"The River That Flows Two Ways"

Checking the conditions…

Much like the stunning substantiation won by watching a measuring tape stretch deep into the thirties at the fork of a pinched caudal, so was his face.  His eyebrows rose to beam a sense of surprised relief in having heard the assurance of confidence that was my answer reaching from the kitchen, overcoming the chatter of some cable station’s fodder spewing from a flat-panel in the living room.  Yea!  No problem!  Uh huh, I’ll drive ya up.  Let me know when you’re ready. 

Weighing the odds before heading out…

I didn’t plan on concealing the rings of cigarette burns bored through this polyester seat with the wrinkled hems and stitches woven in an airy weave of linen fabric.  More so, the sultry, donated cover of my shorts.  This apparent, driver’s-side derivative born from an instantaneous decision I made with the same swiftness of the New York minute that he used to stuff a change of overnight clothes into a travel bag.  A decision that reinforces in reminding me of the shiny pin of privilege that comes with wearing a word as simple in comprehension and commonplace in everyday expression as friendship.  A word far too easy in the daily rush of life to bruise and abuse, or mutilate with “likes” from a detached, fleshless electronic mirror of reality with the click of a mouse or a fingertip’s swiping tap of an app, or trample and twist between myriad variations of echoing, eggshell-thin utterances of pride.  A word with not only the most innate of understood meaning, but also the hardest of definitions to enact faithfully.  One that we may hammer with a ringing truth and know that its reverberation will sound in a harmonic union of no synonymic substitute.  It is a churning work of creation that we hope will never break in form, like a standing wave moving against the tide, rising from the sea’s surface, a saline salience admired in recognition from afar.  Unique.  And as this, we can only hope to remain fluid if the tides of friendship ever come to slacken, knowing that with patience and the recurrent acceptance of inevitable change, they may again turn to flood one’s memory with new experiences, having fully-ebbed of what is of less importance only to reveal the winding contour of a sweeping past hidden beneath the surface of a deeper understanding.  The antonym of I’m much more comfortable lying here on the couch.  A selfless spontaneity.  Or, an outright overlooked onus of obligation that in this onset of twilight has led me into steering 5100 lbs. of rolling steel and compelling me to stare straight ahead through prescription eyeglasses.  Action, for a just purpose.

The release…

One hauling drive of a cast has crossed into the distant waters of a neighboring state and another made so far that its soaring altitude has descended from the bellies of clouds.  His first hook-up is made only minutes after arriving at the chosen churning-action confluence of 326 W. 40^th.  The Hotel Four Points by Sheraton.  He makes a clean entry out from the cradling height of the passenger-side door into the vastness of possibility he may find swimming under his feet.  A college roommate he hasn’t seen shimmer in smile for seven years nears closer at his retrieval.  Sidewalk handshakes, shirt-clinching back-slaps, high-rising hoots, and giving’s of gratitude.  Keepers, in one another’s eyes.  Their enthusiasm hints at a favorable night ahead.  A blitz of laughs and tales to be entered in their respective log books. 

Reeling-in allure, snagged of an urban overload…

Eight thirsty, pumping pistons fire from the honed depths of a 5.7L Dodge Hemi power plant, roaring, gurgling, and purring the product of cranking, combusting compression from their rotating and shrieking rubber-to-asphalt torque at the press of my sandal two-thousand shy of  red-line-reaching rpms, belching these throaty sounds within the thinning spill of sunlight disappearing into a swelling sponge of twilight from the trumpet of a cavernous tailpipe, coming to be immediately muffled of any chest-beating masculinity amongst the immutable might that is this cacophonous city’s myriad miles of unclean concrete, her sky-kissing stories of steel, avenues of glimmering glass and spasmodic sea of neon and LED animations looming, winding, flowing, blinking, her multitudes of millions mingling, crosswalks crowding with casts of creeping footsteps, racing dashes, brushing weaves of shoulder, clopping high-heels, long-legged summer-strutting sex appeals, digging headlong honks, my side-view mirror’s half-inch shave, a giving graze of grace, the passing driver’s unconcerned face, Con Ed’s rising streams of steam, sidewalk squalor, the taxicab’s holler, traffic signals allergic to green, returning red, unbuttoned collars and retired ties, the service economy worker’s commencing commute, his computer tomorrow to reboot, flaunting fashionistas flowing on their feet, the epicurean conceiting of a Condé Nast Traveler retreat, jay walkers and street talkers, rumbles of conspire far below the many skyscraper’s spire, gridiron, gridlock, Dutch-laid cobblestone block, a vendor’s sourdough sprinkled salt, a drunk’s breath of ash, rot, and sour-mashed malt, foreign tongues, naïveté, native walkers on the stray, capturing cameras aiming, flashing, uploading, tagging, millions of pixels of a personal pretension, reflective fluorescent-yellow vests, attachés, orange construction nets, hydraulic hammering, pneumatic noise, a bottleneck of sneaking taillight ploys.  A chorus of streets and avenues that could never exist as silence.  A metropolis, missing of melatonin, impossible to coax with sleep.  An island of bedrock, whose arteries of asphalt forever flow, whose capillaries of concrete find the footways to doorsteps distant, whose chiseled shoulders of schist resist against a natal river’s turning of the tide churning at her side.

Underpass…

It’s now 10:49pm on a Tuesday night in June.  The sinking slice of crescent has long crossed over the finish line of the western sky’s horizon leaving me in its moon dust.  I’m forty-miles away from the comforts of routine.  A man, who at this hour, would normally be entangled in a sparing thread-count of cotton, striving to stay awake at the attentive trance of TV’s “reality” coaxing for five-minutes-more of my somniferous stare, curled amongst pillows and a muddled mash of sheets, twisting, slipping-away, passing, sleeping, stalled from movement until the first eye-opening ring of alarm set on my phone awaits to sound within a scant six hours’ time, all before the sun will again sneak skyward to engild the soaring edges and angles of this city’s glass grid, these twinkling towers teeming, glinting of a shining golden-orange shower.    

The city’s crosstown congestion, avenues of intersections plagued by the many over-hanging synchronizations of ill-timed illuminated instruction, yellow yielding to red, direct me at a stop-and-go dash of dashboard-instrument discordance, dials rising and falling, accelerating and braking, revving and idling, last-second crossings over the solid-striped lines of adjacent lanes and standing plastic stanchions between impetuous passageways on W 41^st and 8^th, those feeding the tiled-tubes of 495 W.  My steed of steel is jostled by the countless canyons carved of rim-punishing asphalt.  Assaults, as if to the hull of a ship by stormy sea, mark the street-winding exodus along an unsightly visage of New York neglect. 

