Early morning trail ride

Some Saturdays I rose before dawn for early morning trail rides with my friend Stephanie. Everyone else was asleep. Her father never knew of our morning escapades, and my grandmother didn’t seem to mind. But I also didn’t tell her where we were going, as it was too far from home for a child on her own. I was on my horse, somewhere deep in the hills, and therefore, safe. At least she never said anything to me. My own parents were in absentia, my father deep in a bottle, my mother in one asylum or other. Steph‘s dad was a little more controlling. See, her mother, who was a Russian translator for the UN, blacklisted by McCarthy, knew all about silence. She drank in silence, and because of that silence, she died in the fire. A short in the dryer. Because Les couldn’t protect his wife, he was over-protective of Steph. The boys, her two younger brothers, not so much. Bucky was close to our age but Gooby was still in diapers. We’d simultaneously sneak out of the house just as the sky was beginning to lighten, and meet up at the county road. The morning fog was like a tight glove protecting us from the mid-20th century. We could’ve been anywhere in time. Sometimes we’d sneak through her upper pasture, past Old Grandad, the Hereford bull, to get to the fire road that led up to Mt. Barnabe. But the stiff barbed wire gate gave our small hands pause. The top of the mountain facing due west was our goal. It was always a spectacular view from the crest of the ridge, the morning mist parting to reveal the sheathed silver sword of Tomales Bay, tracing the trench of the San Andreas Fault, and the clenched bare fist of Elephant Mountain. It restored my equilibrium to see the word from a raptor’s viewpoint. These refuges, these steep hills and valleys were the coping weapons of my youth.

4/12/23 

TheNarrativeMethod.com prompt

Write invoice for a life past due

1. In the morning my voice feels like a lost horizon, a longshoreman headed for home at daybreak. The sun warming the edges of the ridges to the west. The stars weren’t quite ready to let go of all that indigo serenity. Perhaps the moon is setting, the lump in my throat reminds me to stay in the present tense, this day, this new beginning, is all that there is. Beginning now.

When I was a child, my voice was soft as warbling birds and singing was a second nature. My voice was a thin, reedy wind coming down from the ridgetops, its sighing having emanated deep in the pines. Those sighs followed me, my voice took on the stubbornness of stone, like the layers of ribbon chert laid down long ago beneath the seafloor. All the detritus of living transformed into metamorphic rock, into these mountains I call home.

My voice is closest to the earth, when I dream, because in dreams, my voice becomes the wings of small birds, escaping on the wind as I traverse the landscape of my psyche.

My mother, tired of hearing a child’s monotonous sing-song, told me to either sing or shut up. I love to sing, my voice was like the blackbirds in the cattails lining the pond. So I put it away in a box never letting it out of sight. But my voice wanted to scry on the updrafts and thermals, circling the valley of memory and the past.

Declining coho run on Lagunitas Creek: It's the damned dams, Stoopid!

An Open Letter to Alastair Bland:

Who, in an article, Big Rains Bring Both Good and Bad News for Salmon, for of newsdeeply.com, wrote that: "Lagunitas Creek and its lower tributaries, have been lined with bank fortifications and berms that confine the streams to their main channels..." are the real problem for failing coho salmon runs ... Not.

Hmm, Mr. Bland, and there are few berms on Lagunitas Creek. Unless you're referring to the dams on upper Lagunitas Creek, they are called, you know, flat-out dams, not berms. I  ridden every inch of that creekbed from the Inkwell to Tócaloma. There are berms at Jewel, but that’s about it.

As to your reference to all the damage to the lower tributaries, you're way off mark (have you ever heard of primary investigation vs using Wiki as a reference, bolstered by a Marin Municipal Water District quotes. Nice touch, BTW. Lends a real air of authenticity.

Has it also ever occurred to you that MMWD just MIGHT be part of the main problem? Not exactly an unbiased source. Think about that for a moment. I'll wait. Five dams. Has the penny dropped? Oh, right. Dams! MMWD's bread and butter. Ka-ching!

