August 6th, 2015 - Eric C. Smith
- donaldewquist
- Aug 6
- 4 min read
Offshore of the town where we vacation on a barrier island in North Carolina, climate change piles five new inches of water onto the sea every ten years. Each ten years about a hundred and fifty feet of sandy beach wash back into the ocean. On average three hurricanes churn through in that time, chewing up the dunes and spitting them out who knows where, though lately the storms come more often than that. On the next island north, where the Army Corps of Engineers doesn’t pump the sand back out of the water after every hurricane and nor’easter, the land shears off in the current a hundred yards at a time, hollowing the sand from around the roots of salt-soaked oaks until they topple into the inlet.
August 6, 2015 was summer’s last stand. We had rolled up two days earlier to a sun-bleached hotel in a minivan stuffed to the edges, three kids wedged into the way-back alongside all their summertime stuff. School was starting in a week two thousand miles west, and we still had all that distance to cover on windy highways across the plains. But first we drove east until the road ran out, and we bought cheap beach chairs and a Styrofoam cooler from the grocery store, and we hauled it all up the public beach access to stake out a spot by the water. The surf is lazy in August, heavy in a salty warmth, rolling up and down the sand without hurry. We followed suit and sunk into the sun and the water, the thin metal feet of our chairs falling deeper with every lapping wave.
We took turns hunting for shark teeth. You might imagine that the teeth would be gleaming, freshly fallen from some Great White’s mouth. But the teeth are ancestral, tens or hundreds of thousands of years old, fossilized the color of coal in the blackwater rivers that vein the mainland. The shark teeth fell from mouth to seabed way back in the Tertiary, after the dinosaurs died off but before we humans began to have our day. The world was wetter then and the coastline was a hundred miles westward, so the ancient seafloor used to lie where inland rivers run now. After so much time embedded in sandy loam and tannin-stained freshwater, the teeth erode out in the rivers and tumble downstream toward the sea again, where they turn up in the surf, black against the broken shells. We found nine teeth on the beach, scavenging the last memories of long-dead tiger sharks and hammerheads and makos, plucking them from the sand to line the pockets of our swimsuits.
The kids were young that August day in the unforgettable way that parents soon find impossible to remember. Perpetual and tireless, they moved like waves across the sloping beach, piling sand and fetching water and rescuing small fry they had only just trapped in dugout pools. They moved just inside the window where the youngest was old enough to play with the big kids for hours, and the oldest was still just young enough to play along with the little kids. We let the high tide chase us up into the dunes and then followed its ebb out again. An unseen moon pulled the water, and the water pulled us, and we heeded the tide’s promptings until the sun began to slip low in the sky.
The August sun casts shadows longer every new day, and that sunset hour the shadows of the kids’ wiry bodies stretched in the late light all the way back to the water, dissolving into the mist on the breakers. In their silhouettes the kids looked more grown than they were, like a troupe of giant stretched-out castaways charged with building doomed castles and excavating every last coquina clam and befuddled sand crab. But when the sun dropped below the horizon and the light turned suddenly soft, the kids shrunk to life-sized again, tiny against the darkening sea.
Where the ocean stops and land begins, you can’t expect anything to stay the same, but you also don’t expect much to change. Water surges in and then out, up and then down, over and then back, in a metronomic dance of gravity and time, an infinite rearrangement of a billion grains of sand. You could never put it back the way it used to be, even if you wanted to. It’s never the same way twice. But there’s a stability alongside all the change, or maybe the stability lives inside—a moment of recognition when the tide drops out and a familiar horizon emerges from the sea. You know the whole, even if all the parts are different.
But the familiar horizons are on the move. These past ten years the planet kept warming and the beach began to slip away, each tide trading a quantum of water for the slimmest memory of land. The shoreline moves those fifteen feet every year, not even noticeable until it is, and the sea level will add an unassuming half inch one year at a time until everything is water. We dreamed of returning when we were old, maybe when the kids had kids, imagining some new languid August day when we would find our way back to lengthy shadows and long-fallen teeth, to watch the sand rearranging on the tide.
You don’t expect much to change, but you can’t expect anything to stay the same. Kids grow up differently than you think, slowly and all at once and sometimes not at all, until one day you look up and nothing is the way it used to be. Something has been carried off in the current, a wide-eyed smallness exchanged a couple of grains at a time for a harder distance and different species of innocence.
We packed the minivan that next morning and turned it to the west, surrendering summer’s last stand, leaving time to its work of trading shore for sea.
