On a Winter Beach
By Robert Finch
During one bitterly cold day earlier this month, I went for a short walk at the tail end of the afte
A hard, cold wind had been scouring the land relentlessly since morning, and a light dusting of snow
from the previous night had settled on the frozen ground. I walked along a narrow band of moor that
lay between me and the bay. It had been almost swept clean of snow by the steady wind, and it was
here I began to see how hard the freeze really was. The bare sandy ground was as hard as concrete.
The wind blew mercilessly here, slipping like a knife into the cracks and crevices of my clothing, t
to pry me open like a quahog.
On the beach there was a single line of footprints ahead of me. But these seem to have been made in
another age, an ice age ago. Now they lay fossilized by the cold, gathering snow dust in their dents
own footsteps, like ghost tracks, left no prints at all. The bay beach was, if anything, harder tha
moors, barren and empty except for a few frozen slipper shells. These mollusks were the victims of
"Dead Man's Fingers," an aptly-named Japanese seaweed that invaded our waters in the 1970s. The
seaweed's thick, slimy, limp fronds attach to shellfish, as it had to these slipper shells, then dra
ashore on the wind and the tide. It holds them there on the beach until both organisms freeze or
desiccate in the burning wind.
On the western horizon one of the Cape's violent winter sunsets began to play itself out. It was lo
to watch, but the beach had an unnerving, pre-human aspect to it. I climbed the bluff and walked
among a string of empty summer cottages, boarded blind for the winter. I could easily believe that
people had left this place for good, and that I was only some relict or guardian spirit looking on,
that the biting wind kept reminding me of my flesh and blood reality.
Heading inland again, I did meet one man, a hunter, a figure clad wholly in white - white-jacket, wh
gloves, white hood, white face mask. He was invisible against the snow until he emerged suddenly qui
near, startling me. So inhuman did he look, with not an inch of flesh showing, that for a brief mom
wondered if he might be out for me, the last of my kind. But he was after other game, rabbit or
pheasant. With a brief nod from behind silvered ski glasses, he passed silently by.
I made my way back inland, back through a dead landscape bathed in light like blood. A nearby
church bell clanged five o'clock like a warning. That evening a friend asked me where I had been on
walk. I was hard put to say. "On the beach" hardly seemed adequate. I felt that I'd gone much fart
and been out much longer. There was some nagging meaning to the whole strange excursion that I
could not quite grasp. But there was nothing definite I'd learned or discovered from it - unless it
how willing the imagination is to indulge itself in trying to fill up such an empty and whitened wor