Hey, everyone! I can only imagine what you think happened to me (did she get lost on her way to eat the world? did she jump ship and move to Spain to drown herself in Padron peppers?...). Forgive me for the long silence. I've been a very busy girl, including moving to a new and exciting 'hood that I'll introduce to you soon. But the doctor is in now, and ready to pull NY Girl Eats World out of her coma. Will you rejoin me?
Helping me jump-start the effort is my dear friend and talented writer John Clare, who last wrote about the incomparable Old Town Bar. As the freakishly summery weather we've been having in New York takes its last balmy breath, John brings us to the beach for one last visit. Enjoy.
By John Clare
Gore Vidal has an extremely short list of opportunities never to pass up: appearing on television and having sex.
Standing at the edge of the Atlantic on the unofficial last day of Summer 2007, I added one more activity to never miss: throwing yourself into the sea.
It was late morning with an onshore wind of teeth and muscle. Under an almost white, cloudless sky, the waves arrived at a sharp angle to the beach, not as stately thumpers (although they were big enough) but coming quickly, white- capped, as urgent as the wind.
Far out the sea was almost black, topped by froth, but in closer the water was green, fighting its way to the wet, pure sand of the beach.
I wasn’t alone, but nearly so. There were two young families, set up with chairs, baskets of food, shovels, pails, and kids having a three-way comedy with umbrellas and the wind. The smell of grilled meat, the pop of beer and soda bottles.
Voices carried in the wild acoustics of the wind. Monarch butterflies played in the dunes, dancing crazily over the beach and then being driven back to the dunes. Could they really be making preparations to winter in Mexico?
A four-year-old girl came and stood next to me, a ripe, half-gnawed peach in one fist and without a greeting told me that Bootsie the cat left home and never came back but we made posters telling people about Bootsie and put them up on telephone poles and at the deli but Mommy said that even if we didn’t find Bootsie it only meant some nice family had taken her in to love her like we did.
Her father came and stood next to her, also holding a supremely ripe peach from an orchard just a few miles up the road. When I caught his eye he raised his eyebrows at his daughter’s narrative. He ate delicately, catching the juice after a bite in a cupped hand, but the girl was doing real damage to the fruit, her mouth and chin smeared red with juice.
Down the beach another young man was calling to his little ones, pointing at something moving in the waves, coming in at that sharp angle, close to the shore. An older man with a sun-weathered body saw the same thing and began screwing a spinning reel to a rod.
It was a dark amoeba shape in the green water, five feet wide and ten feet long. But then it sensuously reversed those dimensions, drifting at the tops of waves, ten feet from the beach. As it came closer, the form was alive -- thousands of tiny bait fish, schooled up, driven in this close to shore by bluefish and striped bass.
The fisherman cast over the undulating school, looking to hook the big predators who feed on the run by slamming into schools of bait fish, which are also called “killies” along this coast. Gulls wheeled above the changeling school, falling dead weight into the fish, others knifing down for a closer look before banking away.
I scolded myself – when was the last time I’d gone out for blues and stripers? I’d forgotten that fishing, like virtue, is its own reward.
Both fathers took their children’s toy pails and waded in to capture a few fish, but like the fisherman they had no luck, the school dissolving at their sweeps and then reforming. Everyone was smiling, pointing, except the man holding the fishing rod, who finally gave up, scowling.
The school passed. I waded in, waiting for the right wave and then diving through it. I pulled hard through the green-lit world of cleanliness, coldness and startling power – always bringing a thrill of fear – and surfaced, carried in the breathing swells, exhilarated.
Weightless, I watched waves rushing toward the obscured beach, then rose with the waves at my back to see over the dunes, and dropped again, no land in sight. Nothing but cruising, indifferent gulls and the great bowl of sky.
I thought of opportunities missed. Why didn’t I have peaches this morning?
The current had real authority, pulling me where it wanted. I started swimming, surfing the waves, and swimming again, fighting the undertow, finally finding my feet and hearing again the voices in the wind.
The physical euphoria stayed with me, but there was something more. For a short time I’d been like the slithering school of killies, inseparable from the sea. I was the poet’s question: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
Peaches, I thought, my face in a towel, almost regaining my breath. Ripe peaches.
