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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And people say you can never go back to the beginning, pssh.
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Two Lights on Cape Elizabeth is also the result of North America getting half of Avalonia in the Pangaean divorce, but the Kittery Formation looks very different from the Cape Ann granite, huge folded ledges of quartzite and phyllite like petrified wood. It is probably the first geology I knew much about beyond the rock-sowing concept of the terminal moraine. I spent my summers climbing them. The kid will love it.
And people say you can never go back to the beginning, pssh.
So long as you can get to the sea.
*hugs*
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That sounds so beautiful! Rocks and sea are definitely good things! <3
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Yes and yes, but yay that you DID get to go!
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I hope you can spend more time in the world soon.
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It would be an honor.
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Thank you!
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It was a wonderful place to be.
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I like being able to feel that much time.
*hugs*
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Thank you!
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Thank you!
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It was great.
*hugs*
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I'll have to put together a next book!
I hope you can spend more time in the world soon.
Thank you. I am working on it!
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Thank you!
voila!
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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.
AAAAAAAAAAH
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Very!
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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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Thank you so much! We are making plans.
*hugs*
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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!
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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. --Thank you for this.
The photo of you is beautiful. Is it at Bass Rocks?
Given your deeply poetic
understanding of the geologic, animal, and botanical regions of the area, it's evidence that you are a mermaid.
Have you read any Marcia Bjornerud? She's a local hero--geology professor at Lawrence who also writes eloquently about geology for the lay reader (in books and The New Yorker). I recently finished Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks and I was entranced.
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The link will not dry out before then.
--Thank you for this.
You're welcome! It was astonishing to drive through.
The photo of you is beautiful. Is it at Bass Rocks?
It's a bit to one side of Half Moon Beach, I think. We need to get to Bass Rocks sometime.
How, exactly
does one accidentally drive through a washed-out bridge on Route 127 without drowning?
(Perhaps further proof of your mermaidenhood.
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Thank you! I will accept your argument.
Have you read any Marcia Bjornerud? She's a local hero--geology professor at Lawrence who also writes eloquently about geology for the lay reader (in books and The New Yorker). I recently finished Turning to Stone: Discovering the Subtle Wisdom of Rocks and I was entranced.
I have not, but that book looks wonderful.
"The tiny spheres of quartz dimly recall their youth deep inside Proterozoic mountains, when they were part of a tight-knit community in granite. They attest to how erosion dismantled the mountains, how rain dissolved their neighboring minerals, how they alone survived. They remember tumbling in the surf on a tropical Cambrian beach, then lying still beneath a heavy blanket of other strata, hardening slowly into sandstone. The sand recalls how, eons later, it was excavated by rivers, then rasped by glaciers that disbanded the grains and scattered them in a meltwater diaspora. This sand has had a long and complicated journey, but this is probably its first bus ride."
Thank you for the heads-up!
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In fairness it may not have been a bridge in the formal sense, but we were driving carefully down a small state route winding coastally through what had looked like salt marsh before the storm came down and suddenly between the guardrails which were barely visible in the thickness of rain themselves huge furrows of water rowelled up so deeply on all sides of the car that we were legitimately uncertain if the engine was going to stall. It did not—it later flashed a check engine light at us accusingly—and we still couldn't see any more than if we were in a carwash, but our best guess is that we were over a stretch of marsh and the road was actually flooded out. We had no idea until we were in it. We could only course-correct later on the same route because the rain had slightly begun to slack off.
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That’s terrifying! I’m so relieved you lived to tell the tale.