We watched ospreys key in as the tide ebbed out, looking at the fish schools that pulsed in the tiny creek, moving up and down, sometimes holding still. Red drum, mullet and flounder. Tiger minnows, mud minnows and pinfish. An eagle drifted overhead, wings paused, head and tail bleached, reflecting a late-day sun that had microwaved our little stream and all predators and prey within.
We waded to more fish, casting, feeling clams in the cool mud, dodging sharp shells with bare toes. The world continued to shrink, the boat bellied on a bar behind us, and we wove ourselves closer to the smallness of things – of skittering crabs, riffled pools and spitting oysters.
The birds lift as wind-tossed rags, white, off-white, streaked colors of the grass. A pile of salt-bleached wood is out in the middle of things. The tide floods here, fills the puzzle of potholes, and recedes, leaving stagnant pools. This is where the red fish nose for crabs and show their tails, where blue-winged teal dive down to rest on their way to Mexico, where marsh hawks hover slow in the wind, where the ghosts of old waterfowlers sit in their broken blinds, where we are connected, and we are young.
Every blink is a shutter click in the boat-driven wind.
A quorum of birds. A feathered dais. I nod to the birds and to no one, out across the salty marsh.
Further still, the river pours into the sea, splitting north and south through the sandy shoals. A star fish feels its way along the rim of a tidal pool. The cold green tide. The white foam.
Life can toss storms into our worlds to stir the system and disjoint every stable thing we know. The turmoil of rain and wind is bad enough, but digging in the rubble uncovers simple, sharp pieces of the past. And while we pick up the pieces, a great wave of unwanted downtime washes through, allowing too much introspection. But the evening after, the sky catches fire over a great green swath of marsh. Under the smoldering shades of red, hope returns to a storm- battered barrier island.