One main tributary to Lagunitas Creek (other than Olema Creek), the San Geronimo/Creamery Creek does not have extensive berms either, and certainly not any new channeling, and the fish runs were huge when I was a kid. There was a fish ladder at the golf course (see below), but it didn’t impede the fish run. The golf course (and pesticides) did.

I know damned near every bend of these creeks. (And most of the tributaries). And I have swum in, or ridden most of the streambeds. On Lagunitas Creek, south of Kent Lake Dam, Devil's Gulch Creek, another main tributary, has NO berms whatsoever... never had them, so this is bogus info. Total bullshit. Olema Creek, ditto. Cowshit might contribute to the problem in Point Reyes. But I have seen silver salmon runs where the water was roiling with fish in cowshitted water.

There was a fish ladder (at Roy's Dam) on the San Geronimo Creek in San Geronimo. Unless the fish ladder was later removed, SPAWN's claim to fame is somewhat hyperbolic. The fact, that in 1997, the fish were still navigating San Geronimo Creek, suggests it wasn't a problem. I distinctly remember going to the ladders to watch the coho navigate the steps in the 1970s.

It is possible that the SGV Golf Course radically changed the structure of the ladder ca. the late 1980s, early 1990s, and I wouldn't have witnessed it. (From what I can gather, upon further sleuthing, the fish ladder was in disrepair, and fixed in 1999 and Roy's Dam—if you can call it a dam— was removed). But I’ll also mention again that the golf course used pesticides to keep the weeds off the course. 

Maybe Andy Giddings has more specific info on the SGV creek fishladder as his father was Fish & Game Warden for the San Geronimo Valley during the 1950s-1980s?

BTW, Fish also made it all the way up to our tertiary creeks, Barranca and Arroyo during the 1960s. 

On San Geronimo Creek, where it meet Lagunitas Creek, Shafter's Pool was dammed during the summer, but that practice stopped in the late 50s, early 60s. It was a seasonal dam, a summer swimming hole for kids. It had zero impact on coho runs. And the salmon were still plentiful. No other dams on the creek. So what exactly are you talking about?

The silver salmon and the coho runs declined in the 80s-90s, there's something else at work: like over-fishing and lack of spawning grounds. Oh, and the biggest "berm" of all, Kent Lake Dam—is probably the biggest reason of all why critical fish habitat was destroyed. Add Nicasio Dam to that list. Most of the Mt. Tam dams date back to the 'teens" so they didn't have a huge recent impact on failing coho runs of the 1990s.

Lake Lagunitas dam was built 1872, Alpine Dam 1917, Bon Tempe 1948, Kent Lake (Peter's) Dam, the largest reservoir, in 1954—it was still filling up in the late 50s. The dam was raised 45 feet in 1982, after the drought of the 70s. Nicasio Dam was added in 1962.) And then there was the drought. Did I mention drought. As in several back-to-back long-term drought cycles?

So, to be clear, Lagunitas Creek (and its three forks) is dammed at Lake Lagunitas, becomes Lagunitas Creek the First, which drains into Bon Tempe Lake, then to Alpine Dam, (with a name change to Big Carson), then to Kent Lake Dam, then to Lagunitas Creek the Second, at the confluence of San Geronimo Creek. Note: they are full blown DAMS not berms.

And then there's Nicasio Creek, which flows from the Nicasio Reservoir (1962), to Platform Bridge, where it joins Lagunitas Creek— another damned dam, to the mix. That's the source of the problem. All the damned dams.

FYI: From Kent Lake to the sea, Lagunitas Creek is a wild creek through Samuel P.Taylor Park, through Jewel, around the bend, past Devil's Gulch, past McIsaac's Ranch, my cousin's Gallagher Ranch at Elephant/Black Mountain, to Point Reyes Station, to the Point Reyes bridge....still NO channels or berms, on to White House Pool, that I can recall—then it empties into Tomales Bay... Even Olema Creek is not bermed. So, what are you talking about?

Seriously, this sounds like a spin from the self-serving organization, SPAWN (litigious Todd Steiner's Salmon Protection and Watershed Network) which began its alternative truth campaign in 1997, and has been wildly successful at obfuscation and litigation...probably leading to some of the factoids in your article, a case in point. It's the damned dams that are the problem. And droughts. Did I mention the droughts???