I’ve silenced the truck’s FM radio in favor of the road’s focus.  For my mind’s drifting indulgence at racing ahead, homeward, riding the pushing head wave of the pulling engine’s purrs.  Her sounds.  The bottlenecked traffic building, AC belts squeeking, brake pads shrieking, revving engines roaring and hollow sounding thumps of rubber tires striking.  The muggy nighttime air’s clenching scent, its distinct urban weight, it’s deafening resonance of its cross-breeze percussion gushing through the lowered windows of the cabin is that which is definitively and impurely Mannahatta at her grandest.  It’s late. My eyelids have grown heavy.  I’ve seen enough.  I’ve avoided even more.  I belong, elsewhere.  I’m braking, then revving, braking and revving, avoiding the drawing squeeze of flanking quarter panels and rubber-necking distance of tail lights exploding in the hesitancy of red, inching ever so slowly like a viscous flow of lava as I eventually secure impassable presence in my lane. Then suddenly, I roll in, passing beneath the support of a cobbled archway.

I’m swallowed into a one-way descent of echoing engine noise and the dull drone of rolling traffic to a creeping echelon of pulsing brake-lights.  A wide river’s culvert for the endless underpass of carbon-dioxide and sulfur-emitting combustion.  Nearest mid-point, three-quarters of a mile in, I’m some ninety-seven feet underwater.  Under the tidal Hudson above, below the reflecting glow of a city’s iconic skyline diffusing in the saw-toothed riffles of a river rich in colonial American heritage.  Under the dingy curve of soot-covered tile set at the working hands of daring laborers in the mid-nineteen-thirties, a trinity of tunnels whose mouths now connect separate states,  but that four centuries earlier, was pristine forest of the native Lenni-Lenape tribe who inhabited both banks of this river I’m now speeding underneath on a westward course at 45mph.  They named her the Muhheakantuck (pronounced muh-he-kun-ne-tuk) or, “the river that flows two ways,” as was appropriately noticed, having observed how she empties into the welcoming Atlantic’s rising and falling turns of tide. 

A retrieval of thoughts, churning… 

It is that slippery habit of our mind to defect from the present and unfurl a distinct memory from the twisting vortices of time.  For that recollection of something distant, from here, away, from now.  That which is nothing more than the former breaths of our very existence, exchanges of purpose, isolated in moments.  That desire, to unpeel the layer of the present and relive succulent tastes of memory garnered from piths of the past.  To expose the roots of our sunken seeds whose germination has led to an irreversible advancement of growth that can only be touched in the now.  Driving alone in silence has afforded me such a defense.   Junctures in our mind where we strive to tunnel through the impenetrable bedrock of the past, somewhere beneath these flowing passages of time remembered, to return to where we came from someday distant.  A prior rising of the sun, a smile at the sight of a landed fish, a lover’s warm touch and silky invitation waiting at home.  At the innumerable and inestimable.  Those heartbeats that are paid with breath and spirit as the cost of admittance to travel further across and through to where you rest now.  To emerge somewhere new.  To experience the rawness of life in all her grandeur and live amongst its unblinking frankness staring you down with piercing hindsight, if only to recount in our mind’s catacombs of thought, as now.  As if to separate from meaning the essence of tide from the flow of seawater.  Onward, elsewhere, always, there exists the former.

The passing of another season has placed two-hundred and twelve days distance since the last moonless night I held the stripes of a Striper outright in my hand.  One admired and then resuscitated with shakes of tail within the placidity of ink-black, frigid mid-November surf.  Away, swam the culmination of an entire season of scales and thousands of casts, at last, those released before stowing away my gear for the dormant duration of yet another long, winter hibernation.  Before accepting the pact of packing, the inevitable trade-off that are stains of salt exchanged for blankets of dust.  Now however, the tide of time has finally changed course.

Since the piercing of this night’s field of starlight above, it has been approximately fifty-days that the genetically-distinct fish of the Hudson River tribe began their annual migration upstream, those tens of thousands of tails instinctively swaying within the harbor-water flowing around the Statue of Liberty’s base to the headwaters of their freshwater breeding grounds near Albany and the Berkshires, one-hundred sixty-something miles from the restless tide’s eddying rip spilling around the sweeping tip of Sandy Hook.  Our celestial orbit has spurred the auspicious beginning of another summer.  One fostering the continuation of a species’ brood.  M. Saxatilis has again spawned, and thus, we await for her nocturnal redemption.

From the Empire State’s capital city of Albany she will swim downstream, seaward, from whence she came in late-April and early May, and before that her over-wintering grounds off the coast of North Carolina, journeying for over one-hundred miles to pass under the Castleton-Hudson, Rip Van Winkle, Newburgh-Beacon, Tappan Zee, and George Washington, down the Hudson and offshoot of Harlem and East Rivers, past Randall’s and Rikers, below LaGuardia’s runways on the Flushing, Roosevelt Island, foraging the bays of Little Neck, Manhasset, Hempstead, the Long Island Sound, under the shadows and footings of the Williamsburg, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Verrazano, Governor’s Island, the container ships of New York Bay and the pilot boats of the Narrows, Raritan Bay, Rockaway, Flynns Knoll, some swimming south the one-hundred-twenty miles of sandy Jersey coastline to the reaches of Cape May, even crossing Delaware’s bay, while most sling their caudals past Jones Beach, Great South Bay, Shinnecock’s inlet, Fishers and Shelter Island, Gardiners Bay, the mecca of Montauk, Point Judith’s Light, Block Island Sound, Watch Hill, Rhode Island Sound, Cuttyhunk, Nashawena, Pasque, Naushon, Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds, the flats of Monomy, Chatham, The Great Marsh and The Cape’s great breakers bowing to the towering dunes lining the National Seashore, before finally taking summer residence around the outermost isolation of Cedar Point. All points, everywhere.

Light, at the end of the tunnel…

Tonight, perhaps at this particular moment of contemplative thought, she may be crossing above the concrete conduit I am now travelling within, being guided seaward by those eons of inherited instinct and related physical senses of which I could never relate.  Those that encourage her passage through the relative blindness of what I would otherwise consider a pitch-black world, this ancient channel of obsidian-colored darkness whirling above entombed tiled-tubes that invite her to flow forever, elsewhere.  Towards the many tidal undertaking of new beginnings flooding the old and familiar.  Of her epic seasonal migration, that underwater marathon in which she is simply one tail existing apart of the vast unknown.  As the consequence of one man’s fancy from within these buried depths of mud and silt I speed through, there is the promise of a striped-fish in her lean and ravenous, post-spawn form passing atop.  A life-force enduring pilgrimage over the rich memory of a riverbed that prescribes a Striper-superhighway, furthering herself from the metropolitan reaches of Manhattan to venture seaward in a current charmed by the open-ocean.  One that will someday solicit for the fulfillment of her future progeny now resting unhatched as the countless billions of egg-sacks laid upstream.  Her promise of plentitude.  One that with varying degrees of fate and luck and skill and timing, comingled with the lure and wobble of wooden and plastic presentation drawn shorebound, may manifest one night to ordain that our paths cross once again, that they may crash in a splashing connection.  That with each passing minute I may be ever closer to feeling the surge of her tugging pull.  That the darkness of a coming sunset may deliver the silver scales and black stripes of her body, those rising to the surface and emerging from unseen depths to fall anew upon my sight once more.  For the reeling renewal of this surfcaster’s crossing-over towards a season favored by her furtive presence. 

