Hurrah for the Black Ball Line
Finally, at the end of the day, we made it to a beach. I say finally because the first two times we tried, the beaches were inaccessibly crowded with people who were not six feet apart and definitely not wearing masks—standing in the parking lot of Corporation Beach to survey our chances in the mid-afternoon, I was in fact the only person in sight with a mask on and nobody was giving me space because of it, either. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch received some strongly worded text messages in all caps. We tried again toward evening, struck out a second time with Corporation Beach, couldn't even get into the parking lot at Mayflower Beach, and then Chapin Beach came to our rescue with its long, shining strand of silt and channels and barnacle-sharp cobbles at low tide. My mother set up her folding chair in the lee of a sand dune and my father and I went walking.
There was open water if I followed the tide out far enough.
The sand was full of stranded moon jellies. No lions' manes this time that I could see.
I do not ever tire of walking these roads.
Dead man's fingers on iron clay.
Illuminated like alabaster, a tiny clamshell opened by a fragment of a larger.
I have never known what these ridges left by the action of the tides are formally called. My father and I started calling them Schiaparelli's canals.
I loved the light and the water running over them.
I met a hermit crab.
My father turned back to spend time with my mother and the lengthening sunset and I spent what I was told afterward was nearly an hour wandering the tide flats by myself. I met some herring gulls, some laughing gulls, and the tracks of many sandpipers. I didn't take their calls personally and they didn't seem to mind my singing.
(An incomplete list of songs to which the seagulls of Chapin Beach do not object: the Bills' "Bamfield's John Vanden," Gordon Bok's "Clear Away in the Morning," "Bay of Fundy," and the refrain of "Peter Kagan and the Wind," Clannad's peculiarly jaunty version of "Two Sisters," the chantey I learned from Louisa Killen as "Hilo Johnny Brown," and the Yiddish folksongs "S'iz der step" and "Makhetonim geyen," for which I cannot source the right versions on the internet.)
I tried to take a selfie with a camera that doesn't have a selfie mode. I think my aspect ratio went a bit weird, but so few pictures show the actual color of my eyes.
Standing where the land finally ran out. You can just see the break of a sandbar. Or the whaleback of rocks. I didn't swim out to find out which. I did stand for some time with the waves around my knees.
The sand was dotted with these little holdfast clusters, rolling with their stones.
The water winds back to the sea.
I was so intrigued by the white object jutting from the sun-tipped shallows, but I couldn't photograph from the right angle at a distance: I thought it must be bones. It was a mostly stripped fish head.
I accidentally and blurrily photographed my own hair when it blew in front of the camera, but it looked so much like kelp, I'm keeping it.
Portrait of the artist as a barnacled shadow.
A concatenation of slipper shells.
I had hoped to walk as far west as the salt marshes, but I saw my parents gesturing for me to come in: the bugs were coming out in force at the end of the day. My father nonetheless called his shot of the scene "Endless Summer."
By the time I got back, the sunset had decided to go for the drama.
My mother took this picture of me, enjoying the drama.
I got a clearer shot of the horizon as we were driving away, but I liked the silhouettes. The sky behind them was volcanic.
And then we got home and I fell immediately upon a plate of fried clams, chased by soft-serve ice cream, chased by mermaid latte and collapsing on a couch. Tomorrow we return to Boston. There will not be such ready sea, but there will be cats. I dream of the two together.
spatch received some strongly worded text messages in all caps. We tried again toward evening, struck out a second time with Corporation Beach, couldn't even get into the parking lot at Mayflower Beach, and then Chapin Beach came to our rescue with its long, shining strand of silt and channels and barnacle-sharp cobbles at low tide. My mother set up her folding chair in the lee of a sand dune and my father and I went walking.
There was open water if I followed the tide out far enough.
The sand was full of stranded moon jellies. No lions' manes this time that I could see.
I do not ever tire of walking these roads.
Dead man's fingers on iron clay.
Illuminated like alabaster, a tiny clamshell opened by a fragment of a larger.
I have never known what these ridges left by the action of the tides are formally called. My father and I started calling them Schiaparelli's canals.
I loved the light and the water running over them.
I met a hermit crab.
My father turned back to spend time with my mother and the lengthening sunset and I spent what I was told afterward was nearly an hour wandering the tide flats by myself. I met some herring gulls, some laughing gulls, and the tracks of many sandpipers. I didn't take their calls personally and they didn't seem to mind my singing.
(An incomplete list of songs to which the seagulls of Chapin Beach do not object: the Bills' "Bamfield's John Vanden," Gordon Bok's "Clear Away in the Morning," "Bay of Fundy," and the refrain of "Peter Kagan and the Wind," Clannad's peculiarly jaunty version of "Two Sisters," the chantey I learned from Louisa Killen as "Hilo Johnny Brown," and the Yiddish folksongs "S'iz der step" and "Makhetonim geyen," for which I cannot source the right versions on the internet.)
I tried to take a selfie with a camera that doesn't have a selfie mode. I think my aspect ratio went a bit weird, but so few pictures show the actual color of my eyes.
Standing where the land finally ran out. You can just see the break of a sandbar. Or the whaleback of rocks. I didn't swim out to find out which. I did stand for some time with the waves around my knees.
The sand was dotted with these little holdfast clusters, rolling with their stones.
The water winds back to the sea.
I was so intrigued by the white object jutting from the sun-tipped shallows, but I couldn't photograph from the right angle at a distance: I thought it must be bones. It was a mostly stripped fish head.
I accidentally and blurrily photographed my own hair when it blew in front of the camera, but it looked so much like kelp, I'm keeping it.
Portrait of the artist as a barnacled shadow.
A concatenation of slipper shells.
I had hoped to walk as far west as the salt marshes, but I saw my parents gesturing for me to come in: the bugs were coming out in force at the end of the day. My father nonetheless called his shot of the scene "Endless Summer."
By the time I got back, the sunset had decided to go for the drama.
My mother took this picture of me, enjoying the drama.
I got a clearer shot of the horizon as we were driving away, but I liked the silhouettes. The sky behind them was volcanic.
And then we got home and I fell immediately upon a plate of fried clams, chased by soft-serve ice cream, chased by mermaid latte and collapsing on a couch. Tomorrow we return to Boston. There will not be such ready sea, but there will be cats. I dream of the two together.
Re: Prosaic
The web tells me there are better signed cliff walks in both York and Scarborough/Prout's Neck. (Also one near Portland Head Light.)
Re: Prosaic
I keep forgetting that exists because I partly grew up at it. (I partly grew up more at Two Lights, though, which does not to my knowledge have a cliff walk, but with those ledges you don't need one.)
Re: Prosaic