Between Times
As the beach towns sleep, lulled by the surf roar — somehow more distinct at night, yet strangely subdued by dawn — long after the mound of ruby and emerald and diamond lights of Ocean Beach darkens like a pile of cooling coals, a million vari-colored clams stir in the shallow bay, and hold themselves open on taut muscles a million other creatures move about or hide or silently die or give birth. Complex mouths—snail mouths and anemone mouths— open and close in the fluid atmosphere of their underwater places. Crabs crawl from shell to shell; minnows dart through tide pools like silver slivers, frightened by the glint of moonlight on the rocks. A lonely heron rises from the flats, scrapes his wings on tall marsh grass and points his long ungainly form eastward, toward the mountains.
The people of the beach towns sleep, night is only a time between dinner and breakfast. But clams tighten their muscular vigil; crabs run faster; minnows seek even the moonlit patches for camouflage. For the new tide flowing in upon them brings a freight of food and fear of creatures with multiple jaws, spears, claws, darts and needle teeth, of creatures with mouths and eyes seeking food and watching for enemies in the new place where they are being taken. In every cove, on every long flat shelf of beach in every weird rockpile of the littoral, and out in the marshes, where the roots of grasses reach clear down to salt water, where shodows of lamp posts lie like solid logs against the moon-white sand of yesterday's dredging; under bridges, on the sides anf bottoms of channels, on pilings, on the transoms of old rowboats, the nameless ones huddle and scuffle, open and close, chew, ingest, thresh the water with short feelers, retreat and attack, dig holes in the bottom mud, drill holes in shells, feel heat and lack of heat, and fearfully enter mystic columns of cold water rising from the bay floor . . .
While people of the beach towns sleep or lie there listening to the surf roar, smiling to themselves, like children, somehow secure in the myth of peaceful night-ness.