Interludinal Interlude

A passage from some (co)incidental reading...

'Oceans are only oceans when they move. ...Waves are what keep oceans from just being very big puddles. Oceans are just their waves. And every wave in the ocean is finally going to meet what it moves toward, and break. ...A wave, breaking on a rock, giving up its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape.'

Perhaps so. But in my experience, the beaches on the southern West Coast kinda suck if you're used to those of the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, the waves in the latter are smaller. And colder. But no matter, because there's still the sound of those waves. The ceaseless lulling crash that nullifies everything aside from where you are right then; the sound of an agelessness and of the outerness of an expansive otherness; a sound that erases all the things that led to your pathway there, the anesthetizing assertion that -- providing you've reached the right place -- that you're one the outermost rim of civilization, the point at which all things drop off or fall away into oblivion. Over which the stars so brightly spatter the sky at night.

The air here is never still, and the landscape -- the slant and shape and texture of it all -- reflects this in innumerable ways.

Some common wildlife: Pelicans, either in flocks gliding on the coastal winds or plunging singly into the surf with a dramatic splash. Sandpipers and the occasional heron. Dolphins just past the foaming of the waves. Various species of migratory birds. Seasonal ghost crabs with their burrowings and their slo-mo T'ai-Chi dances and flexations and their comical zipping sideways evasions. Coyotes what roam the dunes after sundown, evident only by their tracks as seen in the sand by daylight the next morning. Alligators and armadillos, but only if you venture inland into the marshes. This time: butterflies and dragonflies among the morning glories and reeds. People, seldomly. With the sound of the surf only occasionally being drowned out -- perhaps once a day -- by the overhead droning of a small-engine aircraft.

Wifey long ago said she'd find a landlocked existence alienating, that she'd dread life far away from the coast of a large body of water. I hadn't given it much thought before then, but in my mind had to agree with her right away. This even though she'd once been on a small boat in a storm where the waves towered above the mast (reminding all aboard just how small and fragile and easily extinguishable they were), whereas I hadn't. But now again wandering and climbing the miles of dunes, you encounter the remnants of prior outposts previously swept away by the lashings of hurricanes and tropical storm surges, being reclaimed by the ever-shifting and -piling sands. The names of entities that shape landscapes like these stacking up like a litany of malignant tsars -- Frederick, Ivan, Katrina, et al.

In the face of which (I suppose) that sound, that constant churning mentioned above, is little more than a whisper, a wispy rumor of what could be, otherwise might be, but what -- at least for now -- isn't.

Debussy offered only the most slapdash of sketches.

So: My own batteries in need of an extended recharging, moreso than I would've guessed. How much can a person sleep? Apparently quite a lot, a surprising amount, when induced under the best of circumstances, and when the backlogged deficit was -- it seems -- chronic, severe. What I can take from these few of days of offroadness will have to do. Thus the recent lag, partly on account of a hiatus. Some family matters to attend to, but the sort that also allow for some getaway time. Remoteness, off-mappish, no internet or media, accompanied by the most pleasantly loud version of quietude.