The Myriad and the Particular (1)

Yesterday I was on a beach where the sand was made of shells. Tiny shells, some still whole, in every shade from white to black and brown to lavender and palest pink, mounded into dunes that clicked faintly under my feet. Tiny shells, broken down by the waves into coarse multicolored gravel. Shells completely disintegrated into a powdery greyish-beige sand between my toes, a sand that could be lifted and blown onto the wind.

I sat on the dunes and watched the waves, eating a chicken sandwich, and two tangerines picked that morning from my aunt and uncle's tree. Pelicans flew down the length of the beach and splashed into the surf. An osprey hunted overhead. Gulls and long-legged shorebirds searched the shallows. Waves rose, broke, slipped onto the shore and retreated with a foaming edge of watery lace.

The shells were warm beneath me; I gathered a handful and let them fall through my fingers. The dunes and the beach stretched in either direction as far as I could see, and I thought, or tried to think, about the fact that each of these shells had once contained a life.

I had flown here before the disaster on the other side of the world, flown here watching the sun set over a thick blanket of clouds and rim the horizon with blood while the sky turned from turquoise to deepest azure and then lapis, punctured first by a planet and then by stars.The next morning, we woke to news of an equally incomprehensible magnitude. And yet, because it involves human beings, we cannot keep from trying to count and quantify and somehow contain the incomprehensible within a vessel of facts, because to do otherwise courts the disintegration of belief in the one life we comprehend, most of the time, as real.

There were very few other people on the beach, but I met a man walking in the same direction who came there once a week to look for special shells that he uses in his art projects. He was tall and tan, about my age, and wore shorts and a blue t-shirt, blue mirrored sunglasses, and a straw hat into which were stuck three feathers of different colors. We spoke for a few minutes -- Where are you from?  Canada. Well this weather feels cold to us! How long have you lived here? All my life -- and then continued searching, separated by fifteen feet or so; he walked in the wet sand and I kept to the "shell line" that marked the extent of high tide. Every now and then he stooped down, and gave me something: a piece of soft green sea glass, a razor clam, a pair of matched cockles as big as my palm. Do you always find something special, I asked. Not always, he said, but usually...it depends when I come. But in the past year, it's been amazing, I've found two messages in bottles. Really! I said, and stopped walking. Yes, he said, I was amazed too, especially because I'd never found one before. And neither one had water inside, which is very unusual. One had a postcard in it, with writing in German -- I had to have someone translate it for me -- and that had been tossed in somewhere in the Atlantic. But the other had been put into the Baltic and had somehow come all the way around and washed up here after a journey of three years. He shook his head: So you never know.

- to be continued