In my mind I’m often staring at the horizon on a quiet beach. I haven’t been to a beach in some time, something I always promise to address but never quite do.
You see, that silence on the beach really doesn’t exist but for a few moments, the early moments as the sun rises, as the birds awake. I miss the mornings at New Smyrna Beach for that, using the camera as an excuse for my presence. Fortunately, I have walked so many beaches at those hours that I don’t seem to need to actually go for the experience. I can, at whim, be at a beach in my mind.
It’s still not quite the same. Every sunrise is different, the flotsam on a quiet beach can be different. I remember the simple joy of looking at the trails the turtles left in laying their eggs, and on the walks back watching the volunteers put caution tape around where they had laid those eggs. People respected that on those beaches. People generally kept the beaches clean during the week because they respected the beach. The weekends saw the traffic from Orlando show up, which was a boon for the local businesses but it took a toll on the beach in the form of garbage despite there being garbage cans every 200 feet or so.
The people of New Smyrna Beach would quietly pick up pieces of trash they saw and stick them in the garbage cans. Occasionally, in groups sipping coffee on a bench, we might bitch about the people from Orlando who showed up and made a mess, but it was a balance for the local businesses so we put up with it. The local businesses often were informally involved with the cleanup.
What set New Smyrna Beach apart in this regard was the income level. At that beach, when you walked into a bar, you might be talking to the wealthy and not know it because they dressed very ordinarily, and they would laugh at people who brought their expensive cars to the beach because they themselves drove old cars, sometimes rusty from being at the beach. The community, as a whole, cared about the beach. I was told by one of the wealthy one day that the difference between New Smyrna Beach and Ormond Beach, where I worked at the time, was the difference between old money and new.
I don’t know. I did go to Ormond beach a few times, but not during the early hours – the best hours, the most quiet hours when you can hear the surf rearranging the sand in fits of violence followed by a gentle touch, putting everything fairly close to how it was. Every wave a revolution, every space between a consolidation.
No, I don’t have to go to the beach to see that anymore because when you see it you see it everywhere. What changes is the frequency, the level of violence and the consolidation needed after. The balance kept things the same, and it shifted too much toward the violence, erosion can be seen, and erosion on a beach is always considered a bad thing and yet it’s that very rhythmic violence that creates the beaches themselves.
What disturbs me in the world these days is that it seems we’re reshaping the landscape and we don’t really know what the hell we’re doing, from the planet to society to even our personal lives.