23—Vanishing Point

Continued from #22—”The Town That Fell into the Sea”

There I sat, alone on a thin strip of sand where the town of Bayocean had fallen from a dream through folly into the sea. Behind me, the country of everything that had brought me to this place. Before me, only a mottled sky and the sea, the coastline curving like a thin margin of error out of a mist moving in from the south

I’d hoped that my month by the sea might give me some new perspective on life, possibly even help me shape new questions to the same old answers about the bureaucratic absurdities and injustices of the education system. But here there were no questions or answers—just sky and sea with nothing in between to give me any perspective whatsoever. 

Suddenly, to my right, something was coming at me out of thin air     a barage of rocks     Oh, wait, birds     a neat oval ball of birds wheeling this way then that, changing from dark to light to dark then light again as they swooped and turned     like one of those optical illusions, appearing alternately as flying rocks and bits of sea foam.

I got out my binocs: small birds     not much bigger than sparrows     brownish gray with white breasts. They lighted about fifteen yards in front of me along the waterline and began scurrying around on their twiggy black legs, pecking madly at the sand with their pointy black bills.

Sandpipers? 

I checked the bird book.
Yep. About a hundred of them, I estimated, as a foamy wave sent the birds running back toward me. And I mean running    running with their heads down     the most intense running I'd ever seen. These birds even seemed to have shoulders. Man, they were fast. I began humming "Chariots of Fire."

As the water withdrew, the birds darted about again, pecking the sand like bargain hunters at a sidewalk sale. Then back came the sea, and they were off and running again. Fly, you birdbrains, I thought, immediately realizing the absurdity of this as these birds definitely knew what they were doing. 

The sea withdrew, as if taking a deep breath, and the flock darted about until the big water exhaled with a big white whoosh. And off the birds flew dipping and wheeling this way and that. I took off after them. The bird ball swooped and looped before me, not a bird out of order. How do they do that? 

Then the bird ball flew off, faster than I could run, and—just as suddenly as it had appeared—vanished back into the air. 

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” Henry Beston wrote of birds in The Outermost House. “In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not bretheren, they are not underlings; they are nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of Earth.”

Henry, a writer and naturalist, lived alone for a time in cabin he built on the outermost point of Cape Cod. 

He’d had his little house moved back several times from the encroaching water but eventually lost it to the sea.

Although, looking out at the sea on this day, I was there on the other side of the country in The Outermost House with Henry, the birds, and the mystery.

As I contemplated the oneness of it, the sea suddenly became alive, speaking to me to me in flood of something I felt as pure perhaps even divine energy. And the flood said to me: In each experience you create     we collude    there are no questions   answers are illusion    there is no perspective    there is no point     unless you vanish into it    what is your nature?   there is your art   that is all   

A tear trickled down my cheek in a thin salty line bequeathed to me from the first spark of life in the sea.

When the flood of energy had receded back into sea, I saw that the surf was rising in the distance toward eye level. Time to start back. The mist moving in from the south had turned to fog. Where was the path? The tide rushed in. The sea’s foamy lip lapped at my sneakers. My heart started pounding, and the metallic taste of fear filled my mouth. I scrambled up the dune as the next swell flooded its lacy pattern over the sand where I’d been standing. 

I found the trail but then paused for a moment, unsure. The fog was moving in rapidly, the daylight quickly fading. In the clamor of the incoming tide, I heard the clatter of a train, the pounding of nails, and the crash of that last house into the sea. Trail or not, I took off running away from the sea, yearning for my cats and a cup of hot chocolate in the warmth of my own little bubble of firelight.  

Next: Roots