Beach Plot
As I indicated in the last entry, I have long been compelled by the circles inscribed in the garden of Charles Darwin’s restored Down House. In that entry, I explored one source of that fascination: the embeddedness of work and wide knowledge in the landscape of home. But there is also something about the process of observation itself that seems important to me. Looking intently at a small piece of land in one’s own garden, or at a small corner of a room, defamiliarizes the familiar, corrects generalities. The process can make us more humble. And smarter.
Four years ago, I decided to imitate Darwin and to use shapes in the ground to focus my attention on what was going on inside their outlines. The ground I chose was itself both familiar and unfamiliar, domestic and exotic. That ground was actually sand—part of the beach in Galveston. I do not live in Galveston or have a house there—at least not outside my dreams. Instead, for several years before the pandemic, my family and I rented a house on the island along with some friends. Each year, we rented a different house for about a month in the fall. My husband and I spent as much time as possible at whatever house we rented, but in those pre-Zoom times, these were limited to (sometimes long) weekends and to a two-day fall break. On Fridays, after inevitable afternoon meetings, we would flee Houston into sometimes standstill traffic. Still, even as the days shortened, we were often in time to walk the beach just before sunset turned the sky a shade of pink I will always associate with the Gulf in autumn.
The four weeks from September to October are a magical time in Galveston, and belie the idea that South Texas has no seasons. We experienced the hot-tub heat of the summer gulf, where the water lies flat and still in a shallow bowl of sand. We saw the menacing beginnings of gulf storms, and walked through the detritus they left on a grey beach. We wore and discarded sweaters as crisp fall mornings heated the afternoon air. We struggled through air thick with humidity, and, more rarely, dry as a Chinook. We saw, in our month-long stays, full cycles of the moon. If we were lucky, this would mean two full moons: one a deep orange as it rose over the horizon and one colder and paler. Every visit felt like visiting a different place, a different season, a different climate. I wanted to see, literally, how those feelings of difference played out on the ground.
One fall, I reproduced, on one of those Galveston beaches steps from our rented house, what felt like the sacred contours of Darwin’s circle. Like many of my projects involving continuous input—before the pandemic imposed and I accepted the freeing discipline of this blog—this self-inflicted enterprise petered out. For the first two weeks, I drew—and with the imposition of tides redrew—a large circle in the sand. For the duration of these two weeks I inspected it in the morning with coffee and dogs, in the afternoon in my bathing suit without dogs or coffee, and in the evening with dogs again and sometimes with a plastic glass of wine. On the third weekend of this project I simply forgot to look at the beach; after a particularly loathsome traffic jam and some particularly tedious meetings, I tumbled out of the car and into my bathing suit, bypassing what used to be my circle in my haste to immerse myself the Gulf. As I floated, feet pointed towards the horizon as pelicans swooped into water just beyond my toes, I felt my project slipping away and never, really, looked back.
Last week, we returned to Galveston to another rented house, but this time with only my family and only for one long weekend to celebrate my husband’s birthday. I was determined, after writing about Darwin’s circles, to learn to observe at this temptingly small temporal scale. This time, I eschewed the circle, in part so that I did not have to deal with the problem of tides erasing my boundaries. I fixed instead on a strip of beach 5 feet wide—a size I determined by my lying on the beach parallel to the shore, the dogs scuffling anxiously at my head. I say “strip” but I now think of my bounded space as a plot, both for the connection the word offers between my project and the idea of growing, but also as an homage to the Victorianist Gillian Beer, who, in her lovely book, Darwin’s Plots, suggests that the shape of the stories we tell ourselves and that our novels reproduce—of growth and evolution, of competition and change—owe much to Darwin’s own master-narratives of the world. “My” plot began on the gulf side of a small bridge over the dunes across the street from our rented house and technically on someone else’s property. Mostly I crossed the bridge rather than going all the way around to the public access road: although I was a little anxious about trespassing (Texans love their guns!), I wanted to approach my plot as directly as possible. I wanted it to surprise me.
