Always, For More

It always begins the same.

Some morning, his feet will disappear into a turbid and shallow, leg-lapping tide of April.  Somewhere from a stone-strewn sand or mucky, marl marsh flat or tidal-weed-washed or dead-reed-framed shoreline along the Raritan’s lower reaches.

There, his fingertips will wriggle and wrangle to wedge under a familiar flap’s sewn hem, prying for a firm-enough grip to its skin of Dacron sailcloth.  Squeezing for a bond that may finally silence the enduring tensions of time and encourage an unfolding pull upward.  One that will suddenly saturate the surrounding salty air with its distinct tearing-sound of Velcro’s virtue roaring awake, as if it were perceived with the similar signature of alertness heeded to the solid, deep snapping and splintering of timber beginning to fall.  Unstoppable change, set in-motion. 

For him, these few parting seconds of time are nothing more than one man’s proclamation of revival and return.  Of a stirring seasonal apogee of time and tide, now steadfast turned in favor.  For the spoils of a long-awaited emergence from a hibernal abyss and its cold clasping confines of wintertide emptiness.  For his spirit’s resultant submergence into an aqueous realm of springtide abundance and Nature’s forthcoming draw of curtain to fill his eyes with her dreamy colors of genesis. 

Sounded is one surfcaster’s startling crack of thunder, heard rolling and rumbling across the many distant and untried dunes of sandy shoreline signaling his return like a sudden change in the weather.  A storm, soon enough, that will rain of cascading casts slicing, air whisking, driving downpouring descents of bodies plastic and metal and wood, splashing distant seawater with a rhythm of raining dimples and rings emanating and promises piercing.  The air of the sea, punctured by this angler’s ambush of sound, sweeps over a liquid layer of quietude.  His surf bag, is opened.  Finally fallen awash in the orange-colored glisten of early light, he eyes its deep row of tubes lined with the trebled testaments of dependable color and form.  A pretense of reflection for what is to now ensue over the giving months ahead.

Inhaled alas, is the momentous moment when shadows finally fold down to this precipitous pouring of light, where sight seeks the unseen, withheld somewhere under the glassy gleam of glints and march of riffles, as time generously unravels from within the curling wave, and in his mind, everything seems split-open with the immutable and indelible gestures of remembrance.

He pauses to muse, in that it’s simply the separating sound of a fabric tearing apart that has welcomed him back the many fathoms of time and miles of memory.  But far more, it’s one accompanying his suddenness stirring in thought and action.  Again, for more.  One ordinarily insignificant, inconsequential, and inconsiderable detail of routine that will otherwise incite the many memories of his wading in the stirring foam of a sea that may again flood through his mind as it does over his body with the sudden and invigorating intensity of one of her fallen, rushing wave’s cast ashore does seethe and storm over his ankles.  As witness, born anew of her unflinching temperament.  For more, again. 

By parting ways of a fabric, he imparts a solidarity in these parting seconds with the fabric of realization that is his common existence unfolding anew.  Always, for more. 

And so it is heard. By virtue of finned-fortune and the contribution of his unpredictable, seaward-seeking footfall, it’ll never end the same.