Ode to beachtide

The wise ocean tides call to me season after season to offer thinking space, and deep breathing, and subtle lessons for a flourishing life. The rhythmic ebb and flow alternately lulls and startles – pulsing like a slowly ticking clock and unsettling with its turbulent inflows and retreats. The tide’s power is sometimes evident in the beached flotsam, broken shells, and sadly lifeless creatures – sometimes evident in sand stripped barren, leaving only deep, now-dry runnels – always evident in the thriving, ever-changing ecosystem of dunes and rock and sand and sea. For me, there is something irresistible about the push and pull of tides, echoed in the constant breaking and receding of waves on the beach. Here my mind wanders. And settles.

When vacationers who flow to these shores settle in, they often set their rhythms to “beach time,” giving in to the lulling undertow of the tide. Like flotsam from a turbulent world, these people – broken shells and sadly lifeless creatures – withdraw to the beach hoping the waves will wash their cares out to sea. In beach time, the push and pull of clock time recedes, allowing for wandering bike rides, slow window shopping, sunset beach strolls, afternoon game tournaments, absorbing book reads, extended barbeques. Visitors plan activities that rely on optimal tidal conditions – when there is plenty of beach space to spread out, when their kayak adventure will be paddling with the tide instead of against it, when the fishing might be good. Beach vacation memories linger like runnels, and these are all the more firmly etched because of how time slows here. Even for us residents, the tides encourage deep breaths in, and cleansing breaths out, in a luxuriously slow cadence that is the defining characteristic of beach time.

My abstract tide clock is a fitting symbol of beach time. It is a greenish ceramic plate with an overlay of wave action on its face, and a single rotating hand that ticks around from the deep stretch of blue-tinged sea foam representing high tide, through ebb, to low tide spume, and back up to high tide over the tide’s recurrent rhythm of twelve hours and 25 minutes. This tide clock doesn’t show clock time, inviting me to focus on what is happening now. The tide app on my smartphone shows the more practical details that enable me to plan to be on the beach at a time when the tide is low enough to have made a hard sand walking path just beyond the reach of the waves, irresistible for ambulatory thinking. Still, it’s a stripped-down artsy tide clock that I decided to hang next to the front door, so that it can subtly encourage me to live life in a different rhythm. And it can remind me that other aspects of the tides offer additional thought-provoking lessons.

One of the tide’s lessons is about fulfilling a purpose. Notice how the tides regularly wash up delectable sea life for the gulls and shore birds and how, in receding, the tides often wash away broken shells and nasty guano. See how the rising tide really does lift all boats, allowing passage through dangerous sea channels, and be grateful that the motion of the current encourages sea life to congregate, forming flourishing fishing grounds. Appreciate how the tide stirs water to cool it, agitates water to clean it, and exchanges water to replenish the microscopic base of the food chain. Perhaps there is food for thought here as well, begging unsettling questions: What am I meant to bring into my corner of the world and what am I meant to remove from it? What I am born to contribute or called to agitate, and what in my life might be a defining force?

The tides rise and fall because water and land both respond to the gravitational pull of the moon and the sun, giving a lesson that some silent forces are meant to be heeded. I could learn to attend to the promising pulses that pull on me. That writing project that puts me in a state of flow and hints at a new vocation. That new acquaintance who seems like someone I might want to know. That echo calling to me when I pass by a church. That urge to see the Rocky Mountains, or turn up the music, or call a long-lost friend, or make an Italian feast, or walk along the water’s edge.

The edgy ecosystem between the tide’s high and low marks also offers a provoking lesson. Living things there evolve to adjust to powerful waves and changing salinity, to live sometimes underwater and sometimes exposed. Each neighbor in the turbulent tide line develops differently advantageous quirks: the kelp’s deep roots, the barnacle’s glue, the mussel’s ability to burrow beneath the sand, the starfish’s sucker-tipped tube feet, the anemone’s flexible tissues. Perhaps learning to ride life’s up and down rhythms is a better approach than trying to hold steady. Perhaps I, too, can develop advantageous quirks that will make me strong in changing circumstances. Perhaps a go-with-the-flow attitude is a strong hedge against startling events.

The suffix -tide denotes a season; it’s a way of suggesting that a particular event flows and ebbs into the before and after, but also that whatever -tide we wander into is here only for a short time. I fully appreciate living in a resort town and absorbing all that beach life entails – but it’s the deep breathing pace of life and the calming rhythm of the sea that will allow me to thrive even in occasional turbulence. I intend to make this lingering “beachtide” the defining ambiance of a flourishing life in my next chapter.

Notes

The structure of this essay was defined by a prompt in the Experiments class I’m taking with the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild this summer. Many thanks to our facilitator, Maribeth Fischer and my classmates (and Jo!)  for helping me to improve the original draft.

The assignment asked us to write a prose sestina, which has these characteristics:

• 6 paragraphs of 6 sentences each, followed by a 3-sentence paragraph
• Integrate strong words from first paragraph into the others, showing up multiple times
• Last word of paragraph must be in first sentence of subsequent paragraph.

The sestina has quite the challenge, and I take up such challenges with detailed planning. I picked a topic and endeavored to lay out what each of the paragraphs might cover, and also brainstormed the words that might be appropriately threaded in the given topic. I had several false starts – one because I couldn’t work out the main point, and another because it didn’t lend itself to the kind of lyrical language generally present in a sestina. Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed the intellectual challenge of writing within such specific guidelines.

I’m quite pleased with the final version here, gratified that my outline for it worked out so well.