D. L. Emblen

They tell me the cove behind False Point is no good for swimming, but I have dived into the surf there, and my body swept through the richest of sea water. An unaccountable fluid there, in waves rolling in, and in thin silver sheets hissing up through the gravel beach; more like broth than water, strongly flavored and well mingled with golden broken kelp leaves. There is no sand on the shore, it is a crescent mound of rounded stones the size of a dollar. But from the soft dirt cliffs, the stones of the cove, wet with high tide spray, gleam and sparkle like piles of jewels.

There is a lawn on Feldspar Street where at least a dozen seagulls come to rest each day. An ordinary lawn, no greener and no larger than those in front of other homes on Feldspar Street. But here, in this one place, shortly after 2 p.m. the sleek white birds convene, to stand and stare at passersby, to preen the smoother feathers at their breast, to sleep, to cry complainingly at grinning dogs who come from several streets at 2:15.

All manner of creeping, crawling, scuttling things celebrate the morning in their own fashion. Sow-bugs, antlered worms, moths and ants and sand-crickets and pincher-armed termites pause in the first fall of sunlight on their patch of ground, and suck the clods for one last taste of moisture. The dew-cooled surface dirt crumbles dry, scorpions grope with rigid claws and jade green centipedes tumble down the shiny shovel-blade. The brown earth moves with multitudes, unknown hordes of barbarians and sophists, that leave broad, silvered trails, narrow trenches, like wheel-ruts; funnels and delta-fans of masticated soil. This is the way the beach land grows, changing hourly, in every vacant lot, between the rows of every garden patch, under the sod, in dust piles by the roadsides, innumerable unnamed beings turning soil in million mouthful lots, inheriting the earth.

Landsmen crowd the shore like children at a carnival, exclaiming, pointing seaward, shading their eyes with hands and books. They bring their various lives along, as dangling and cumbersome as folding deck chairs in their arms, as intimately varied as their costumes and as basically the same.

Old ladies peer nearsightedly and poke the softer sand with canes, Brown and agile as seals, the younger folk run together quickly; smaller children disappear and reappear, crying with sandy mouths.

Fathers shyly step across to the moving edge of surf, and stand there, staring; they look naked and cold in their white skins. They turn and awkwardly advance upon the waves, drawing back and hopping forward, laughing excitedly, as dogs meeting the sea for the first time.

I was walking down Emerald Street on a Sunday morning, an early autumn day that fairly rang with the singing of meadowlarks in the weed fields. She was standing in the center of a patch of fresh-plowed ground, soaking it with a hose, and trodding up and down in a pair of torn tennis shoes to mash the clods. She was smiling like a child and staring down at the rich brown mud and humming to herself.

As I watched, she turned the hose full force upon her feet and sang out in rare delight; for streams gushed merrily from holes in the ends of her shoes. "I've got spouts in my shoes!" she laughed.

Flat as a dish, the sand hard-packed and shining extends from shore to surf-edge, further and wider with each half-hour of retreating tide, until the bathers look like dolls bobbing about in the mounds and sheets of moving water. The lifeguard stares and squints into the sun, it is hard to tell a lump of kelp from a swimmer's head, and there in the black-tarred piling of the pier, many a small life might scream for help. How would it sound, here in this warm, concave afternoon, with the sea-air filled with the barking of dogs, shouting of children, squealing of girls, blare of a radio, and the long, continuous thunder of the sea? Would a single frightened cry pierce this complex haze of sun and running bodies, splashes and flapping towels, or would the lifeguard listen once and put it down for the querulous voice of a seagull passing by?

It's a poor man on the cliff who cannot harvest gold and silver dreams by nightfall. The joyous, many-cornered sounds of families walking home from long warm days along the beach, carrying inner-tubes and limp towels and remnants of Sunday papers, shiny with sunburn, smiling with the coolness of evening, speak of laughter loosely gathered from the lips of many idle waves, shells and bulbs of kelp, wave-worn sticks and thick green gems of bottles smoothed by countless tidal trips across the beach slope.

An old man's cottage on the sand, down off Bacon Street, has a yard of lawn and a pink geranium hedge. They grow and bloom in a three-inch layer of reddish dirt that he has hauled there and spread out on his hands and knees. He lives alone, watching the years' high-water marks advance across the beach, chasing the seagulls out of his garden, befriending the swimmers.

After each summer day, after ten hours of sun-glare from the hot, white sand, he sits in an old rocker on the porch and sips lemonade and inhales the coolness of his green backyard and watches the sun dissolve into amber fire and pearl grey smoke along the horizon.