I guess you could call it a gray day. The sky is gray and the huge sheet of water beneath it is gray too, like a mirror reflection.

I stand beneath the sky, near the water wearing a gray sweatshirt. The sea has always held some strange fascination, a kind of enchantment for me. I have longed for it as we travel to basketball games in Clallam Bay or Neah Bay, have rubbed away the fog on the bus windows to watch it as we go westward, not knowing whether we follow it or it follows us.

I have watched but never seen in all those trips a single soul on the beaches. I have wondered then, why the sea doesn’t draw the people in these sleepy little towns, why it does not pull them close like a magnetic force, why they do not run along its edges, energized by the wild beauty so near to them. 

For the sea draws me. It draws me this day, and so I come though I don’t know what it wants from me or what I want from it. I can only look, and look.

The sea has claimed most of the beach today, lapping hungrily at the remaining feet of sand. I wonder if it can ever cover all of it or if there is some sort of natural law that prevails over even the sea’s desire. I remember a verse in the Bible that says that God has set a boundary for the sea. I wonder if that’s true. Can you put perimeters around something so large, so strong and seemingly so free? I suppose so, although we don’t understand, for the box placed around the sea is just a larger version of the one we occupy. 

I begin to walk, then, noticing that I am by no means the first to travel this way. I study their foot prints, the only sign of human life that I can see, a legacy that will soon be obliterated. My foot is bigger than that one, I think, smaller than this one, my tennis shoes wider than whatever shoes that person wears. I pick up a long thick piece of wood and drag it behind me, watching the line it makes cut into the sand. I have made my foot prints, but hasn’t everybody? I will create something different, something more, I stopped to carve my initials in to a virgin patch of sand. H.P. dot after each letter. I was here, I think but soon there will be no record of my coming. 

Gray doesn’t work I decide, walking along. Yes, the water is gray but there is more. A single word can not define the indefinable. I study the lights and darks, the shadows that glint off the rolling waves. They are not merely black and white and shades in between, like they teach you in art class, but rather pinks and blues and yellows that could never be found on an artist’s pallet. Colors that change too quickly to be classified or named. They flow to the shore, rolling into sprays of frothy white. No girl, I think, could ever have a dress so beautiful as the colors of the sea. Not for any amount of money. I reach my destination, a huge piece of driftwood, many, many times taller and wider then I am. The sea carried this, I realize. One day there was bare sand, the next day this monstrosity covered it. The way the sea whisked the bright pebbles at its edges in and out, so can it also can dredge forth this driftwood. And someday, if it wants too, it can reclaim it, carry it, elsewhere, to another beach even. Perhaps then, this is why the beach is so therapeutic. It is always changing, never the same twice. It is a place that reminds us that this too shall pass, that bad things don’t last forever. 

I search until I find a wishing rock, a dark stone with a single band of white encircling it. I stand with my back to the sea, and toss the rock over my shoulder. I make a wish for the future, entrusting it to the depths of the mighty sea, to carry it for me, to guard and protect it. When I turn to face the water again, I can see no trace of my stone, no ripples marking the place it fell. Now my wish will come true. 

I turn and head back the way I came. Already the sea has erased the line I made with my stick. Once more, I drag the stick behind me, plotting a new course. When I reach the place I started from, I toss my stick into the water. I watch it float away and wonder where it will end up. I guess it's like my life, that stick. I know where it's been, but I can only guess where its going. 

Copyright  @2001 Heather Peters