And so tonight, we both pass without confrontation.  Our journeys approaching ever closer to an end that will promise the pursuit of new beginnings.

The Silky-Smooth Iridescence of September

We starve to spy that early-morning eruption of a certain celebrated fin’s most fervorous form slicing-open the saltwater’s surface.  For that tell-tail glimpse of the splendid Atlantic Speedster’s inshore offensive charging aerially through a placid promise of streaming tide.  We stare and scan with eyes piercing from the overlook of fall’s cool and dampened overnight sand before the propitious renewal of blooming sun-light.  Maybe today, the Fat Albert will manifest from our few hours of fretful sleep in which she provoked our dreams of longing, that by finned-fortune, we may sight the seldom-seen Little Tunny within distant, day-dreaming stares cast asea.  That we may profess upon the sandy alters that are our chosen beaches to inheriting capture of the pelagic False Albacore in celebrated and esteemed, surfcaster-to-surfcaster conversation.  For the reeling revelation of having received Euthynnus alletteratus. 

We wait all-summer-long for her arrival to our near-shore, salt-brined amphitheater.  For the month of September, when the local waters warmed temperate alchemize as those brief seasonal favors - open windows of time and temperature valued most opportune - born of tropical circulations spun off the Gulf Stream, those currents coddled and primed to her physiological preference.  For an ecosystem teeming with Atlantic silverside and bay anchovy that she will forcefully ram-ingest during darting feats of sunrise surface slashes, ones exhibiting her unrivaled predatory speed and majestic leaping predation.  For a cast chance at intercepting her sudden, adrenaline-inciting, porpoise-like breaches teasing at the surf-stranded of spirit much like a perspiring glass of ice-cold water taunting at the imagination to the deliriously parched of thirst.  So we cast mightily, ceaselessly, and far, as far as possible, toward the promise of an oceanic-rising sun, to hopefully, if not eventually, encounter paths crossed with our rapidly-retrieved mold of holographic metal anchovy imitation pulled fast and high behind flourocarbon in the upper-water column for the jarring severity of her unmistakable strike arresting any reel’s winding motion and crushing our rod like a ton of free-falling bricks.  Just, hold, on.  For all that locomotive muscle, for all of her rapidly-beating, fin-pulsating fighting-power will electrify any drifting attention with the sudden shock of a nuclear detonation setting-off deep within your chest, freezing a reflexive, white-knuckled-clenched-grip onto the very intoxicated curve of carbon-fiber straining to subdue her darting, high-speed escape.  This entanglement of exception shall be deemed a personal trial of judgment towards ascending esteemed eminence as a surfcaster.  A most-rare opportunity to proclaim uncommon triumph as a common sand-straddling angler.  As one having been fortunate enough to reveal from beneath a hidden world of waves an exotic fish surging in giant color and evolutionary greatness.  Pound-for-pound, she is a hook-up like no other surf-prowling gamefish we may pursue, running drag harder and louder and stripping line faster than any of her seasonal surf-sought competition dares.  And for this, she steals all passions piscatorial from the dying days of summer, reeling-in these very fleeting desires pouring of our seeking hearts.

So we vow to never squander a water-borne sunrise to chance encounter this smallest member of the family Scombridae, this mackerel masquerading as a member of the true-tuna genus Thunnus, however well-disguised in her flawlessly-verdant brilliance and ventral flashes of pink, silky-smooth-to-the-touch, iridescent sheen.  That hard-to-catch hard-tail painted of a signature vermiculated pattern of upper-dorsal squiggles crowned by a row of free-swaying finlets.  Or that special fish stippled by those distinctive black pelvic dots of four or more over a football-shaped form sheathed by a seemingly scaleless ultra-hydrodynamic luster.  The sea's seasonal bolt of green from the busting blue.  Our opalescent obsession that are those colors revered, reputed, and whole-heartedly understood between strangers of fishermen in sandy beach parking lots as the relishing, pelagic parlance of morning tailgate nomenclature.  After all, it is those of us with the surf’s sand to our feet, however fortunate or few, who already know that there is nothing conceivably false of our transient, lunate-tailed visitor, for a fin by any other name would not fight as sweet.  

That, is no falsehood.

Limits

There are remembered only so many words, idle in my mind that I may beckon to rouse at the pause of lip-biting thought.  There are only so many sentences that may challenge the bravery of defining one’s inexpressible moment.  Those that may cross the invisible divide of experience, of reality, falling from our mind’s consciousness to appear as life lived on paper, these words, these reviving revelations, the envoys of experience, flowing as uncontrollable as water in a river, forever elsewhere, as the untamed stains and ink-scribbled seizures of thought.

There is only so much time we can pour within the confines of our hands, however carefully cupped, hoping for more and more and more only to watch it spill away, over, and about, seeping and sifting through, wasting from what we cannot pause in escape, vanishing before our aging eyes.

There is only so much fresh line layered unto our spool, waiting to unravel by way of our mightiest heave.  Even with a gale of accompaniment at our backs, there is only so far a cast-hunger can ever explore in its radial reaches.

There are only so many seconds, before there are no longer enough, for which that seeking-cast he placed was just in time.  Before its splashing entry about the surface was too late.  Before her head is aimed elsewhere, and her interest is won to another.  Before the radially-splayed filaments of her tail thrust against her liquid element, her very life-blood, and the freedom of her motion surges scores and scores of distance, underwater, away, farther, deeper, never nearer, ever again.  His chance, had.  The limit of his encircling acceptances tested, deafened and disinherited by these very limitations he inadvertently chose to breathe amongst.  Those challenged by chance, by design, by fate, by error, by impracticality, by inexperience.  

Six Seconds Since

Seconds will slip away, unraveling from the favor of the present much like the curling, vaporous whisks of condensed breath escaping from between his concave furrow of chapped lips, ephemeral exhalations quickly vanishing from existence, diverted by the early morning’s easy easterly blow to course elsewhere, to neutralize from the nineties and assimilate with universality, to blend as the autonomous exchanges of purpose for that continuous effort to define reason (or is re-define or re-discover or defy or more so, illusory mirages of each?) amongst life vanishing into the trailing slipstream of reality like the backwash of the wave his planted feet are now shifting and sinking softly within, essentially escaping from somewhere to elsewhere, physically, in time and sand-covered space, seawater and spray, but more so mentally, behind the guise of half-opened eyes and thoughts contained within a wrap of dry, wind-taut cold skin, a kinetic energy returning seaward to where perceptions of all else have originated and so return to remain forever kinetic as though that very millisecond of thought he just thought, that swirling and sinuous inspiration as mesmerizing in beauty and subliminal in self-rooted-recognition as dawn’s witnessed creeping cast of color served to impress one mortal man’s immortalized imagination, those affected brushstrokes upon the soul, spewed trailing and twisting, spiraling and sweeping, bending and blending, as though the ossified oils conjured and frozen for all time for all to see like van Gogh’s The Starry Night have in his mind depicted a masterpiece of Nature’s impression-able, impossible to imagine any more immaculately impactful in immortal image as Her impermanent Inspiration of a Splash of Time.  This breath and blink of time, growing to flower in grafted scions of seconds, born of a bearing impression, germinates the soulful seed of this awestruck angler. 