Otherwise, a good article...

Google Maps screenshot of San Geronimo Creek headwaters. Roy's Dam was at the golf course, where SGV Rd turns up to Nicasio road.

TREMOR AT 3 AM

I was just north of Pt. Reyes Station
sleeping over in a friend's living room,
I got up for some water, I was feeling woozy
and then I fell back to sleep.

But the trees were whispering and shimmying.
The land around me moaned and roared
like a freight train through Tortilla Flats.
And I was nearly tossed off the couch.

I couldn't figure out someplace safe to go,

I was in a strange house, So I screamed.
Brian came running out and we shivered
on the front porch in our underwear

as the earth hissed and shook and the stars jigged.

I was positive it was San Andreas' fault
which is only a few feet away, and runs
the length of Tomales Bay, lapping, lapping.
Thought I was gonna be on a floating island,
drifting out to sea on this slippery raft of a couch.

I must've been wakened by an earlier tremor. 
In my dreams the earth was roaring so loud,
the hum seemed to be coming from inside my head,
then I realized it's the earth, deep inside, groaning.
Singing a primal earthquake song.

Next time I sleep over, I'm bringing a seatbelt.

8/24/14
rev 10/16

Landscapes, sketches (art) 2013

I made these drawings in May and June of 2013, ideas for silk art and wet pastels. I like the drawings better than the finished product.

Scratchboard drawings, India ink, 1995-97
Landscapes, wet pastels (art) 2013
Three drawings, Scotland, ca 2006
Mt Diablo from Clayton, drawingBaja, Mulegé, Cabo San Lucas, watercolors
Shells, three drawings, stabillo pencil, 3/95
Shell, charcoal drawing

Marin's Pastures of Plenty

Heifers resting by the creek, George Lucas' Big Rock Ranch, Marin County, northern California. All these photos are © 2010 by Maureen Hurley and may not be used without express written permission from her. Please respect copyright.

There's a great SF Gate Inside Scoop blog by celebrated executive chef/restauranteur Hoss Zaré at Flytrap, who interviewed Straus Family Creamery owner, Albert Straus. Albert who once told me that majored in ice cream at Cal-Poly, has revolutionized the organic dairy industry. I remember Albert's mother, tiny Ellen Straus, made the best strawberry shortcake in the world. Ellen was also co-founder of the first agricultural land trust in the nation, the Marin Agricultural Land Trust.

(See the history of MALT at YouTube.)

During the late 1970s to the early 1990s, we made an annual party trek to the Straus farm, Blake's Landing Farm on Tomales Bay, to bring on the Autumn Equinox. My cousin and I made wild huckleberry ice cream with Albert's fresh cream in an old wooden ice cream paddle churn—with all the kids madly cranking away.

We shucked oysters and barbecued salmon, bratwurst, corn and tofu on the metal water trough-cum-grill. We visited the creamery, we petted the cows and fed the calves. We danced in the barn and raised the rafters. But the piece de resistance was always Ellen's strawberry shortcake piled high as the Matterhorn with fresh whipped cream.

So it was with delight that I read Hoss's fine interview with Albert. But it also got me thinking on how much has changed in Marin since I was a child—once dairying was an important part of Marin's culture and identity. Where did it all go? Suburbs, parking lots and malls. Like how it goes in the Janice Ian song: pave paradise, put up a parking lot. If not for Ellen Straus.

Huckleberries

MY cousin Sineád and I went huckleberrying on the Autumn Equinox at our secret spot on Inverness Ridge near Tomales Bay, where we used to go berrying with our grandmother. Hard to believe so much time has passed since I hiked the highlands of the other Inverness, Scotland. I once thought that 20 years was a widening gulf—impossible to retrace extant memories of childhood. Here, at Tomales, it really is like Loch Ness; in the pine forest we’ve strange white deer from China instead of the red deer. Instead of Nessie sightings, the San Andreas Fault stretches its monstrous length northward and great white sharks relentlessly patrol the mouth of the bay. My grandmother said Nessie was a coelacanth—Gaelic ceili, for “singing” fish. As a child she remembered the fishermen catching the rare singing fish in the North Sea. From the isthmus, we could see Point Reyes in the distance, a mountainous corona against the shimmering sea, separating Drake’s Bay from the raging Pacific—a misnamed ocean!

