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Apr. 13th, 2006 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iridiumyesterday i walked down the beach just before sunset. the sea islands rest on the horizon: Deer Island, Ship Island, Horn Island. before the storm, you'd see shrimp trawlers out criss-crossing the Gulf, but now they are very rare. there's one up by the Fort Bayou bridge, a wreck in the marsh, blue nets all tangled in its rigging.
today the Gulf's shallow breakers are washing in, one and another and another, quiet and steady; yesterday it was calm, nearly glassy just off the beach. a memory: when i was small, standing out on the beach by the Ocean Springs yacht club, Sunfish and HobieCats drawn up on the sand, watching my youngest uncle sprint out into the water...and he just kept on going, which amazed me. the waves never reached up around his knees and tripped him down, because the water is so shallow so far; inches deep for yards and yards.
the yacht club is gone, as is the bridge that used to run from Ocean Springs to Biloxi. now you have to drive all the way up to the interstate and all the way back down. and Biloxi is still dominated by the casinos; they are the first buildings to be repaired, though the Treasure Bay pirate ship is a listing hulk, and the demolition is taking months. that's a pretty neat thing to see, though -- a huge building-barge built to look like an old galleon, with a gaping hole in the middle and tiny little men crawling over the exposed I-beams.
but, the beach, here, out on Pointe aux Chenes Road, out away from the casinos and the highway, in among the pines and cypress and of course the live oaks. the beach is narrow, but the storm brought several feet of pure soft white sand. along the waterline the sea-wrack on first glance looks not too far from usual -- drifts of marsh-reeds, oyster shells, bits of water-trash, old beer cans and bits of rope. but too much of it, far too much, is not from boats or seashores, and the neat row of piers, our right-angle constructions laid over the fractal shapes of shore and wave and marsh, are now just lines of slanted pilings. (but the pelicans like them, just the same.)
there's too much glass. there's beer-bottle glass, faded olive-green, but too much of it, and there's bits of blue glass from odd-shaped bottles, smashed plate-glass, patterned glass from windows or vases or decorative bottles that used to sit by someone's bathroom sink. there are bits of porcelain and ceramic; i found many pieces of some small black bowls with little orange-red ridges on them. found one bit of pale purple glass. a pepper-shaker, a katsup bottle, the corner of a green glass block. the bases and lips of bottles are what seem to last, somehow, circles and rounds with everything else neatly broken away. (my grandmother in Charleston has two stained-glass windows made from the round bottoms of old glass bottles; when i was small, i would stand by the door and look out at the driveway and the oak tree through their bubbles and striations and brilliant colors.)
and there are the heavy materials of buildings, worn quickly rounded by the sea...but as much as the sea has taken them, they bear witness by their strangeness to the energy the sea spent on them. the beach carries sand, and the light flotsam of driftwood and boat-trash, styrofoam and beercans and rope, maybe, but not bricks. not cinderblock, not cast concrete. my uncle said "where the water came, you eventually noticed that none of the pieces of debris that it left was any larger than one person could carry alone." and on the beach the cinderblocks are broken, the tile comes piece by little piece, the bricks are cast up one by one, with hardly any mortar left on their soft edges. out in the sand the sea left to replace the pond we used to have, there is a strip of pieces of asphalt laid out, none larger than i could carry; i have no idea where it came from.
but then again, there are also the signs where trees used to be, tight grasping braids of exposed roots still hanging onto mud and sand, but the stump is black and slick and eroded into short wet spikes. there are pilings a foot or more in diameter and twenty feet long washed up among the drifts of marsh-reeds.
on my return, the chair in the neighbor's yard is still there, but the black plastic CD-rack covered in barnacles is gone. the front part of an airconditioner is stuck in the drifts of new sand. and the sun is setting over the unlit casinos of Biloxi, through the branches of a cypress tree with half its roots under grass and the other half walking spiderlike over the sand; its branches are covered with tiny bright-green new growth.