My rigid and austere accomplice has endured once more, resisting submission to a countenance of everlasting curvature.  A line tension unyielding to slackness.  An eventuality yielding the crushed-barb hook-set, now un-set, from her creasing cortege of cartilage as nothing more than a sharpened, dangling placidity, static, awaiting aerial course and aqueous trial by its regulated, fibrous staff of potential, but again, I arise from a squatting observation of ease to stand upright within the shallow, seething blanket of foamy water rushing back eastward over the smoothened and striated runnels of carved, coarse sand and pebbles, racing towards the building curl of an oncoming wave, one having been brave enough to charge free from these mysterious depths of uncertainty, splashing wildly upward and turbulently encircling my firmly-set footing with the forceful influence of a schoolyard bully’s provoking shove, hissing below my bloated smile, inciting a sudden flash of mental and environmental alertness as she asserts, yes, I feel you here, just as I have now made you aware of me.  Her invitation to feel uncreated.  Familiarized with the unfamiliar.  Her assertion to become less unreal, and more real.  Another kind of alive.  Six seconds after coming to terms with the realization of what just was.  What is now gone, returned to the unseen vastness of the sea.  Of the hook-sinking fate that may await after the next thrust of my finned-prize’s tail, one that may be her last exhibition of glory before becoming the principal ingredient to the chemical involvement of another being’s metabolism.  As energy forever flowing in motion.  As energy enveloped in a fatal transformation.  As matter, neither created nor destroyed, but altered from fusiform form.  Nevertheless, not a matter of conservation, for she will forever be gone.  Her stripes stripped of form.  Gone to become the building blocks of life in another, adenosine triphosphate, but I don’t need-a-seen the trip of its fillet-fate.  I just know.  It’s inevitable.  The complications of the two coexisting.  Her impulses to feed.  Her hunger to strike.  His impulse of hunger to cast.  Man, the stalking, ever-present dealer of death, the imposter devising for her decided destruction, poses to pitch and immerse his imitable, plastic offerings of wounded prey.  He is the otherwise indistinguishable embodiment of impending doom lurking from above the fatal fringes of her watery ceiling retrieving rolling rattles or baiting Bunker bodies or trolling lured dredges or sieging sudden surrender with seins of scooping, championing Saxatilicide, achieving esteemed status as the slayer of Morone Saxatilis.  For him to find harvested, oven-baked and pan-seared succulence or gaudy showmanship of trophy, an egotistically-inspired carnage and catharsis of conservancy by means of Pisciphilocide (or, love of killing fish) committed in the dragging of drying caudal tails over sand and pavement, the gripping hoist of gill plates, the closing of crammed coolers, the evisceration of body cavities, the snapping of spines and the callous carving of cartilaginous carcasses, upon which discarded, severed heads, whose glassy and wide-open, wizen, golden-colored eyes are disjointed from tamed tails upon the inky, open pages of section A’s five-day-old entrail-sodden editorials.  Extra! Extra! Read all about it! exclaim the words from her unseasoned obituary.  Her purging extirpation from elegantly existing as a principle ingredient to the memory and moment of Nature.  I read this daily news.  I know of the flesh-war waged upon her every seasonal whereabout.  The mounting struggle for equilibrium until there is equilibrium no more.  This metamorphosis of momentum, unstoppable as the wind is to open palms and cupped fingers held outright against an oncoming, onshore breeze.  As unstoppable as tomorrow’s inevitable sunrise, and as cheated in one’s anticipation of viewing such a fiery glow bleed in color across the dawning sky when it is otherwise obfuscated and obscured by drawn curtains of bloated, blackened clouds ominously stalled upon the horizon instead.  This evaporation of what is now from the flowing stream of time, the vaporizing pool of potential ever-increasingly disappearing in what remains of this season’s fleeting continuum of fortuity and of limited time and tail and tide.  Gone, yes, but never entirely purged from the churning metabolism of my own memory.

It is said that Nature abhors a vacuum.  She suffers a fear of emptiness.  And should not Her most capable and intelligent descendants fear an empty sea?  Or do his repeated acts alone speak for themselves, selfish, and without depth of conscience?  As one pair of eyes see, it is the ship of mankind whose piercing bow carelessly slices over the charity of Her back, disrupting the fragile reflections of harmony cast upon Her surface, rearing ripples of ruinous repercussion, while setting a stormy sea of uncertainty in his wake.  Entropy may be of Her own creation and accord, but in the perfectly-arranged composition that is Her unsurmountable, unsurpassable magnum opus sprouting the symphonious sounds of the living, Her swimming swarms of fellow brothers and sisters will never be left willingly in abandon, blinded by a blankness of white nothingness, for there shall always exist, for all conceivable eternity, the fertile touches of their dearest Mother, in all colors curing.  There is always the recurring promise, the heal of Her hope, of mature masses migrating, scores of schoolies schooling, the annual lengthening of lateral lines layered on the brooding classes of bruising brawlers, the growing rewards of Her perpetuating fecundity.  Of a saltwater-brined future yet unwritten, a telling tide yet unrisen.  Of a wet-sand-slapping, truncate-tail yet to radiate as this fisherman’s sweeping tale, somewhere and sometime before a sunrise yet unborn.  A day yet to awaken one man’s dreams in stretching hues reddened and breathing to mirror the pulse of life in her image. 

So I plead, dear son, that you be sure to always look further, broadening the shores of your mind, but also do your best to eye nearer, ever closer, to wash over this world of mine with that drifting gaze of your calculated curiosity, just as my surging tide too rushes over the migrant presence of your found-feet towards higher ground, prying, as if to feel with my fluid touch just who this is before me, where we both happen to explore this mutual acceptance of what is, here, now, during this thin sliver of time we share, fostered within this shower of the breathing tide, for my forthcoming light-of-life unhurriedly emerging before your staring eyes is something greater than that which may ever be attributed with a certain physical existence, one as simply instinctually-driven and corporal as your own.  Remember, dear child, that above all else, what you are is the sum of who I already am and have always been, she hints from a pouring of abounding breath.

