So calm. The edge of the water, two miles wide here,
Is hardly moving. The half moon floating
At our feet is nearly still.
A heron glides, arches his wings, splashes his
Gangly legs through the water to the sand
Scarcely ten feet in front of us,
Turns his head and shakes.
"Hello heron." I say. And he reels and flops aloft.
"Why did you do that?" she asks.
Not knowing why, I shrug.
Jupiter pierces the blackness below the moon.
The few thin clouds, brightened by the moon,
Reflect -- softly sandwiching the opposite shore.
There is only the croak of the heron as he settles down out in the kelp bed.
He folds his wings, shakes, and then there is silence.
We crunch slowly along the beach. Our feet crashing into the pebbles,
Crushing rocks to sand, and sand to finer sand.
It is so quiet we must be heard for miles and miles.
Through the din of our crashing feet, we hear a distant splash.
We stop.
"Slap splash." A harbor seal turns and plays, out of sight
In the blackness. Again, "splash slap."
And then through the intervening silence a gull cries.
From five miles north we hear a rhythmic "thudding."
Like a lighted wedding cake, the Friday Harbor ferry
Churns past Shaw and Orcas.
Farther down the beach we stop again. A frog
Begins to sing from a marsh behind the drift logs.
Announcing spring.
There are cozy lights and silhouetted figures in the house
So often empty. Headlights two miles down the road inch
Toward us across the causeway.
The sand gives way to rock at the point, and we stop again.
More gulls. The persistent frog chirps and chirps.
Then stops -- and there is nothing --
The water, motionless and black at our feet.
Faintly behind us a soft crunching, like the iron wheels of a wagon
Breaks the silence. There is no road, no headlight.
But it is approaching. Slowly moving toward us
Down the beach.
Louder now. We guess it is the long out-of-sight ferry,
Its wake slowly curling into the gravel.
We stand and wait.
Five minutes, and the water at our feet begins to move
Slowly against the rock. Barely lapping, then slapping gently,
Then calm again. The half moon wobbling in its inky bed.
Then, just before we turn for home, an owl, a little owl,
Hoots from the woods. We count eleven high-pitched notes.
"Sounds like someone tapping on a metal pipe." she says.
"A screech owl, I think," but I am not certain.
Crunching back up the beach, the tide has come in, covering our
Tracks. We smell wood smoke.
"Ours?" I ask. "Yes." she says.
The heron croaks.
In the house, the fire crackles.
"I wonder if the seal feels at home in his ink black bay."
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