Anodyne
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
 
The two-land road descends plumb-straight through trees, traversing the side of the hill. Roofs flash by: small houses; sloping yards. Past the yards' low ends a salt marsh stretches west to a narrow spit where even smaller houses -- shacks, really, some not much larger than RVs -- sit facing the low grey surf. Clabbered sky, the peninsula's distant mountains remote behind curtains of snow.

A dogleg curve. The road runs perpendicular to the ocean, marshes stretching off on either side. Russet on brown on gray. Birds lighting and flickering and lighting again in the shallows, the water's surface pushed here and there by the wind.

Out of the car. The wind slaps against my canvas coat like a solid hand. Rolling green "lawn" pockmarked by rabbit shit and thistles. Along the cliff-edge. Heaving breakers on the narrow cobble beach below. Out in the channel the passenger ferry explodes through clouds of spray, narrow vees of white foam cleaving off its blunt wedge-shaped bow. A bulk carrier executes a slow turn on the horizon, its squat grey presence brooding at vision's edge like an Imperial Star Destroyer or the military bulk lifter that executed its final approach above the Taurus' roof, making me think I'd blown a tire.

Unmade photograph: the consonance of the turnaround's green grass oval against a bulge of silver sky.
- posted by cjb @ 10:47 AM


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