The eternity of my voice will always be.  I will always be here, timeless, roaring, waiting.  Inescapable to your soul and unavoidable to your sight.  My thundering heartbeat, ubiquitously alluring, will never ebb further than the harbor of your own mind, as haunting as the murmuring resonance heard from the spiraling depths of a knobbed welch held close to your ear.  So I will whisper this more, for I know you regard the unfailing sounds of reflection I shell-out.  Know that what I am is greater than that which you seek the striped-body of, the familiar, dignified odorous residue of what you may praise as an exalted morning from the suds of my surf, of fish-slime glazed upon your dampened palms, of wet and sticky sand granules adhered to the inside lengths of your chilled, pruning fingers, or the flaky, translucent proof of small, cycloid-shaped scales donated upon the connected angler’s sleeve, your own, those noticed only after his benevolent revival of my otherwise finned-sacrifice writhes and wiggles wildly to vanish from sight under a concealing cloak of foam, the pride of this angler’s collagenous souvenir, his bonus brooch, may it serve as mindful evidence of the fragile living pulse pumping and surging forward, enduring everywhere, gliding with the every tidal motion in which I rise and fall, beating and coursing within this salty soma of mine, the very element you now see swelling to life with each repeated cast by the growing flame of an effervescent effusion coaxing chromatic change.  So I am…

And so the penetrating renewal of morning solicits for his sight, outpouring in prominence to pass into the permanence of his mind’s eye.  Elevated in stance and renewed in esteem, he stirs from a drifting daze to cast aside these perturbing perceptions of a piscatorial pessimism.  Behold! For the shining stripes of her glistening contour reflect the glow of a growing orange orb of optimism, one rising from the reaches of darkness to slather both with the conspiring seconds of time for which they are held frozen.  Both, awash in a light and life, ascending.  He invites the lineaments of her image to rest alight in the longevity that is a reeling remembrance mounted upon the wall of his mind, alongside her many kin who have all come before.  Who must all come before, after all have been left to go, released in form to stream within her tides of favor.  Those torrents of time which have all favored him so generously.  The whip of a cast revives a pause from the present, and so, his perpetuity of purpose.  The surf, smashes at his feet.

Where The Sky Is Born

There is yet the promise of dawn.  That renewal of light which severs black from blue.  A gift born anew each day, bleeding before the world as rays of irrefutable truth.  A cyclical certainty, a transition between the stupor that is restful night and the fury that is a hungry sea filling with penetrating bands of illumination.  An occurrence which spurs the aggressive impulses of scaly hunters and the restless, unnerved behavior of the hunted.  That event which draws man to the edge of this obscure and murkily-blackened expanse of roiling brine, and for his finned-ambitions, undaunted in having shoaled these shallows of the shore in an otherwise near-blindness, under the ineffectual accompaniment that are countless pinholes of starlight above, it serves as prime opportunity to ambush unsuspecting prey.  A narrow slant of time for the striped of scales to winnow the minnow, to remarkably visualize any palatable profile forms fluttering in unison within the seawater’s inky blackness.  She will tactfully exploit this inherent physiological prowess granted by endowment of Nature, specifically, that of her predatory favor of eyesight dominance brandished against the inferior low-light optic faculties of lesser-fortunate baitfishes as emerging light begins to filter into the roaring tidal conveyor gushing over my feet, rushing landward up sandy-slopes seething in sibilant sounds as if these were the gasping pleas of the sea, objecting the forthcoming change, begging for the sinking moon’s return from the western sky.  For the serenity of nighttime to ensue. 

It’s a yearning cry of breaking waves booming, trickling tides talking, and lapping water lecturing that I faithfully listen to during this dissolution of darkness, where I, in turn, silently stand to hunt among the hunters and the hunted.  A man’s insignificant six-foot profile wielding his armament of concentric ceramic coils epoxied to a tapered shaft of carbon-fiber, whipping and slicing forward through the very air he breathes, enlivened by an inseparable companion of thoughts rebelling to the surrounding placidity, rambling in an internal thunderstorm of immutable chatter, however evanescent to the magnitude of greatness that is everything else surrounding him.  Faint retorts to the sea’s indomitable voice.  Participation, in part, of his witnessed awakening to this water-born world.  For this sea, I fancy, wishes for the soft shining of her nocturnal spotlight to forever shower upon her furrowed surface, skittering in a lustrous diffusion of vanity, for the phases of their ancient friendship to continue in coexistence, for this celestial stage-lighting illuminating the changing acts of her tidal performances to outlast time itself. 

No matter, I imagine, for by planetary providence, she is cordially graced with the longing attribute of seduction, solicited for between the daily-pleading and twice-determined serenades of two wooing suitors, Luna and Soleil, both of whom patiently remain at wait for their next assured orbital encounter.  For their next opportunity to charm her as they slip upwards in slow, parabolic ascension and sojourn skyward from beyond that linear mirage marking the distant depths of unseen truth.  For the following moon and sun rises.

Unlike the slender luminosity of Luna’s subtle surface and her ambivalent, chalky-albedo-colored phases cyclically waxing in magnitude and bashfully waning in retreat, soon will begin the diurnal courtship of Soleil, robust in fervor, storming skyward with flaming intensity, boasting a bathing, colorful rebirth from beyond where the earth and sea brew in stirring froth and foam.  It is where Eos will awaken, dawn, ascending from the faraway depths of Oceanus.  This awe-inspiring outburst of creation, in essence, a devout angler’s greatest catch, a blazing keeper for such a worshipping soul, is merely to stoke wonderment, for it will never be quite close enough to grasp or even boast for one’s own attainment.  She is merely ours to marvel, to feast upon at will, to ogle and undress with hungered eyesight as though her solicitation to the senses were as similar in appeal to the suggestive curves of a calling, hourglass figure never meant to satisfy one’s desire of want or belonging, of sweeping with a salacious touch.  However close, yet forever a tease too afar. 

Praised rather, is the extraordinary, eye-catching spectacle of her breath-stalling form, an unabating allure calling one closer towards this all-consuming nature of Nature, a reality tugging at one’s direction to be here, on sand, where the lapping surf and bath of briny air dares without permission to infuse within the very pores of one’s skin, where a life, one as seemingly inseparable to continuance and impulsive in its embrace as wind beneath an ensemble of sharp-sounding shrills squawking from breasting seabirds, swooping and hovering upon the mass of cushioned air pressed against the scalloped waterline, insists in reinforcing to remind me of my own saltwater-stricken motive and piscatorial-prescribed passions.  A fluttering beat of life trying the limit of its own aerial boundaries.  A man astir, maneuvering to define his own.  Ascensions to freedom by individual factors of choice, dare, and provocation.  This act of acceptance being like an unquestionable truth, a fully-accepted, fundamental force of Nature defining a fibrous fragment of one’s existence.  A fleeting snapshot surfacing from the latent depths of reality much like the enigmatic, striped-fish you so patiently pursue, the once beached, finned-prize you admire briefly before release, when only by perfect timing as she is momentarily mirroring and glistening of the rising sun’s low-angle bath of orange and sanguine hues, those first shed upon the world, does it become understood that such imbued observations are only yours to relish in sensation and visual experience before disappearing into the vastness of sweeping transition and faded recognition.  The elastic sky of color, the fluid saline home, the furtive fish.  All become an acclaimed acknowledgement of opportunity for another time, another day of existence, yet unborn.     

