Prominence (a brief essay)
“Be like a rocky promontory against which the restless surf continually pounds; it stands fast while the churning sea is lulled to sleep at its feet.”
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Prominence
Kneeling in an embryo dune, I watch as the wind shapes a small golden comma of sand around a single stem of beach grass. Bits of dried detritus, dislodged from a wrack line by the onshore breeze form punctuation from another language. In a protected hollow, a wind shadow, past meanderings of a stag horn beetle perforate the sand in tiny parallel tracks. Tips of the grasses bend low and swing in the breeze, scribing Saturn’s rings in the sand.
Stepping to the surf’s edge and gazing inland, I can see the fore dunes, the older siblings with their well-established Mohawk of grasses protecting winding spines. Standing taller still, well out of the tide’s reach, are the yellow dunes looking much like distant hilltop meadows from where my feet are drawn down into darker, cooler sand.
North of here, looming over my shoulder, the dunes mature quickly and run, forested, to rocky promontories. Maritime pitch pines huddle low in the lee of the grey dunes on the edges of slack water ponds, cozied by yellow blankets of Wooly Hudsonia. Contorted Black Cherry trees cling to a short, bitter life and Quaking Aspen flutter in a breeze even too light to cool my brow.
I splash south, watching the mature and grey dunes thin until only yellow remain. The land lowers and the sky presses down, towering cumulous on thermal stilts. Beach grasses struggle to hold fast, the sands continually animated by the volatile mood of the sea. Where the grains lay low in the estuarial shallows, the currents call them by a new name with each turn of the tide. Golden fingers grasp and swirl in the brackish nursery where fresh and salt funnel life, remembered and reborn.
As dunes and bars yield to flats of mud and peat, Cordgrass rises to the challenge. The comical skittering of plovers retreating from hissing foam is replaced by the graceful patience of heron and egret. The rhythmic crash of tripping waves traded for a slower, silent cycle that can only be seen by looking away.
I climb back in my boat, minutes from being once again lighter than the water displaced. I close my eyes, feel a shadow slide across my face, and anticipate the lift and roll. As Archimedes comes through again, I set an oar, lightly tap the still water and watch Ohs! slide away into the marsh.