The weather at the Point is capricious. Once my aunts and uncles went out to the headlands to gather abalone. Caught in a whiteout of tule fog, they nearly drove off the cliffs. Only the urgent whispering surf on the rocks saved them. Offshore fog rising like a vast wall against a sky where tiny fishing boats disappear into its maws, makes me think of a Chinese silk scroll, or a painting I once saw in the Tate Gallery by Turner. The wind-ravaged bishop pines, draped in the pale traces of Spanish mosses we once used as green tresses, took a severe beating from last year’s storms. So many uprooted trees met an abrupt end—we used them as aerial pathways up the steep hillsides. This part, primordial as the beginnings of time, unscathed by the devastating Inverness Ridge inferno that blackened the hills for miles. But the resilient land is again clothed in the succulent grasses the deer favor at sunset.

Neruda wrote Death is an admiral on a ship. . . Many shipwrecks along this treacherous coast. We found hand-forged square nails, slow crawling moonsnails, and pottery shards in the lagoons and on the beaches of Limantour Spit. The natives of Point Reyes and Bodega Bay thought the sailing ships arose like white birds from the belly of the sea, and the white-skinned explorers—ghosts. They tried to sing away the apparitions of the otherworld. They had no words for this, other than the arrival of death.

Because this peninsula is now public land, Point Reyes National Seashore, we’re not supposed to gather anything: huckleberries, or moss-covered antlers. Short, thick branch: a fallow deer’s. Non-native, like us. We lugged our 2-year-old nephew, Seán, through the undergrowth. He plucked each berry like a little king appraising jewels in sunlight, then greedily fisted them into his mouth until he was tattooed with violet juice. Returning the memory of those who came before us, we re-enacted an age-old ritual, gathering berries before the fall—no matter that our skin is white, not red.

My aunt will make pies and ice cream, our teeth will be indigo-stained for days (like my fingers). How Pictish! The berries, so labor-intensive (cleaning takes longer than picking), we make jokes, compare them to caviar, as we drop them from silver spoons, polishing them, black pearls on purpling terrycloth towels. But it gives us an excuse to be together, like in the old days. We’ll eat pie and have tea from the Blue Willow teapot with a cracked spout. Later, we’ll go to a party at the Straus farm across Tomales Bay on the barren, grassy Marshall hillsides and make gallons of huckleberry ice cream with their cream fresh from the dairy. Jungle-lush Inverness Ridge is part of what’s left of the granitic Pacific Plate, while Marshall with its thin red soil of Franciscan strata, is part of the North American Plate. Two continents divided by a thin bay, different as night and day.

© 1997 revised 2000 Maureen Hurley

CREAMERY CREEK

CREAMERY CREEK
   —for Albert Straus

Teddy Roosevelt fished here.

That is why this part of the creek, where it enters Tomales Bay

is called White House Bend. The flash and churn 

of silver salmon spawned in cowshitted green water—

a coinage of fiery fish, unturned stones and politics.

With a pitchfork, my uncle speared a salmon

fat with roe—escaped embers combusting downstream

where the given name changes again and again

but not the creek. Creamery, Lagunitas, Papermill.

The Miwok names are lost.

With rosemary from my grandmother's garden, we seasoned the salmon.

Nestled in the resin-green needles, a surprise of pale blooms 

like fragments of the sky against sunrisen flesh 

wrapped in a tinfoil night. We baked it in butter and garlic

but the flesh was like muddied water.

The cats fought over the feathered bones.

Each pool was named: Shafter's, China House, The Gravel Pit, Taylor. 

Beneath dank redwoods, rags from the City were pulped into paper

by big paddles when Papermill Creek was still untamed.

Near the Inkwells, so deep, everyone said they were bottomless,

we found obsidian and chert arrowheads, nameless iron, 

coins and wedding rings. Who we were. Where we came from.