And so exposed through the widened-pupil aperture of gazing, seaward-directed eyes, and developed in the darkroom of the mind, hang this series of drying prints capturing for the personal experience what is a worldly awakening that only may be observed during these intimate, parting minutes of time, as damp and heavy, salty inhalations invade one’s being to its deepest reaches, weighing to dissolve what is flesh from splashing foam, as boundaries successively come revealed through the shedding layers and gradations of darkness, as the disrobing of homogeneity ensues, that visual oneness as perceived throughout an otherwise monochromatic vastness of a seascape devoid of color.  The wrapping cloak of night slowly unbuttons and undresses her nighttime gown to make plain a natural bareness, the nakedness that are the curves and lines defining her distinct shapes and form.  The lineaments of recognition.  Familiar tones and hues shared in her gathering embrace.  The blurring bewilderment between shadowy sand and sea becomes obliterated with this increasing acuteness of a sky growing in refined focus with deep gradients of blue towering towards the heavens from the horizontal division of these distant waters.  As if the sea herself offers to share her own complexion, diffusing upwards in a casting reflection of rising reform.  A gaining charge urging the eclipse of night to finally resign.

An incessant beeping sounds, startling my mind, interrupting a silent state of blanketed blankness.  I mute the digital invader of quietude.  The time has arrived. Groaning through a twisting, body-arching and stretching exhalation of rigidity, I remind myself that I wanted this moment more than sleep itself.  The staggering temptation to resist springing upwards cowardly coaxes, those devilish seconds as daunting and tiresome as dragging chains of iron shackled to your drowsy spirit of motivation and seeming to last minutes instead.  I cannot allow this to sway my desired ambitions.  Don’t mess this up.  The weekend.  Too short in duration and precious in possibility.  A somniferous skirmish I will win so as not to regretfully cross the divide of slumber returning me to sound sleep, and fishless dreams. 

Yet supine, but awake. I squint, breaking-open cemented-closed eyelids to hazily peer through the bedroom window’s drawn-shut sheer drapes.  Nighttime.  There is a single hue coloring my view, that of the artificial, yellow-colored light of a neighbor’s outdoor flood-lamp, diffusing valiantly as the only challenger to a domineering, obsidian-colored darkness.  In time, its tungsten filaments will cease glowing, perhaps at the electronic command of a programmed timer or photoelectric sensor, retiring in brilliance, an unfaltering feather-weight victory in its own right over the preeminence of night, having become relieved of sentry as it is outshined by the creeping omnipresence of a fiery orb ascending slowly from the fathoms of the east, torches of unyielding brilliance now passed of hands, the latter stripping reins of control from the slipping grip of night, bleeding the dim shades of an indigo blue skyward from under the faraway horizon as if they were the blended swirls of watercolor paint becoming drawn upwards into the bristles of Nature’s brush daubing at the surface of the sea for the morning’s first stroke upon this new canvas.  For now, this prismatic exhibition is yet unpainted, indiscernible in greatness.

I am in a physical race against the ticking advancement of time.  Of sneaking within the opportunities of open window which she so obstinately presents before shutting closed and locking from outside entry.  Time and tide wait for no man, remember.  The ocean is rising.  The sun soon too.  Both are unstoppable in motion, posing specific slivers of promise each.  If I am so fortunate as to wade amongst the presence of stalking fish, at best, I can only expect such a gift of linesided-luck to occur when I act with calculated timing, so as to allow an opportune collision-course between environmentally-attentive lateral lines and acoustically-enticing retrieves of swimming plugs to impart what is a striking encounter of fate.  Even at ungodly hours of the morning on a desolate stretch of beach, under a fading ceiling of stars, timing remains to be everything.  It is the only thing as reliable and necessary for a successful run-in with fish as the submerged, shifting grains of sand scoured from under the heels of my planted feet before the rhythmic flooding of broken waves and backwash rushing towards the surf, grabbing at my ankles to seduce and solicit my attention seaward, will have in letting me know that I am boldly alive and in no better place possible.  I will have witnessed another day bloom in creation over the Atlantic.

My bare feet, curling as they stretch awake after hours of weightless surrender, swing from the warm, layered depths of cotton and flannel sheets, dangling from the mattress edge to make contact with the plush sponginess of a cool, awaiting carpet.  Opposites touch.  My mind briefly focuses upon the chilly sensation.  An environmental stimulus.  Nothing more, then it’s gone.  It’s something that comes with waking early in late-November.  A primer, insignificant in scope, as compared to how the elements will aspire to challenge today.  I stand upright in this quiet darkness, in a room seemingly unfamiliar to me at this time of the morning, slowly shaking fuzzy thoughts tempting me to take the easy way out, returning to the carefree comfort of a toasty bed, empty to my backside, bleeding away warmth from the wrinkled impression of my contour, as I shrug-off a stiff sluggishness.  I have awoken with anticipatory determination.  Excitement for what lies ahead.  To make first-contact with sinking sand under the boots of my stomping waders, beginning the meandering march made foot by foot, closer towards the moment when my first cast will become rocketed seaward, will be worth all my effort and every second of otherwise lost sleep. 

Just as the familiar daytime colors of reality are suppressed, drenched in shrouds of darkness which only impart subtle recognitions of form, shapes, or outlines of my surrounding environ, so too are absent even the slightest sounds of this world to the keenest of listening, those which otherwise enliven our awareness with sonic signatures of what is.  I consider this impermanent semblance of deafness an acceptance of peace.  An aural retreat from the cacophony of everyday existence.  Appreciations of undervalued understanding for the price associated with calming silence.  No matter, for with increasing light, will come sprouting sound.  Testaments to change and proclamations of a world in motion.  Occurrences of life unfolding. 

For one, I anticipate listening to the distant, resonant sounds of tightly-curling waves crashing ashore, “good-morning” greetings from the sea, saltwater salutations tumbling ashore as their fluid, circular motions pound the beach, producing a muffled, thunderous sound in the bass-range.  I think of it as Nature’s barefooted heel striking firmly and thudding repeatedly against her sandy floor, proclaiming a booming presence during the changing tidal state.  To walk closer to the site of her stomping footsteps, to feel these split-second, shuddering vibrations carrying throughout the surrounding air, absorbed into your body, is attestation to having tread your wader-clad feet upon this heartbeat of the surf.  You have listened through the tried-and-true stethoscope of your soul to the healthy, beating pulse of an ocean alive with an incessant intensity of unmatched strength and vigor.  She is a temptress to the thirst of your devotion.

I pick-up an ignition key that I placed overnight atop an end-table set beside my apartment’s front door.  The key’s rounded-smooth edges, worn by the treatment of time, do nothing more than wait to become inserted for the ten-thousandth time into the lock of my car.  It’s a perfectly-mated, sawed-tooth gateway offering liberation of sorts, allowing me to begin a physical journey elsewhere.  My mind, in a newfound frame-of-reference, jumpstarted in motion, will unlock the rest.  Dormant in the elements all night, my escape is nothing more than an inert ice-box on wheels. 

A buffeting of arctic wind driving from the north-west shears across my ears, producing a ruffling sound when the angle is made just right to the cold, fluttering breeze.  I yawn, scrunching my face.  My vision briefly falls bleary, momentarily blurred under the refractive distortion of tears.  Both eyes glaze-over, watering at first-contact to the abnormally-cold November air stinging the dry, taut skin of my face.  A Jergens model’s nightmare.  Nature has unapologetically piqued my attention.  A divide of comfort crossed.  Forgotten are the sensations of soft cotton comforts, the stillness of rest, and the smothering warmth of bed.  I am in a different state-of-mind now, excited to have immersed myself yet again, challenged as a vying contender to these elements, to my own willful stamina, at the tail-end of an ebbing season, tested in a trying bath of frigid air.  All to find fish. 

