Where the river meets the sea is an endless, changing drama. The river is tidal, rising and swelling twice a day with inundations and releases of water. With fresh water coming out and sea water coming in, the heads are always in turmoil. Boats on their way out to sea for fishing or sight-seeing tip and plummet up and down on the wash, thrusting their way through the top of it. People fish off the rocks into this meeting of waters, balanced precariously on the sharp, black, slippery rocks, bucket wedged next to them.
It’s a study in contrasts. Turn and face inland, and there’s an idyllic scene: gentle waterways, an inlet leading to a harbor, the sloping hills behind; a pastoral, humanized landscape. But the other way—out to sea—there is wilderness and nothing. The slopes of waves, heaving away to the far distance, a vast greyness or blueness, an enormity of unchanging seascape barely touched by human forms; maybe a small boat floating at the horizon line or a couple of surfers in the foreground.
I come here at night, running from my safe human house, my unsettling human relationship. It’s a long way in the middle of the night, but there’s hardly any cars and it’s a timeless experience driving dark, familiar roads to the unfolding of the beach. It’s so different here from the secretive hills with tall trees leaning over everything, the rustlings and creakings and murmurings of forest. Here instead there is space and breeze, an openness that offers me air after the cloistered hills, the closed house. It’s midnight, we’re in a dark moon, and the universe stretches out around and before me.
I stand on the cold sand, the breeze blowing around me gently. I think I could stand here for a long time, hours, and it wouldn’t be counted as hours because it’s night, because time stretches away over the ocean, and stars count in millennia. I feel my desperation, my aloneness and sharpness as I reach out to the sky and sea and air, just breathing and not knowing what to call in, what to ask for, when a sparkle speeds across my vision, towards the sea. I look up and see a second, then a third; shooting stars. I’ve never seen them before, not really. Sometimes after other people cried out I looked up and caught an after-image or the very tail, but I never saw this before: a long burning arc across the map of sky, an anarchist trajectory etching a vision onto the night.
It’s brighter, stronger, more powerful and directed than I imagined; there are dozens of them, and I see them long, long after they have passed; inside my eyes, inside my thoughts. I could be the only one who sees this, sees it so exactly, was waiting, so ready. And the dark, staid jeweled universe has given me this, brief burning life against the arc of atmosphere. I don’t know if I invoked this or not; it’s more like it has invoked me, and I’ve come to life again now that I’ve seen this. I’m reminded of brilliance, of the burning worth of a moment’s beauty, of the uncounted brilliances scattered indifferently across the world in art, in nature, in human kindness. I hold it as long as I can, then finally I turn and go back to the car and drive back, now, to the house; filled up. Reminded of stellar visions, of startling essence, reminded to ask and open my eyes and let them fill with falling stars.