During my three-day visit, I inspected my plot nine times—morning, midday and evening. I took close to 100 cell phone pictures of what I saw, although on the middle morning Scott took the pictures with his birthday camera. I tried to be attentive in my observations both to what we think of as nature and what we think of as human. Although it was always tempting to focus on unspoiled nature, to use my camera (or later my editing function) to bracket human intervention, I was committed to the much messier realities of beach life in Galveston, with its juxtaposition of bird tracks and tire tracks, empty shells and plastic bottles. My colleague Tim Morton—and other ecocritics as well— remind me through their work not to fetishize “nature” as a thing apart, but to see it as something humans have invented, even as they destroy it.
I have chosen a few—but only a few— of these pictures here, with some brief commentary. I can propound not theory, or even pretend that I am passing knowledge on to my children. I feel as if I have written the Origin of Nothing. But what I have done, I think, is to confront my own ignorance about so many things, while bringing my own forms of knowledge to bear on a plot shaped to my own body and my own experiences.
10/22 7:43 a.m. Sunrise.
Stumbling to catch the end of the sunrise, leashing dogs and spilling coffee, the horizon slightly askew. It rights itself as we—four dogs and I—mark a straight path to the beach over the little bridge between houses. I have been self-conscious about bringing the dogs with me ever since the last time we rented a house on Jamaica Beach, when I received a ticket for having them unleashed in the water. The police officer who wrote the ticket accused my two 20-pound dogs of “rocking” her van. I may have been rude to her. A few weeks later she was almost killed in a car chase, when the suspect slammed into what I assume was the same van at 100 miles an hour. Stunningly, she survived and recovered. I saw her a little later that day directing traffic in front of the gas station across the street. As we ran over the bridge, I held tightly to the four leashes.
In past years, as long as I can remember, sunrise at Galveston beaches was an almost solitary time, shared with my own dogs and perhaps a dog-walker or runner or two. Today it is a spectator sport. Five young women crowd on a beach blanket, their cell phones pointed to the east. Two young men talk loudly by the water. I hear music from down the beach. Galveston Island is oriented from northeast to southwest; this means that unlike the barrier Islands of the East coast, this place allows for views of both sunrise and sunset.
19:13-9:14 a.m. Holes.
Straight to the water, shedding my shoes, ignoring the life above the tide mark. Mysterious objects that look like stones from the full height of the observer. Once I stoop, touch, collect, they reveal themselves as wood, pliant as sponge. Mysterious holes that have haunted me me for years; without checking any sources, I told my young children these are the holes/homes of ghost crabs, which it was our pleasure to track to the sea. Online, I find disagreement: some sites invoke those ghost crabs or ghost shrimp, unshelled and unpigmented. Others anticlimactically identify them “sand bubbles” filled with nothing but air. Is it the sand or the crabs breathing beneath my feet?
9:15 a.m, 2:45 p.m. Cars on the Beach.
These large electric vehicles are, like sand bubbles, enigmatic to me, although I see them everywhere. Non-Texans are often shocked that vehicles of all kinds are allowed on the beach as part of the state’s “open access” policy. There are, surprisingly, no pick up trucks on my plot today—later in the afternoon an ice-cream truck will make its way along the beach, avoiding the sots claimed by umbrellas and beach towels. To see “nature” one must avert one’s gaze, reorient to the horizon. Looking back towards the bridge, I see two people eating in their electric beach cart. “Breakfast on the beach,” says the woman in the flower-covered hat, chewing on what looks like a biscuit. “I like your hat,” I say. The man answers, wryly, “thank you.” For the entirety of three-day period no human resists being the subject of a picture. No one asks me why I am taking photos. By the time I was able to take this picture, a group of people—parents and children?—had spilled out of this vehicle, crossing out of my plot to the east where the children played and swam and the adults stooped for shells. They left behind this elaborate cart, and this flag, signifying support for police. This is an African American family, the only black bodies I see on the beach for the duration.
2:50 and 2:59. Blue.