Any sane person may question my motive.  Is not the beach for summertime enjoyment, under the baking heat of the sun?  I would not necessarily disagree, but I am also a fisherman.  Fishermen see the sea differently.  It is on the sand and jetty tops where my roots find nurturing ground and scaly sustenance.  That is my place in the sun.  Is this really the same beach I am venturing to step foot upon at it was in August, anyway?  Seasons have brought about change.  She more resembles a barren tundra now, combed-over by a frigid wind sending a tan-colored haze of scattering sand granules airborne about her surface.  A sinuous, miniature sandstorm at ankle-level.  Caustic in reception, but graceful in its own effect.  A never-ending rearrangement and reshaping.  Besides, only our perceptions define what becomes of reality.  The way I see it, there are fish gliding within the very depths where I swam months prior, stalking prey from beneath where my tanned, bobbing face was influenced skyward to those sedative rays beaming from the sun shining high above, legs gently kicking and arms sweeping, where this man’s unsinkable spirit was held buoyant by an ablutionary liquid-peace, his body floating idly in refreshing, seventy-eight-degree water beside his smoking-hot better-half precariously wrapped with stretchy and stringy, suggestive threads of Lycra knotted at her hips and tied mid-back.  Memories, now, being the only evidence salvaged after this dissolution of time.  Remnants of activity much like the dried residue of salt blanketing one’s skin, and thickening the volume of hair atop their head, an aftereffect of emerging from this ocean.  This fine, dusty coating, this accumulated layer of experience encased tautly over your body’s exterior, an artifact of action enriching your being, will only endure for as long as you can preserve its accompaniment to complexion, texture to reality, importance to memory.  

On this morning, all barriers characterizing the many constricting constraints limiting the latitude of my personal choice, those which entreat ascension to routine weekday conformities, are unabashedly breached.  Dissolved like salt in water.  Finally cleansed of.  Made invisible.  With the evaporation of the weekend, I will come to see their routine reappearance.  For now, today, I am free of the damned demands associated with earning a paycheck in this go-go-don’t-stop-for-a-single-second society of ours.  One would be hard-pressed for arguing a logical reason to follow them anyway at these burgeoning, single-digit hours of the clock-face during the final weeks to the calendar year.  I think of this liberty as a weekend rite-of-passage towards renewal, as the real-self reemerges from what may be thought of as a fisherman’s false-reality, one I bear to live as “the workweek.”  There will be no pressed white-collars and neatly-fashioned Windsor knots at this morning’s meeting.  Uni and Albrights only.  And I proudly wear stubble instead.  It’s a natural, gruff, complimentary appearance I look forward to wearing all-week-long. The growth of change.  A detachment from my morning norm.  The parting of an otherwise daily ritual.  At some point, I’ll find myself brushing the stout stubble of hairs lining my jawline and cheek into an open palm in slow, up and down strokes, impulsive inclinations coupling those otherwise languid occasions fraught with flat-lined thought and unblinking, thousand-yard stares out to sea, a habitual course of comfort nursing paring moments of repose, all of which seem to be second-nature whenever sporting this protruding signature of manhood from the rim of my face.  A homage to habit.  Similar in condition to the coarse and tangled disposition of the surf during an easterly blow or when fouled by weather.  Unshaven, just as well.  An embraced state, whether masculine at heart or gnarly in temperament, both are something I like to tangibly feel to my touch to know they are real.

 

The cushioned, rubber weather-strip seal insulating the frame of the drivers-side door resists my pulling tug of separation, stubbornly tearing apart from a frosted adhesion set overnight.  The ambient temperature had reached dew point.  Ice formed.  The air itself laminated these two mating, otherwise protective layers from the extremes brought about by weather, forcing them temporarily bonded to one another.  I can relate.  There are mornings where I too, am just as difficult to peel from under the sheets welded against my warmed skin, lying embedded into a sunken mattress like a fossil frozen in a slab of stone.     

I’m here, again, motionless, sitting in the driver’s seat of my sedan, exchanging short-lived puffs of condensed breath into the crisp-air of the cabin.  The engine turns over, idling high.  I wait.  For both the car, and myself, to warm.  I look ahead, out the windshield, but not at a roadway passing by.  I’m looking miles ahead in my mind, drawing my crossed arms tight unto my torso, as a quick muscle spasm shivers across my chest.  Even at an hour like this, in a comatose world devoid of even the slightest hint of liveliness, a thousand random thoughts, alive and aloft in their indulgence, find a reason to parade inside my head.  Sometimes I feel as though they themselves, swarming about my face like a dense offense of mosquitos, buzzing, distracting, annoying, threatening, weaving and tangling amongst one another, the baggage of bête noire side-tracking tranquility and sound well-being, nagging for the continued sustenance of a host, despotically commanding valuable time or increased effort and attention, are those that attempt to detract me from what is surfcasting’s overall simplicity, awaiting unhooked from reality.  Where I may swim freely as the fish I seek.  Think as clearly as the fresh air I breathe. 

Still waters may run deep, but actions speak louder than words.  The crunching carbide-tip studs of my Korkers grinding atop mossy granite jetty-tops will serve as stepping testaments of conspiracy against an affiliation to life lived on land.  And with that, I will allow only one string to remain attached to myself, most willingly and dearly, of course.  Perched atop an awaiting, interlocking passageway of boulders leading to depths of the unknown, I will use every caution to stay bound to the frailty of my retrieved mainline, my indispensable, millimeter-thin helpmate, faithfully drawn from the sea with each repeated cast, a braided ambassador of my soul’s intentions, neatly repacking onto my reel’s spool, layering tightly with a weaved and winded order, where I will remain at the ready, for more.  It’s my essential lifeline to sanity, to a self-preservation of sorts.  But these interloping thoughts, in order to survive day after day, in order to materialize even, must live-off the favor of the present, greedily seeking to suck from the warm blood of memories ago in order to survive.  Parasitical judgments to those remnants of the past, resplendent or not.  A past, if relived once, was relived one-thousand times already.  Being here, I simply want to get away.  I want to use my best judgment, find a favorable spot, somewhere, and cast away.  If fish are there, I will know.  If fish are not there, I will still harbor hope.

Sometimes, to strenuously over-think is to simply over-work.  Why must I project so deeply into the matter, analyze, wonder, fantasize?  Why can’t I save that energy for work, for the endless challenges that are life, for what really matters?  Release.  It is all waiting for me anyway upon my return home.  Just where I left it.  Or does sitting in my car, in the desolate darkness before dawn, matter just as much?  Isn’t this simply a pastime in which I engage, an escapism, a hobby which doesn’t translate direct value to life?  Leisure, satisfaction, and refinement of skills, sure, but it’s more of a personal, visceral challenge to the physical embodiment of oneself protesting to the oft harsh and unforgiving elements of Nature, those that incessantly wear away at one’s foreign composure of order pitted against a merciless saltwater environment, that unnatural neatness accosted by a natural entropy, but there must be more.  I can feel it.  Something deeper, harping at the very fibers of one’s essence, plucking at the strings of one’s soul, the music thus sounding being the magnum opus, the very notes, the unique signature of oneself imploring and provoking at the listening ears of the sea, a casting composition of sound proclaiming what it means to be a human placed wildly amongst the natural world, if only for hours at a time.  A perennial pupil learning what really is. 

