A Walker in the Suburbs

I was out early this morning for a bike ride around the refuge and a walk on the beach. The sun was rising, and though I missed its first rays on the strand I caught them on the marsh. It was more stunning, if that is possible.

I came to the beach for a few days to clear my head and punctuate what came before from what comes next. In that I was moderately successful. A lot has come before, after all.

But I came, most of all, for the place, for its beauty and rhythms and peacefulness. I’ve tried to capture it in words and photographs and mindset. And now, I’ll do my best to take it back.

My family has a long history of visiting Chincoteague. We brought Suzanne here before she was a year old, and the girls have visited at regular enough intervals that they have real memories of the place. One of them is a standing joke/question/riff: Are the famed ponies, popularized by Misty of Chincoteague, really wild? With today’s post I will answer this question once and for all.

They are wild, within boundaries.

OK, I know this is a cop-out — but it’s true. I walked five miles round trip yesterday to a section of the island where they roam free. “Once you cross that fence (there was a cattle guard), you’ll be in their territory,” the ranger told me.

Fenced wild ponies? An oxymoron, for sure. But I was close enough to feel their wildness, their utter disregard that I was there. I kept remembering the pamphlet warnings. “Wild ponies bite and kick.” So I didn’t approach or offer an outstretched hand for sniffing.

Instead, I observed. And soon after this mare walked past me she started to trot and then to canter. Her friends soon joined her, a posse of five. I held my breath as they galloped past, leaving a cloud of dust and flowing manes in their wake. They were alive and moving and free. They were as wild as any fenced creatures can be.

I’ve been thinking about the impulse to label and categorize. Take this shell, for example. I picked it up today after promising myself I would collect no more. The big bag of shells yesterday should  have been enough. And since today’s walk was a much chillier one — stiff breeze blowing, long-sleeved shirt and sweatshirt — my hands would have been warmer stuffed in my pockets. Except they were too busy picking up whelk shells.

But the urge to acquire is often accompanied by the urge to name and arrange, so I stopped in at the Tom’s Cove Visitor’s Center and picked up a little handout on shells. There are two types of whelks, I learned: the knobbed whelk, which has little points on each whorl, and the channeled whelk, which has grooves instead of points.

Learning its name is a way to honor the shell and its former inhabitant. It helps me appreciate it, which isn’t hard given its beauty.

But there is much I still don’t know: how a snail created this shell, how its hue came to resemble a thousand sunsets; how the ocean buffeted and burnished it and the waves tossed it up on the shore for me to find — all of those things I’ll never understand.

Thinking back to my beach walks, to the surf booming and lapping — to my right on the way out and to my left on the way back. The brightness of those mornings, the people I would see, some ambling along sipping coffee, others pounding the hard sand all decked out with pace-measuring equipment.

There was everywhere to look and everything to see. There was the sparkling gulf, the waves leaving foam on the shore. And then there were the shorebirds, the best show in town — gulls, terns, sanderlings, piping plovers, wheeling and swooping in tandem with an occasional loner breaking out of the crowd, soaring into a blue vastness.

I like to imagine the seaside now that I’ve been back three weeks, now that my nerves jingle-jangle as I walk and my head is full of commas, dashes and semi-colons. I like to remember the different life I had there, and the slow, steady purr of a great ocean.

Back home in the early morning light, I wake automatically at my near-accustomed hour. Gone is the beach vibe and the beach pace. I think about how different it is to have nothing to do and nowhere to go, to live beyond schedules.

And how shocking it is to move from one world to another. From beach walks and languor to office and checklists.

Luckily I’ve had help in this endeavor. Flying home catapults the relaxed vacationer headlong into tightly parceled time. Only worse than that — it’s tightly parceled airline time. Hurry up and wait. A parody of real life, which makes the return of schedules a comfort in comparison.

Metro is in my future; the beach is in my heart.

A dousing overnight, a sudden storm that flooded the street in front of my motel. This morning I dodged puddles on the beach, noticed the enlarged pools and lagoons that came in the wake of a large tide and persistent rain.

A beach is always the same and always different, shaping and reshaping itself from day to day, wave to wave.

Maybe that’s the source of its power. Maybe that’s what gives us stillness — the presence of constant change and motion in a form we can understand and enjoy.