IT WAS a wild empty place, that beach. A place where the ocean met the sky and the seabirds screamed and reeled in wide, wide, borderless blue. The dunes were three stories high or no bigger than an anthill, great ancient breakers or new little hillocks. It was a place of shifting sand, singing sand, sinking sand, hard-packed made-for-running-on sand. Sand with a sheen to it, a certain luster in the right light (moonlight, starlight, dawnlight). A long crescent swoon of a beach, even its name was magical: Pearl Strand.
