Summer has always been the best time to visit the Cape. Any other time the water numbs your toes, and the wind pulls slime out from your sinuses. Half the fine establishments are shuttered half the year. But of course all this attracts all those crazy beauty, warmth, and leisure seeking tourists. So when's the really best time to head down? Never, of course, there's always something wrong.
Last night it was that ridiculous howling wind. New Englanders are used to a storms' deafening chorus of whispers in the trees, the incessant window rattling, and the occasional howl if it caught a corner of the house just right, but this cacophony was something else.
This morning it was the remnants of a fire near the base of the stairs down to the beach. He hallucinated a cloud of flies hovering over some rotting, indiscernible carcass and just kept walking out onto the flats. Eight flats out and he could forget the stench and enjoy the morning. Warm for October, and welcome after last night. Tan islands stretched a little further out into the bay. Squinting into the morning was already giving him a headache. Normally he would keep walking out to the edge of the tide, hesitate, and see how far out he could get before the fear of being overwhelmed by the mass of water the Moon was about to start dragging back to shore.
Instead he turned around to get another look at the festering, carbonized leftovers. No one had ever had a fire around here before as far as he knew. Scattered weeks and weekends throughout the years aren't exactly a good experience to draw on when making assumptions about a place's rhythm, but there had never been any reason to think people did that. Not to mention it was probably illegal. Probably some bored teenagers dragged on an almost off-season budget vacation.
No comments:
Post a Comment