The Bone’s Prayer
The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.
Annie Dillard
1.
She has been walking the beach all afternoon, which isn’t unusual for days when she cannot write. And there have been several dry days now in a row, one following wordlessly after the next. A mute procession of empty hours, or, worse still, a procession of hours spent carefully composing sentences and paragraphs that briefly deceive her into thinking that the drought has finally passed. But then she reads back over the pages, and the prose thuds and clangs artlessly against itself, or it leads off somewhere she has not the time or the skill or the inclination to follow. She has deadlines, and bills, and the expectations of readers, and all these things must be factored into the question of whether a productive hour is, indeed, productive.
It becomes intolerable, the mute procession and the false starts, the cigarettes and coffee and all those books silently watching her from their places on the shelves that line her office. And, so, she eventually, inevitably, goes to the beach, which is not so very far away, hardly an hour’s drive south from the city. She goes to the beach, and she tries very hard not to think of what isn’t getting written. She tries only to hear the waves, the gulls and cormorants, the wind, tries to take in so much of the sand and the sky and the blue-green sea that there is no room remaining for her anxieties.
And sometimes it even works.
Today is a Saturday near the end of winter, and there are violent gusts off the sound that bite straight through her gloves and her long wool coat. Gusts that have twice now almost managed to dislodge the fleece-lined cap with flaps to keep her ears warm. Thick clouds the color of Wedgwood china hide the sun and threaten snow. But, thanks to the inclement weather, she has the beach all to herself, and that more than makes up for the discomfort. This solitude, like the breathy rhythm of the surf, and the smell of the incoming tide, is a balm. She begins at Moonstone Beach and walks the mile or so south and west to the scatter of abandoned summer cottages at Greenhill Point. Then she walks back, following the narrow strip of beach stretching between Block Island Sound and the low dunes dividing the beach from Trustom Pond.
The estuary is frozen solid, and when she climbs the dunes and stares out across the ice, there are flocks of mallards there, and Canadian geese, and a few swans wandering disconsolately about, looking lost. In the summer, the land around the salt pond is a verdant tangle of dog roses, poison ivy, greenbriers, and gold-enrod. But now it is ringed by a homogenous brown snarl, and the only sign of green anywhere in this landscape are a few spruce trees and red cedars, dotting the southern edge of the forest to the north.
She turns back towards the sea and the cobble-strewn sand. It doesn’t seem to her that the sea changes its hues with the season. Today, it wears the same restless shade of celadon that it wears in June, quickly darkening to a Persian blue where the water begins to grow deep, only a little ways out from shore. Ever shifting, never still, it is her only constant, nonetheless. It is her comfort, the sight of the sea, even in a month as bleak and dead as this.
She begins gathering a handful of pebbles, meaning to carry them back towards the dunes and find a dry place to sit, hopefully somewhere out of the worst of the wind. This beach is somewhat famous for the pebbles that fetch up here from submerged outcroppings of igneous stone, earth that was the molten-hot core of a mountain range millions of years before the coming of the dinosaurs. Here and there among the polished lumps of granite are the milky white moonstones that give the beach its name. She used to collect them, until she had a hundred or so, and they lost their novelty. There are also strands of kelp and bladderwrack, the claws and carapaces and jointed legs of dismembered crabs and lobsters, an occasional mermaid’s purse—all the usual detritus. In the summer months, there would be added to this an assortment of human jetsam—water bottles, beer cans, stray flip flops, styrofoam cups, and all manner of plastic refuse—the thoughtless filth that people leave behind. And this is another reason that she prefers the beach in winter.
Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart Page 24