In summer, my chestnut mare plunged through pools,

her hair, floating in verdent water like fire.

I slipped off her back, grabbed hold of her tail

and was towed to the opposite shore

not understanding the sense of loss.

Years later, my uncle said, I feel guilty

taking that salmon before she laid her eggs.

My uncle said, Before Kent dam was built

the Cataracts were alive with falls.

When the wind blew, dense stands 

of pine and redwood roared like fire.

Now, silt feeds the azaleas, stream orchids

and huckleberries. No coinage of fish.

The forests, the dairies—nearly all gone now.

Perhaps, forseeing the end of civilization,

this is why the Romans named the rosemary for remembrance.

Creamery/Lagunitas/Papermill Creek fed by all the tributaries:

Arroyo, and Barranca—where, in the small summer pools

I caught trapped fish bare-handed; a bagpipe skirling

Amazing Grace from some forgotten canyon at sunset.

Devil's Gulch, Crystal Springs. All the names—even Kit Carson left his mark.

At the headwaters of Creamery Creek—named after Jóse Revere's milking barn

where Alexander Graham Bell set up the first telephone system

in the San Geronimo Valley—did they shout through copper wires

at midnight, The Indians are coming! The Indians are coming!

to those recording the historic event in the kitchen of the main house?

We are already here on the last wild ride of the long night.

And what of the Miwok names?

6/4/88    Marshall/Pt. Reyes

1991 San Geronimo Valley Resource Guide

1989 First Leaves

Steve Torre Workshop, Mark West School Poem fragments

BOLINAS RIDGE

I remember finding charge stumps
still glowing with red eyes.

I had no way of knowing
if they had been smoldering
from a recent burning,
or if they had kept a fiery vigil
all those years
long after the loggers were gone.

3/17/1988

in the morning sun
we watched the old guys
split the cedar shakes

Thwock!

Turn the stump

Thwock!

Turn it again turn

To keep the grain even, he said

The sweat drizzled his whiskered cheeks,

And I sank deeper into the lake.

Like loggers we rolled the logs
below Shafter Dam in the greening pond.

Have you ever noticed the fields by the coasts
punctuated with charred stumps?

Machines with spiked teeth
stripped the bark from trees
as if they were made of eggshell,
instead of wood.

I abandoned my own farm
and a friend runs cattle there now.

The horses they chewed on the barn
until it fell back into the earth.
Unseasonable sawdust
and the mare, Binty choking on that splinter.
Poetic karma.

long shadows of barns

straddle the thin peninsula 

from Tomales Bay to the Pacific 

On Tomales Head 

walking along the windswept land 

the lonely whitewashed barns 

cattle and rocks grazing 

on the windswept grass 

We are losing a landscape of culture

look to your place in the landscape 

your childhood 

I never found the wilderness 

though I spent five years looking for it 

until I realized I was looking for my lost childhood.

What I've lost is like a Kodak snapshot 

with its off blues and deep reds of the 50s 

my mother's carmine lipstick, 

the floral skirt that later became pillows for the couch

People living solitary lives 

personal history 

skin changing imagine

Along the windswept land
solitary whitewashed barns
rocks and cattle grazing
on the matted grass.

Long shadows of barns
straddled the thin peninsula
from Tomales Bay to the Pacific.

Families nailed row after row
of abalone shells to the sides of barns,
not realizing they were finite.
My aunt remembers how the car,
lost in the fog, was also nearly lost
to the sea on Tomales Point.

The horses would chew the sides of the barn
until its back broke and fell back into the earth,
broken spine and unseasonable sawdust
the final splinters lodged in the gray mare's throat
fell her as well.

Schools of tule elk
the extraordinary curve of horn
ancestors
a coyote pelt nose down on the wall

Our shadows watered the sawdust
our eyes all bloodshot
our hearts like a blast of wheat
through the clear ribs of morning
light sank through my body
like alder and pine
and sheep biting the red clay
as the huge cable snapped
gutting the darkness
 and I saw the sun standing
in a pool of ravens

there is no bridge in Hayfork
the big bowl of the Valley
is surrounded by mountains.

