My feet carry me down the beach again. The tide has abandoned these flats, but it shall be back. The ocean will return with old mysteries to make new memories. As I walk away, I leave behind life, death, tide, and time in the safe-keeping of this beach. Following Hawthorne’s advice from his own journey in "Footprints on the Sea-Shore", I shall “pass on, and leave it unexplained.”
By Jev Voight
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