Relief is within casting range.  Very shortly from now, I will become the wayfaring surfcaster who embarks eastward, treading atop an oceanfront altar sedated under this blackened veil of nighttime, forging forward prior to any crimson coloring of the heavens, before Eos’s rosy-fingered awakening paints the familiar hues that are a new day erupting from the sea’s horizon.  Physically, I’ll be in search of a suitable spot to stand upon cold, wet sand squiggling throughout a beach’s unsettled wash-zone, where my bootprints are the shifting evidence of a shore-bound, clandestine-calling leading me to the smoothened, striated sand of the surf’s slope, where these tracks of mine will eventually terminate, becoming dissolved from sight.  That will be where I am finally freed from objection, where I sink into an unspoken sanctum, spanning a turbid event horizon near my boots, defined at the brink of a liquid existence, one rising and falling, splashing and flowing.  I will feel the firm base of sand shift slightly under the weight of my bearing, radiating rings of water from its saturated mass, offering solace for my bruised sense of devotion while away in absence, a caressing invitation for my mind to ebb with the towing tide, to float purposefully adrift on the coddling currents of reckless abandon.  You would not understand what I wish to express unless your outstretched wings too, have spread wide and far, holding you aloft, suspended within the thermal updrafts of freedom, the cushioning billows of air allowing you, in an abandoned mind-set, to effortlessly glide with ease to new-found, soaring heights, all-the-while possessing complete control of choice, for when you deem it necessary to shed this inspiring, invigorating energy, and remit spiritual altitude from these outstretched wings of ascension, choosing when to retract these fluttering feathers to the very air you breath and descend closer to reality in a spiraling finality of finesse, holding in deeply the inhaled hopes of something nearly imperceptible, but sacrosanct and metaphysical to one’s self, before finally returning with the softest of landing, rebounding to the world we all know and awake to each morning, in this moment, grasping tightly to a radiantly consummate feeling of rebirth, a rejuvenation of purpose, as if the time spent alone brought you closer to an existential enlightenment, a moment of environmental clarity whispering panoramic murmurs, elucidations for your longing, listening ears to gorge upon. 

The splashing, rushing, and babbling of mightily moving water against rock and gravel, the hissing seethes over the surf’s sand, the hollow booming of curling waves breaking upon the shoreline’s backbone, these autonomous actions of Nature, will always occur, regardless of occasion.  Unending repetitions with no beginning and no conclusion.  But for the seeking surfcaster, there exist a limited, precious minutes of time where one will have the best standing-room beset before the aquatic amphitheatre of the sea, with the most coveted view of this stage’s closed curtains, soon to draw open for awaiting eyes, to enrapture the senses with an unrivaled performance of color and sensation to spirit.  If you must find me, simply follow my meandering, smeared sand-impressed signature of concave, crimpled boot-prints left abandoned in my slipstream, evidence of my wandering course which abruptly terminates from sight along the leading-edge of the sloped beach’s face, where the farthest stretches of the foamy white water’s rhythmically-reaching fingers fan, washing-away into bubbling sand to mask the perambulatory presence of those like myself who wake and come to cast. 

These are my guiding directions.  Waypoints I’ve set on my map of discovery.  The pillars of support to my faith.  The sextant I hold to the nighttime sky in order to align myself and learn bearing.  This is why I have arisen from sleep in the middle of the night, for the moving finger of this fisherman writes.  I am a disciple to the playhouse of the sea, to a sight yet unseen, to this, the very moment of intrigue at which I tread before, as I stand waist-deep in the ink-blackened water of the surf amid nighttime’s blinding fog of darkness, with nothing more than miles of empty space set between the advancing seconds of dawn and my seaward peering eyes, waiting for when those windows to the soul, fixated upon a horizon awakening in contrast, hungry to be fed light, are finally rewarded with a nurturing feast of color.  For the debut of encompassing detail to furnish this silhouette of encouragement.  For when the chromatic spectrum spanning from complete blackness above my head transforms vertically, retreating, as subtle gradients of midnight, cobalt, and navy blues, intensifying in opposition, bleed skyward, all of which become accentuated by vivid, airbrushed sprays of color painting the undersides of low-hanging cumulous clouds.  For the breathtaking seconds of crimson change to compete before clearly culminating in a climaxing crescendo, screaming, as emergent, brilliantly emanating slivers of striated scarlet streaks tear-open the sky, burning like a bed of glowing coals smoldering in the hearth of a forge or the ashen, flaky growth rings and fluttering embers of a split log wavering within the heart of a wood-fire, arresting one’s attention of all else near. This forthcoming medley, this waterborne-wildfire enveloping the eastern vista in a sea of flames, a concordance of yellow, orange, magenta, copper, and red, fueled by the precious, billowing minutes of daybreak, is surely the apex of the ephemera.  The welcoming bath of dawn, consummating in sunrise, will be a special moment to savor, to taste upon my salty spirit.  I will be amongst those who have witnessed this unfolding metamorphosis evolve from the blackness of night to the very last second when the burning gaseous orb, refracting orange celestial light about its wiggling periphery, ascends above the faraway horizon, slowly breaking tangential contact of its lower arc from the sea like that of a drooping drop of morning dew, stretching from the tip of a leaf before slipping away, breaking free.  The sun, at last, will have been released to orbit the sky yet again.  A day rebirthed anew. 

I will come to visualize, with an absolute certainty reinforcing my seasoned convictions, that there is no place better I could be right now, for not everyone is remotely fortunate enough to journey where the sky is born.

The blurring bewilderment between shadowy sand and sea becomes obliterated with the increasing acuteness of a sky growing in refined focus with deep gradients of blue towering towards the heavens from the horizontal division of these distant waters.  As if the sea herself offers to share her own complexion, diffusing upwards in a casting reflection of rising reform.  A gaining charge urging the eclipse of night to finally resign.

A fleeting snapshot surfacing from the latent depths of reality much like the enigmatic, striped-fish you so patiently pursue, the once beached, finned-prize you admire briefly before release, when only by perfect timing as she is momentarily mirroring and glistening of the rising sun’s low-angle bath of orange and sanguine hues, those first shed upon the world, does it become understood that such imbued observations are only yours to relish in sensation and visual experience before disappearing into the vastness of sweeping transition and faded recognition.

~

“Before the passing sky, in long hours of contemplation of its magnificent and ever-changing beauty, I am seized by an incomparable emotion.  Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul.  To feel the supreme and moving beauty of the spectacle to which Nature invites her ephemeral guests! ... that is what I call prayer.”  -  Claude Debussy