...a small thought: i'm tempted to take some of these bits of cobalt-blue glass and make something simple from it, a reminder. if any of you more jewelry-making-skilled people are interested, let me know. *laugh* the glass is nothing special, not yet very sand-worn, but it catches my mind.
today the Gulf's shallow breakers are washing in, one and another and another, quiet and steady; yesterday it was calm, nearly glassy just off the beach. a memory: when i was small, standing out on the beach by the Ocean Springs yacht club, Sunfish and HobieCats drawn up on the sand, watching my youngest uncle sprint out into the water...and he just kept on going, which amazed me. the waves never reached up around his knees and tripped him down, because the water is so shallow so far; inches deep for yards and yards.
the yacht club is gone, as is the bridge that used to run from Ocean Springs to Biloxi. now you have to drive all the way up to the interstate and all the way back down. and Biloxi is still dominated by the casinos; they are the first buildings to be repaired, though the Treasure Bay pirate ship is a listing hulk, and the demolition is taking months. that's a pretty neat thing to see, though -- a huge building-barge built to look like an old galleon, with a gaping hole in the middle and tiny little men crawling over the exposed I-beams.
but, the beach, here, out on Pointe aux Chenes Road, out away from the casinos and the highway, in among the pines and cypress and of course the live oaks. the beach is narrow, but the storm brought several feet of pure soft white sand. along the waterline the sea-wrack on first glance looks not too far from usual -- drifts of marsh-reeds, oyster shells, bits of water-trash, old beer cans and bits of rope. but too much of it, far too much, is not from boats or seashores, and the neat row of piers, our right-angle constructions laid over the fractal shapes of shore and wave and marsh, are now just lines of slanted pilings. (but the pelicans like them, just the same.)
there's too much glass. there's beer-bottle glass, faded olive-green, but too much of it, and there's bits of blue glass from odd-shaped bottles, smashed plate-glass, patterned glass from windows or vases or decorative bottles that used to sit by someone's bathroom sink. there are bits of porcelain and ceramic; i found many pieces of some small black bowls with little orange-red ridges on them. found one bit of pale purple glass. a pepper-shaker, a katsup bottle, the corner of a green glass block. the bases and lips of bottles are what seem to last, somehow, circles and rounds with everything else neatly broken away. (my grandmother in Charleston has two stained-glass windows made from the round bottoms of old glass bottles; when i was small, i would stand by the door and look out at the driveway and the oak tree through their bubbles and striations and brilliant colors.)
and there are the heavy materials of buildings, worn quickly rounded by the sea...but as much as the sea has taken them, they bear witness by their strangeness to the energy the sea spent on them. the beach carries sand, and the light flotsam of driftwood and boat-trash, styrofoam and beercans and rope, maybe, but not bricks. not cinderblock, not cast concrete. my uncle said "where the water came, you eventually noticed that none of the pieces of debris that it left was any larger than one person could carry alone." and on the beach the cinderblocks are broken, the tile comes piece by little piece, the bricks are cast up one by one, with hardly any mortar left on their soft edges. out in the sand the sea left to replace the pond we used to have, there is a strip of pieces of asphalt laid out, none larger than i could carry; i have no idea where it came from.
but then again, there are also the signs where trees used to be, tight grasping braids of exposed roots still hanging onto mud and sand, but the stump is black and slick and eroded into short wet spikes. there are pilings a foot or more in diameter and twenty feet long washed up among the drifts of marsh-reeds.
on my return, the chair in the neighbor's yard is still there, but the black plastic CD-rack covered in barnacles is gone. the front part of an airconditioner is stuck in the drifts of new sand. and the sun is setting over the unlit casinos of Biloxi, through the branches of a cypress tree with half its roots under grass and the other half walking spiderlike over the sand; its branches are covered with tiny bright-green new growth.
...a small thought: i'm tempted to take some of these bits of cobalt-blue glass and make something simple from it, a reminder. if any of you more jewelry-making-skilled people are interested, let me know. *laugh* the glass is nothing special, not yet very sand-worn, but it catches my mind.
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-14 02:48 am (UTC)This is beautiful writing. Thank you for sharing.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-15 05:50 am (UTC)i haven't been writing nearly as much as i'd like, or as i should...but then, that's most always the case. and thank you, for the compliment. *smile*
no subject
Date: 2006-04-14 04:27 pm (UTC)