Bill's Pier

Bill's pier stands on wormy cedar pilings, bluntly out from the slight smooth curve of beach, a shifting web of planks,a lonely place as a raft would be lonely floating in the space between the crescent horns of a moon. Looking back at night, the cubic patterns of lighted streets spread out across the soft black mounds of the continent. It is a place where you stand open-coated and open-faced, savoring and nodding to the mystic monologue of sea.

A few dim lights spray saffron splashes on old railings . . . the surf seethes violently about each worn piling. And at night like this, from the end of Bill's pier you feel the weight and towering size of that coming cloud bank, looming high and black, light-edged, thick as a slanting mountain. The waves hump high beneath the old plank floor, following each other in like porpoises, the wind's at hand; you look up to the soft, smoke-like wall of cloud, knowing it is as long as the beach, as long as the whole West Coast, perhaps, A single star shines for an instant, caught trembling and lucent in the furled mesh of fog like a silver minnow.