3/18/1988

Stephen Torre workshop 

Early memory, Point Reyes

The hillsides were more open. The brush hadn't yet advanced into the meadows. Deer crossed the fields intermittently. In the forested valleys, on foggy days, they came down to the creek to drink. On the other days, they waited for the safety of dusk.

When it rains too much, water comes spouting out from the gopher holes that drain the water from the higher hillsides. A good place to find quartz crystals, swept up from the bowels of the earth. Once I found rendered fat in one of the holes. Tiny globules waxing my wrinkled fingers.

My pants of gray and blue woven cotton, made from a remnant my grandmother bought at the Lagunitas church bazaar, were laden with rain, and they hung low on my hips. The chocolate mud bordering the cuffs calligraphed the earth.

And my tennis shoes make squelching sounds as I walk down the path, now a runnel from the runoff. I leave my clothes on the newspaper sheets spread in front of the door to catch the winter's mud. I shed my clothes like the hide of a beast —too much of a hurry, I dry off and sit by the fire.

But it is a landscape of wet and cold that doesn't willingly leave you. My grandmother talks of catching bronchitis and the tiny tubules that everyone in our family seems to have.

In the night I begin to cough, and it goes on and on. We hitch a ride out to the doctor. His office is in Point Reyes Station. It's a long winding road right through Camp Taylor where the redwoods crown the sky, and it is always dusk. 

Over Olema hill, near the crest, there's one small curve, where you get the first glimpse of Tomales Bay. On the flats, we pass drowned artichoke fields, and the old caboose, an abandoned railroad car that still proclaims it is the Point Reyes Library, though the only books it holds are written by the wind whistling through broken windows.

The caboose shares a pasture with a donkey and a goose. The goose is swimming in the volunteer lake at the lower end of the pasture. The donkey's ears are splayed at 30° angles as he huddles next to the caboose wall for shelter. He doesn't understand why his friend seeks out water on a day like today.

The doctor's office smells of alcohol and Pine-Sol. Thick coating on my tongue, dark breath. and roaring ears. I am burning. He says 104°. And the doctor gives me orange-flavored syrup. For years after, I will hate the taste taste of oranges.

I remember Tomales was foggy that day. Trees dripped steadily as condensed fog fell to the ground. I looked up a raindrop on the edge of a leaf, the quavering edge reminded me of a wintergreen potato chip.

Last summer, at Heart's Desire Beach, I kept looking for the secret heart. I thought maybe the inlet was heart-shaped, but no, it was an inlet like any other. Not understanding the metaphor, I wondered what shape did it desire to take on?

A stingray gracefully slid across the shallows of the small lagoon and then settled under the mud, using its wings to sift the mud over its body. Only its pale blue eyes were visible, like two tiny pearls fallen from the sky.

When the sun comes out, the water is like dark forests. It's more like a lake than a bay. But periodic shark reports keep it honest. My eyes are like sharkskin, the color of water on a foggy day.

6/1985
added, rev. 2/18

December 30, Dillon Beach; drawings (art)

Two cows weaving in the dunes at sunset, leave fine white crescents in the sharp sand. I gather crushed shells, sand dollars, and paper thin orange scallops. On the leeward side of a rock, a woman dandles a child.

Two girls run along the tops of the dunes, their screaming is like seagulls. Wind snatches a song from their mouths and pushes it back a hundred yards until they sound like they're coming from behind themselves, laughing so carelessly as if time itself stood still when the wind blew, and in that moment, an eternity. 

I survey this world of ageless youth, the same world as ours, but first it comes from the thighs, that inexorable gentle tug of the earth burdening me downwards with its weight, reminding me of my beginning and my end,

The slow tug of gravity, this slow death suckling on the toes, ankles, thighs. A clay chill carrying future memory. But I begin to run, to leap away from the quicksand time, I lift my feet off the earth, pump the blood. It keep my womb warm and ready. I'm not done yet. 

Geoff is on some warm shore. I dreamt of him last night. Donna said he sure showed a lot of pictures of me, but what about the one who had one almost ready for the oven? I said who? A dune slipped out from under my feet. 

