Against a backdrop of spruce trees at the far end of a small beach, a large boulder squats at the edge of the bay. Its top half is dry and pale. The lower half is damp and dirty-bronze. It’s too big to be jostled by the tides.
In the foreground of this photo, dozens of smaller stones lie half-buried in sand. Beyond the boulder, a dead spruce has been partially uprooted. Its bare branches look brittle against the other, still upright, lushly-needled trees.
From the photo, it’s impossible to tell whether the boulder is drying now or about to be drenched again, or how long that spruce has been upended. Nor is it possible to say how many times I, who took the picture, have been wrong about where a story ends or where it even starts.
Take, for instance, the sailing trip that took me to that beach in the summer of 2023. Did the trip begin a decade ago when a friend and I considered the sheen of boulders in moonlight and how we mark the milestones in our lives?
Or did it begin, more concretely, when we boarded the boat in a small Maine coast cove? The sky was blue that day, the winds were good; we hoisted sail, and I, sitting up at the bow of the boat, decided that the beginning of this voyage would be a good time to make one private gesture of an ending. In my pocket was a Zip-lock bag with a few teaspoons of my husband’s ashes. We both loved the Maine coast. What better place to discretely drop a handful overboard, to mark, not a milestone, but the subsiding at last of a two-year grief and the turn to possibilities ahead.
The bow rose and dropped; the swells rocked us side to side. The tide and wind, our captain said, made the sea “confused.” Kneeling, I hung onto the stanchion with one hand, and kept the other in my pocket, ready, while I waited for a moment that said now.
But the finish or start of a story is often frayed and full of holes, and nothing ever opens or closes where or when we think it does. Beginnings are apt to be shadowy, Rachel Carson warns. Endings too. And so the ashes stayed in the baggie and when we went ashore, the dead spruce remained tilted and still, and the boulder I leaned against sat unmoving in bright sunlight. Marking nothing but the force of a long-gone glacier, it cast the darkest shadow on the beach.
But out there, on the water, the waves kept overlapping the present and the past, the sky piled up with in-betweens, and the sea, which mutes all questions about stops and starts and anything pretending to be firm, says without saying that the real story of that trip might have begun when I couldn’t mark the other story’s end.
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Barbara Hurd is the author of The Epilogues, Listening to the Savage / River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies, Tidal Rhythms (with photographer Stephen Strom), Walking the Wrack Line, Entering the Stone, Stirring the Mud, and several collaborative chapbooks with artists. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and the Sierra Club’s National Nature Writing Award, she has published in numerous journals and is currently at work on a series of epistolary essays. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Artwork by Dinty W. Moore