I spent Thanksgiving on Long Island, much larger than Malcolm Island. Another difference concerns beaches. In Westhampton, the beach is sandy, and you see your footprints as you walk, along with the prints of dogs and of birds. On Malcolm Island, it is all rocks, very polished rocks, not so easy to walk on, and certainly no prints of man or dog. In contrast, Malcolm Island has the most wonderful varieties of driftwood, while the beaches of Westhampton display scarcely a stick. (Click on photos to enlarge.)
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| Man and dog were here |
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But as on Malcolm Island, I notice that I am always looking at the beach in front of my feet when I walk, as if I might discover a lovely shell or an interesting rock formation. Again, on Malcolm Island, the beach itself, being so rocky, one seldom comes across a shell that is not broken. But why is it that we stop to gather rocks and shells anyway? On city streets, after all, who bothers examining gum labels, plastic dental picks, or other debris? The former suggest natural processes, from which we humans are removed. The latter is an unattractive reminder of waste and of disregard for the natural world.
I also have to add that I love the solitariness of winter beaches, as in Westhampton. There were a few people out walking, especially with their dogs, but a winter beach does not invite conviviality. It is a place to reflect, again, perhaps on the transience of life as represented by our footprints in the sand, soon to be effaced by the next wave.
The objects on the beaches, on the other hand, represent processes that have been going
on from time immemorial and will continue after we are no longer here. The world today is exactly as it was when such objects
came into formation, especially in the case of rocks, which testify to
the age of the earth. While I was in Westhampton, I was reading
Autumn, a volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard's new literary quartet. I came across a passage that speaks to this special character of rocks and shells. Knausgaard, writing of frogs, has this to say:
"Like all other amphibians there was something primordial about [frogs], they came from a different time than us, from a world that was simpler, for even trees and plants were more primitive then, and that they were still here, unlike nearly all other creatures that had existed at that time, was due to the fact that their way of life was so resilient and unaffected by all the changes the surrounding world had undergone. To them the world now must appear the exact same as the world then: they saw, did, thought and felt the same, and this changelessness, in which neither the past nor the future existed, was in principle no different from that possessed by more recent species, like squirrels or badgers, except that it had lasted immeasurably longer."
