At the beach it's windy, the promise of storms both onshore and off that congregate here. Some 400 miles to seaward, out in that great expanse of bluish foam lurks a storm that churns and sends waves, these waves that I see, the ones that surfers desperately paddle toward in order to reach and surmount and ride into the sandy link between ocean and land, that obliterate themselves on the spit without thought or regret.
We come here to exercise our need for diversion and to watch others and the forces that birthed us. Women in bikinis with fat asses jiggling. They squat or lounge or repose and they cover their sunglassed eyes with brown palms as they look up to and speak with impeccably hair cut Marines with paunchy-ish bellies and rounded deltoids from the work of pulling up. They should be the ultimately ripped specimens from recruiter's ads but the reality of swilling beer to avoid the grimness of the Marines' situation necessitates the deposition of brown adipose at their midsections. The women speak. The Marines look down, lustily, on the women's sunburned meat sacks.
A ginger couple clad in matching green jerseys of some team walk, hand in hand, up the planks of the pier. Some odd expression of Ireland chugging toward me while a charbroiled and bearded man stands on the sand and holds aloft his child's kite. The kite is an elaborate thing, in the shape of an airplane, with an airscrew front and a longer one at it's terminus. The thing takes flight. The bearded man moves off and consults a likely warm can of some undecipherable beer. The child watches the kite lift. I watch them and their group and they never know.
I rise from my observation and walk on, toward the end of the pier and the touching of the open ocean. The planks are smooth, weathered, but not moldy. Garbage of the organic kind litters the pier: nondescript bait, shrimp hulls, the gutted offal of a catch. All the food of human passing seems to be devoured. The pier is lined with fishers, but their fast food wrappers are meticulously deposited into padlocked trashcans that dot the linear expanse of wood. The gulls have little reason to linger here. There is a starling, black bodied and sleek looking, as if it could cut through time, that hops on the pier railing and pecks out the carcasses of shrimp and others that languish in the open sun and wind of the obliquely tilted planes of the upright railings. It eyes me. I open my palms to show deference but it takes flight. I shrug at its passing and walk on.
I stop at the railing and watch. Gulls float in the thick beach haze. Trailers and vacation rentals dwell at the lips of a sea, turquoise and grey tinted, that hurls itself against the land in some erosional foreplay. The shore is there and the sea too. I'm sure it's a metaphor for something but one of those that is only apparent to the observer and any attempt to describe it falls flat as the above one does. In the distance, water towers and hotel high rises lift out of the sea. Beyond is the horizon with its murky and unknown and ever shifting reality. I get my fill of the unknowable and walk back to a more beach-ward perch.
I am up here with the old men. Loners sipping coozied beers of indeterminate brand. We are the purveyors of the flesh below. There is a woman who bends at the waist, exposing her ruffles of her bikini'd ass as she wipes the sand from the backs of her thighs with a towel. A few yards on, a sandpiper bathes blithely in the surf. The man with the kite and his group have gone home. I decide to do the same.
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