Far across the broad Atlantic where the storms do rage severe
Before the thunderstorm broke in such steel-drum sheets of solid rain that we realized only after the fact that we had accidentally driven through a washed-out bridge on Route 127, I lay with my face against half a billion years of granite cooled in the volcanoes of Avalonia and weathered across aeons of which the ice ages were only the finishing touch to a boulder as rough as rust-cracked barnacles: it pushed into my palms like the denticles of sharkskin, my hair clung to it in the wind that smelled of high tide and the slap-glass of waves coiling around the sunken cobbles and combers of weed. The stone itself smelled of salt. I found a fragment of gull's feather tangled afterward in my hair. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch had driven me out to Gloucester for a bonanza of fried smelts and scallops eaten within sea-breeze earshot of the harbor while the clouds built like a shield-wall against the sunset and the thunder held off just long enough for us to get back to the car, following which we were theoretically treated to the coastal picturesque of Manchester-by-the-Sea and realistically corrected course back to Route 128 when we saw a taller vehicle than ours headlights-deep. The sunset that came out after the rain was preposterously spectacular: a huge cliff of cloud the peach-pearl color of a bailer shell, the gold-edged stickles of smaller reefs and bars, the mauve undershadow of the disappearing rain, all sunk to a true ultramarine dusk by the time we were doing the shopping for my mother back in Lexington. I used to spend a lot more time out in the world and I need to be able to again. It is self-evidently good for me.
spatch had driven me out to Gloucester for a bonanza of fried smelts and scallops eaten within sea-breeze earshot of the harbor while the clouds built like a shield-wall against the sunset and the thunder held off just long enough for us to get back to the car, following which we were theoretically treated to the coastal picturesque of Manchester-by-the-Sea and realistically corrected course back to Route 128 when we saw a taller vehicle than ours headlights-deep. The sunset that came out after the rain was preposterously spectacular: a huge cliff of cloud the peach-pearl color of a bailer shell, the gold-edged stickles of smaller reefs and bars, the mauve undershadow of the disappearing rain, all sunk to a true ultramarine dusk by the time we were doing the shopping for my mother back in Lexington. I used to spend a lot more time out in the world and I need to be able to again. It is self-evidently good for me.
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Did you ever go to the Singing Beach? KY and I went once. Alas, apparently these days the singing sand is much muted compared to the past.
One year we also joined a group where we all got clamming permits and dug out a bunch and brought them home to cook and eat.
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I did! Thank you!
Did you ever go to the Singing Beach? KY and I went once. Alas, apparently these days the singing sand is much muted compared to the past.
I never have—I don't think I even realized that we had singing sands around here. What's shifted that they no longer make so much noise?
One year we also joined a group where we all got clamming permits and dug out a bunch and brought them home to cook and eat.
That sounds magnificent.
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We visited Manchester-by-the-Sea in 2016, and by dragging my foot (sandaled?) quickly through the sand, I did get it to squeak softly. Maybe we were just unlucky that conditions were not better?
I say that because I did find this article: https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/manchester-by-the-sea-singing-beach-sand-massachusetts/
And the YouTube video it links is from 2023, so pretty recent, and at least in the recording, the singing is pretty loud (but perhaps the cell phone was close to the ground?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LKoFaebK7M
I was unaware of the trick to get it to "laugh". If I ever go back, I'll have to try that out.
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Absolutely!
I will have to visit the singing sands. Thank you for alerting me to them!