Chester really really hates getting his paws wet. We are on our late afternoon walk on the wide expanse of beach of Ocracoke Island. I want to walk in the cold, two inch deep, last-gasp-of-another-rolling-breaker, just before roll-back, but Chester won't have anything to do with this unpredictable water.
He is more into the dunes. As any dog will tell you, that is where all of the best smells are. Dead things, crabs, human pee spots - all worth further investigation.
Chester is really supposed to be on his leash. In actual fact, he is, but there is just no one holding the other end. And there are few people about to care if this overweight three-year-old black lab is within six feet of me, or not.
As we can see for miles both up and down the beach, ( I can see the pinpoints of surf-fishers vehicles way way along), I do keep an eye out for the Park Ranger, the Park Ranger being the only one who cares on a cool March day whether or not Chester is on his leash.
A massive piece of driftwood lies ahead, nestled into the sand, thrown there in some horrific storm of last winter. While wet, sandy, and smelling of earth and salt, it offers a bit of shelter from the wind and stinging sand, and something to lean against. As I drop down, I wrap my hands around my pale mauve toes. They are cold, but it is sacrilege to walk on a beach in shoes. I am bundled in sweaters, and denim-skirted, but my bare legs and feet are having the full experience.
I will spend an hour staring out to sea. Chester, resigned, circles six or eight times and makes a bed in the sand.
The thing is, the amazing thing, that is, is the colour.
Shifting, subtle nuances make up the palette of the sea.
How can I remember them?
How can I put them into my work?
Why is it all so overwhelmingly beautiful?
I stare hard at the horizon line until my eyes ache. I stare in a sightline toward the Strait of Gibraltar. (which, across from Ocracoke Island, I could see if the Atlantic Ocean was a bit skinnier), and think of my father. My father, lover of ships and the sea. Not as an old man, but as a twenty-five year old sailor in the Royal Navy, in a convoy to Gibraltar when the Atlantic was not a safe place to be.
A safe place? Ha. Not the sea. Never the sea. Perhaps that is part of the endless fascination. Vast, dangerous, unpredictable. Never still but restless and changing. Shifting back and forth, back and forth, the water flows in, the sand slides out, again and again and again.
Mesmerizing. Hypnotic.
Magnetic, I decide, as I can't take my gaze from it. I am drugged by the shimmering recklessness that is the Atlantic.
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