Ah, summer in New England, where no one lives too far from the beach.
For the record, I’m not much of a beachgoer. I prefer life under a pine tree, my feet dappling in a cool stream. Even my favorite beach chair is my favorite only because it smells like smoky campfire and bug spray. Sand between my toes, salt making my hair feel like dried pasta—it’s simply not my jam. And yet, that blue horizon line stretching my eyes out, and my mind too. “How many loves might there be in the world?” Mary Oliver once asked. Who else is out there, my whole body wants to know, just on the other side of that line, which is no line at all?
“How many loves might there be in the world?”
“On the Beach,” by Mary Oliver
If there is something I love about the beach, it’s low tide. When it’s high tide, and you’re sitting with your back almost against the parking lot and your feet almost in the water, it’s hard to imagine that in three hours there will be half-a-mile of open beach before you. I don’t know why this is so hard to imagine. The tides have been swapping places without fail for billions of years, and not just on the beaches of Cape Cod in July but also on the frozen shores of Antarctica in January. People can attest to it; if they could talk, penguins, narwhals, and seagulls could attest to it. Why then is it so hard (for me at least) to imagine that just under the cover of this dark liquid mass will soon appear a soft brown earth?
I don’t think it’s for an actual lack of imagination on my part. When I try to catch a wave on my bare belly and the wave instead catches me, pushing me under, tumbling me into something hard and unforgiving, I don’t have to imagine I have just met a rock. I know I have. I don’t need the tide to roll out so I can see it to believe it. Just as I don’t need a low tide to know where the soft sand is. I just need good working nerve endings in my feet.
So, why is it so hard to imagine the possibility of low tide where there is only high tide? I think it is the powerful ease with which the tides turn that makes it so for me. I think it is the way in which the high tide doesn’t bust through the door to drag the low tide away; the way in which the two do not compete for space on the shore.
After a recent day at Mayflower Beach on the Cape, I was trying to describe this phenomenon to a friend. At Mayflower, the amount of water that is dispersed to make room for low tide is quite remarkable—enough to create 2 more whole beaches. My friend remarked that it must be a good place to find treasures left behind by the tide. It is. Snails perfectly at home on barnacles of gray, black, and blue; stray pieces of seaweed, floating gently by in a maze of tidal pools where babies splash about, happy to be on the ocean floor; pen shells, cone shells, bivalve mollusks that have been split open to reveal another pearl gone missing, and cockles who seem intent on keeping to themselves, even as children come by to put them in their plastic red pails. Why just a moment ago all these were sitting at the bottom of the great Atlantic, and now they are not.
I wonder, though, have all these treasures been left behind by the tide or are they treasures for having resisted the tide? Does the high tide say to the periwinkle, as it’s heading back out to sea, “Don’t mind me if I wash over you on my way by. For you see, I have no choice but to go. It is simply my time. But I promise you, in going, I will not wash you away.” Or does the high tide try to take the periwinkle with it? A final push for power, or of love, or both, on the part of the high tide.
For all our imaginings, we will never know. But this much is true: when the tide rolls out to sea, nothing is lost. For with every low tide, there is some distant shore—and a periwinkle—that has been waiting for the tide to roll in. Plus, this: the tide seems to have a way of always making its way back to the other side, to the place from which it came. Or is it the place to which it is going?
It is one of the agreements the earth has made with itself and keeps to this day: to not fight with the universe, but instead to let the universe in; to choose change over destruction. And look at how the universe responds—pulling back the tides, only to give them back again. A reminder that change is neither permanent nor avoidable, just good and trusting.
The Heart is right to cry Even when the smallest drop of light, Of love, Is taken away. Perhaps you may kick, moan, scream In a dignified Silence But you are so right To do so in any fashion Until God returns to You. - Hafiz (1320 - 1389)
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