Galveston is infamous for its brown water, for chocolate waves bloated by sand churned up from this shallow alluvial plain. Sometimes—rarely, today, right now—the surf is blue or green. On brown days, you look from the shore to see the green line against the horizon, the place where the water looks like it does in books, the way it did when I grew up with/beside/in the Mediterranean. This is a day for beckoning friends to Galveston, for explaining, in terms and colors others would understand, the attractions of this place. Aquamarine. Teal. Perhaps even turquoise. At the very edge of the surf, the water reverts to brown, but today it is without sediment. “Gin-clear to the beach,” say the fishermen, as they turn from looking for sand-loving catch (catfish, redfish) to fish who like clearer water (speckled trout, Spanish mackerel). I realize that although I almost never fish, having no patience for tangles, after more than 30 years of marriage I am finally beginning to read the Gulf as my fishing husband does. Are there birds over the water looking to feed? Is there underwater cover? Are there breaks in the waves that suggest a break in the bar structure and thus a pathway for fish?
3:48 and 3:43 Bird life.
I am still profoundly ignorant about both tides and birds. There are too many kinds of each. Spring. Neap. Bore. Incoming. Outgoing. Rip. Plover. Sandpiper. Willet. Dowwitcher. I stay long enough this time to know that the tide is going out. I can walk all the way to the second bar; you still have to swim to the third bar, with waves, sandy or clear, full of tiny fish or empty, breaking over you. When the waves are full of fish, you will not feel them; the schools of minnows and tiny mullet part at the touch of your body. Birds—I have largely given up on identifying them by species. For me, bird watching (I would never presume to say birding) is a festival of anthropomorphism: individual birds are shy, alert, cheeky, greedy. I make an exception for roseate spoonbills; with their bright pink bodies and cartoonish faces they are unmistakable even without my glasses. But they live in the salt marshes on the bayside.
5.51 Detritus.
Flotsam and Jetsom. Things the sea leaves when it withdraws. On stormier days I have found as many as 12 pairs of sunglasses, most of them unbroken, some oddly unscratched. These now serve as my surf glasses, to be returned to the sea if I get smacked in the face by a wave. While just beyond the contours of my plot, there are plastic bottles and a plastic gun, “my” strip of land is populated by the living and the dead, whole and in parts. Center: seagulls have fought over and abandoned the creature, alive or dead, who once inhabited that shell.
Many of my pictures inadvertently include my feet, pale as ghost crabs but fleshier. I am always there behind the camera, leaving my own faint prints in the dry sand and my own deeper and more recognizable marks in the wetter sand near the shore. On the bottom? You can see not a foot, but a paw, a domesticated paw, and a blurry snout as my dog Sydney steps into the frame to compete with wilder creatures for a succulent piece of crab.
.
5:54 Domesticated.
Sydney takes center stage. The beach is her place. She fearlessly follows a rubber bone into the surf as waves break over her. She runs with me (now, of course, always leashed) along the shore. On this plot of land she confronts the wind, facing it as it blows her ears back.
5:56 Shapeshifter.
My cell phone camera offers the Harry-Potter-like option of the “live” picture, capturing a tiny moment of motion and turning a still photograph into a loop. On my photo album, this foam is animated, abstract shaped slowly coalescing to form something like a seahorse. At Galveston, as on beaches now all over the world, one confronts the problem of diagnosis: is the brown water, is the foam, “natural” or a sign of pollution? Early anthropologists identified what they felt was a human need to separate the dirty from the clean. On Jamaica. Beach, on the Gulf Coast, on this planet, that separation is increasingly impossible. I do not know enough to read for global warming in the tides and in traces on the sand. For me it is visible in the presence of so many sunbathers and swimmers just before Halloween, in the absence of flounder, and in the feel of the water on my skin: just right for swimming, but so fundamentally wrong.
5:55 Up and Back
The last picture I take this evening is not of the ground but of the sky. Soon, I will be watching the sunset from the porch. The plot will be overtaken by darkness and the ghost crabs will leave their holes—if indeed they are ghost crab holes—to march towards the water. I will return to the beach and turn my cell phone into a flashlight. No more pictures until the sun rises again.