The beach is pale and severed by a stream of brackish water, sea brine and fresh water flowing back and forth from a coastal dune lake to the ocean. There are tall grasses and humps of sand as big as whales, amphibious-looking plants that seem as though they could live life on a reef, a roadside, or the dark side of the moon. Stubby beach elder, panic grass, and a kind of morning glory I’ve never seen anywhere else all smile at me from behind a string of wooden fence that has been draped over the dunes like they’re sleeping children, a little “Keep Off” sign standing guard nearby, a gesture, after decades of severe weather and impact, to show that the people are trying to make amends to their places.
I walk here because I like the way the gulls sound.
I walk here because the water makes my toes wrinkle, turning the soles of my feet to a hide of soft leather.
I walk here because, like me, the beach is always changing. And there is so much wisdom in what will never profess to be finished.
I walk here because the fragrance transports me to magic land.
I step down barefoot from a rotting wooden step onto hot, almost-liquid sand. There’s no way to avoid crossing outfall today, which is knee-deep and murky with strange pockets of hot and cold. A swirl of panicked minnows circles my ankles when I step in, and I notice how different the conduit is now than it was twenty-two hours prior. There are no more shallow points, and the water is moving quickly, rushing through a network of just born capillaries in the sand that could easily be gone by sunset.
People in various configurations—singles, couples, families—mill around wonderfully aimless. Most have come to shut their eyes, to bask and be still, two things I can do nearly anywhere but here. There is something so special to me about a place that seems to believe as I do that we are continually shaped by movement. I smile as I wade across, watching a trio of little girls with pink shovels dig for treasure and drag their butterfly kites behind them, unable or unwilling to wait another second on the wind.
I have walked this beach and others like it for years, listening in on the conversations between long-legged birds, letting the sand slough away the skin on my feet, amazed by how it can be so different every time and still so much like home. I’ve come here troubled and desperate; I’ve come brimming with joy. I have come searching intensely for things I can’t name, and on days when I’ve wanted for nothing. The ocean has never given me bad advice. “Keep going,” it says as it reaches for my ankles and turns eleven new kinds of blue in the distance, “Keep on.”
And invariably I do, through the changes in and around me, walking more with the beach than on it and into my prerogative to erode, evolve, birth, and be birthed over and over. “The ocean is a mighty harmonist,” as Wordsworth says, and a very good walking companion, too.
In every movement, each crashing wave, there is transformation. It’s what keeps me walking, every damn day, and what draws me to salt-soaked and sacred spaces like this one, an environment with a pulse of its own, that reaches for me, and is as never-the-same, as I am. Up ahead, a plover searches the sand with her nose and loses a few gray tufts of feathers, gently reminding me that we can shed our feathers with a single step forward.
After six slow miles, with lots of stops to scout for sand dollars and perfectly tousled beach stones, I walk back through the outfall and find a shallow path through the stream that either wasn’t there before or wasn’t noticeable to me. I smile at the idea that the beach has done this on my behalf, though I doubt it. I say goodbye to the sleeping sand giants and their flower crowns, glad that they’re being watched over. I say goodbye to the girls pulling their wilted kites along like dawdling little sisters. “Keep going,” I think, “Walk on.”
Libby DeLana is an award-winning executive creative director, designer/art director by trade, who has spent her career in the ad world. Click here to get your copy of Libby’s first published book, Do Walk. You can connect with Libby on Instagram @thismorningwalk and @parkhere.