I fell into the Roman baths at Bath. Warm water weighting me down. Rich suckle on my sheepskin vest I swim toward the edge, arms heavy with wet clothes, and I followed him with my eyes as he walked away with the group. 

He doesn't see me, though I call out to him, the wind pushes my voice a few yards back, and I realize I'm either a few days forward or a few days backward in another time. But dreams are like that.  

I'm looking at a movie or is he the one walking into my celluloid color dream splashing against the far wall?

Along the beach two spaniels run with their mirror image companions in an upside down world, until a wave breaks that image. Their barks are like pinpricks in the fluctuating surf. They trot in tandem, at play with the waves.

A couple strolling along the sand stop at a sand figure of a person reclining. The woman disengages herself from his clasp and goes back to the figure and stomps fully on the chest. I guess the boobs offended her. They are both wearing white sweaters. So out of place here. The sand woman has long hair made of seaweed and there is only the sound of the ocean.

Four men huddle between the bluffs, a blue screen of smoke designates a dimension between the cliffs. Carrying an ice chest and radio, they make to leave. 

Stephen says the game is over. I wonder who won? Further down the beach, the sand assumes a gray velvet look, where an impromptu game of football is in progress. An onlooker, someone's dog barks as if to announce the score. Or perhaps to punctuate a commercial at halftime.

The two spaniels resume their tandem dance with the sea, endlessly combing one section of the shore in a series of relays. 

The woman and her child leave the shelter of the cliff, she is carrying a bright red and orange plastic pail with a blue shovel. The child is bundled in florescent colors like the bucket. The navy blue of the woman's coat is like a black shadow trying to absorb all that unnatural color in all this gray sky.

The spaniels halfheartedly greet each group of people passing their sector of the beach, they're on a search for something familiar. As the groups leave, they resume their endless trotting and easy lope along the shore, and run parallel with the surf. 

Deeper into the dunes. the cows are grazing on saltgrass. I am reminded of the salt sheep of Camargue, an unexpected hunger arises. The wind erases their tracks in the sand. A jackrabbit exercises his options at dusk along a stretch between two dunes.

This soft sandbanks carved from the last storm, are impossible to climb. Donna's niece, Michelle, makes it to the top, but my weight crumbles the edge of it. My hands reach the top, but I am unable to ascend the bank, it is like a bad dream of pursuit and fear. Further down, a gully presents itself and I climb up. The sand is firmer more dense the inexorable weight of gravity less, age backs off a few years.

I think I have a bit more time to wait for Geoff.

The endless breathing of the sea, wave upon wave, like the sound of someone sleeping in the same room. As they shift into a deeper sleep, how it calms one and makes one sleepy too.

A wedge of shore shifts the mirrored weight of the spaniels as they gallops across the wet sand. The pressure of their weight pushes, and drives the water from the sand like a sponge wrung dry. 

No one disturbs the sandcastle, each one carefully walks around it. 

And when I write, time is suspended—the ocean, Stephan on the rock above me, the laughter of women, the football game, the incessant bark of the black lab—all this becomes timeless. If only I could suspend that moment and enter that world of half thoughts, and record it. 

It doesn't matter what I write as long as I try and define it with words, what I see and hear in the active definition. I am painting, honing my craft. Every experiment with sound and image is cumulative. 

I am preparing for the right moment. I don't know when it will come. I don't know what I'm preparing for. Like what Lee said, a startling enemy will appear. and you will both know what to do.

A synapse of mind, suddenly I'm jerked painfully back into time by some tangible form. My mind buzzes like a stretched rubber band, and I'm disturbed because I prefer the meltingly lost places of ceased time. 

But though I spend large sums of time in reality, and in that other world—the place between worlds—that fraction of a moment when the mind buzzes, hovering somewhere between the real world and the world of daydreaming. 

The spaniels have moved to another section of the beach. I am ready to move on, my mind spent, body numb. The sound of the ocean is fully inside my head like a seashell pressed to the ear. 

The spaniels return to the familiar place of the shore. Keep running into the surf. Sniffing the sand as if searching for a lost sense of something familiar, their mirrored shadows, keeping in perfect rhythm.

December 30, Dillon Beach