Mary on the Beach

 

 

Hard gray sand, nearly black in the darkness, cooled her back as she lay under the indigo blanket of the sky, watching the final twinkle of the Milky Way. Mary lay on the beach in the dampness just below the high tide line, waiting for the sun. Not so much for warmth-July needed no boost of heat even in the darkest of night before dawn-but for light to search for tracks. She felt the earth and sand tugging, drawing her to this beach in the solitary dawn, day after day, to seek the tracks of turtles in the sand.

A month after spending some nights and weekends in the small village on the island with him, Mary took one of the kayaks and discovered this barrier beach. It was solitary, guarding whatever might exist to the west. At the same time, she discovered the force of the tidal flow that twice a day, in time with the moon, drained and refilled the vast marsh which crept for miles inland. On her third or fourth trip to the island, she couldn't remember which, she sought the cooling relief of the ocean. Seeing that she was alone in the middle of the day, she removed her shorts and top and left them on the beach. She let the water bathe her completely. Exposing her skin to the salt and sand in the warm water touched her mind with something primeval. This basic contact with epochs past remained with her when she waded ashore from the water and lay down in the sand to feel the warmth slowly soak into her back. She didn't fully lose the feeling until she got back to the kayak to ride the incoming tide back to the village, carefully brushing most of the sand from her body before donning her civilization costume. Ever since then, Mary spent her time on the beach naked, to the delight of the occasional ranger watching over the turtle nests.

On her first trip to the island, the paddle back had taken her hours and she arrived with aching shoulders. Glen explained charts and tides and currents to her in the evening over cold and umbrella-less rum drinks, and ever after she consulted the current charts and timed her trips with the ebb and flow of the marshes about the low tide.

The turtles she became fascinated with, loggerheads, climbed relentlessly from the sea to deposit a hundred or so eggs in the sand to incubate. One or two might survive to return to this same beach to lay eggs or to fertilize them in the waters offshore. The female loggerhead has no idea of the future of the eggs she deposits in the night; she is guided by ancient instincts back to this same beach where she hatched thirty-eight years ago. She simply comes, singularly and in the dark, just as she always has .

That morning as the ink-blue sky turned lighter and even pink, Mary became aware of a scuffling behind and just to her right. Slowly turning her head, she watched the loggerhead covering her nest with sand, flipper full by flipper full, her egg-laying duties completed for the night. In the rising light, Mary held her breath and watched as the loggerhead crawled back toward the ocean to resume her life-long journey out to the sea and back, out to the sea and back, endlessly toward survival or extinction.