… a few hours ago.

…UD went to Rehoboth Beach and watched the city replenish the beach. Now, from an apartment in Germantown, Maryland, she watches images of that just-dredged beach overwhelmed by waves, and she wonders if all that money was wasted.

So many of the Sandy images we’re seeing – of the Chesapeake Bay, Rehoboth Beach, Ocean City – show places flooded, if you will, with memories for old UD. Her father graduated from Ocean City High School. He spent summers working at his family’s businesses along the beach. Later, he bought a house on the Chesapeake, and UD went out fishing with him. Most of UD‘s summers for the last twenty years have taken place in Rehoboth Beach (see this blog’s category, Snapshots from Rehoboth). All of those boarded-up shops with their defiant messages to Sandy scrawled on window boards — she knows those shops, and the people who own them.

The storm was quiet here – some wind, some sound from the trees. UD’s Garrett Park house had a little basement flooding. No treefalls.

Sunrise blogging begins…

… now, with a pink horizonal swelling that tells me and the person in a folding chair on the beach that the thing is about to pop. I’m watching, jammied, on the balcony.

The burning circle rises – fast – over the pewter sea. A container ship glides across the path the sun’s making on the water.

All the way up. Took less than a minute.

There’s the usual cheering section: Gulls, crows, joggers, policemen in light blue shorts. Praying section? I figure the guy on the beach is at the very least meditating…

Me? I’m thinking I will never really believe the universe of which the burning circle is apparently a teeny teeny teeny teeny part… Ever since I was eight everybody’s been showing me diagrams of the solar system, and I don’t really believe that either… Everybody’s been impressing on me the awesome massive violence out there while giving this particular place a pathetic spin… And as to spin: I’ve never really been able to feel the rotational breeze, as it were, on my face… If you know what I mean.

I mean, as Buck Mulligan puts it in Ulysses:

When I makes tea I makes tea… And when I makes water I makes water …

Squinting my brain to see The First Three Minutes is one thing; leaning my arms on a railing and feeling the sufficiency of sun earth and moon is another. Gimme that old time cosmology. It’s good enough for me.

I’ve seen it year after year, this Atlantic beach, and maybe for various reasons I’m especially grateful this summer to be here, but I can’t recall a time, in the last four decades, when it’s been so beautiful. The clear mild air sharpens the green horizon. Also extremely precise are the white clouds gathered above the green line. Above the clouds there’s nothing but opal sky and contrails from jets out of Dover.

The deep blue sky clashes with the deep green water (darker and lighter green as the clouds drift), and you think of the palette of nature, so pleasing to us here on the sand.

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The beach is a hospital ward. We lie under blue umbrellas that lean on their sides against the wind. This is the quiet floor. We watch the tidal ribbon wash toward us and we say nothing. The ocean makes us mute. The sun, readying itself for the transit of Venus, stuns us. We feel its heat on our arms, our faces. It makes our eyes heavy.

The sleeping, on and off, of the quiet room. We wake up stunned again into submission. Human voices wake us and we drown.

What can it mean that it’s this beautiful, and that when it tips over into this beautiful all we can do is fall asleep again?

It’s too much for us, the shadows on the field of water as the clouds go overhead. Elemental earth with umbrellas at the edges. How can that be? What are we, if not lovers of the earth – so full of love we can’t bear it? Once in the midst of our passion, we shut our eyes and let the atmosphere – air, sky, water and sand – drug us. Nature’s palliative palette.

Shall we gather at the river? The beautiful, the beautiful river. But that assembly prays, praises, implores; here we assemble to disassemble, to break apart under the sun into clouds that blacken the dreaming mind. Blacken, deepen… Anyway, discolor each blue serene with the mind’s own shades.

Let us all nod off. Let part of the beauty of this scene be the sight of our bedmates’ eyes in rapid dream movement. The sight of their bodies circled by gulls.

… for the weekend. Blogging continues
as she watches dredgers replenish the beach.

Her current view:

UD‘s friend Tammy took
these pictures at the
boardwalk dog parade.

And big crowds.

The bright yellow building in the distance is the Hotel Rehoboth. The walk from there to the Pig and Fish restaurant was a real umbrella-crusher.

The soup is butternut crab bisque with cinnamon. Sounds hideous. Tasted great.

… but it’s the wind that gives the beach that typhoon feel. UD‘s at Rehoboth, drying out at the Hotel Rehoboth and pondering her next move. Tomorrow, everyone at the front desk assures her, will be “gorgeous,” and she’s got a great view of the parade if the parade happens.

Off to lunch.

… are preparing for snow. But UD, as is her tradition, now goes to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, to celebrate Halloween. (Today will be rainy, tomorrow sunny.)

With her she will take her laptop (I think; therefore, I blog.), as well as mucho broody thoughts about her late friend David and his late sister, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose writings on depression and Buddhism I find moving and thought-provoking. I will try to write about some of this.

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A LIGHT STORM OVER THE OCEAN

A light storm over the ocean!
As if day were trying to wedge itself back in.
Flashes over clouds are like flashes over mountains.

After days of heat, a hard cold wind!
And the sheeting of clouds without rain.
A light storm over the ocean.

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UD leaves today for her annual Rehoboth Beach vacation. (Haven’t read the book I just linked to. Good title.) Blogging, of course, continues as ever.

Here are two current snapshots from Rehoboth:

Yesterday, tons of headless fish washed ashore. (HEADLESS FISH ON TOPLESS BEACH?) This story reminded me of my brief swim, many years ago, in the Baltic waters off Gdansk. Quite a few dead fish there too.

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Lingo’s Market, a Rehoboth landmark where the summer people shop for groceries, is being fought over by the son and daughter of the woman who for many years (she just died, in her nineties) owned and operated it.

The woman seems not to have liked her son. This is from her will:

I make no provisions in this will for my son Archie, except the same amount of love that he showed me after he started living with his French girlfriend, because he has been well provided for. This is because, Archie, you came to me and said, ‘Mother, let me show you how to save money by incorporating Lingo’s Market.’ You incorporated it as ‘Archie Lingo’s Market.’ I trusted you my son, but you used me for [your] own money grubbing ways.

Ooh la la.

… to inaugurate my new leather writing book: The roof of the Boardwalk Plaza Hotel. It’s a warm windy afternoon, just after the Pet Parade.

I left the hot tub up here to go down to the boardwalk and watch the parade (Elvis sheepdogs with black wigs and silver capes; dachshunds as frankfurters). Now I’m back on the roof, sitting with my sister as we rock ourselves into a stupor on white chairs.

British and American flags flap away on either side of us, and, on the ocean’s horizon, white container ships float. There are gulls, contrails, and white clouds in a pale blue sky.

All of which makes me nostalgic for my sabbatical year (six months, really; the rest was Key West when I couldn’t take the cold anymore) next door to this hotel, in Edgewater House.

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Strange combination of influences, this Halloween at the beach. The constantly lulling effect of the water, wind, and sun is the main thing. You feel as though you’re hovering well above the business of being mortal, skipping over the hard parts… At night there’s the infinity of the sky over the waves, and you feel part of that too… So in the hot tub I found myself singing Time Passes Slowly Up Here in the Mountains, its long calm lines covering the same all the time in the world territory.

But these are the Days of the Dead, and, like something out of Fellini, skeletons and grim reapers cavort on the beach. Halloween Week on our room’s tv features Beetle Juice (UD had never seen it!) and episode after episode of House, which takes you deeply into our decrepitude, and, in the character of its hero, asks in each segment whether life is worth living.

Dune grass, wooden fencing, horses.

… said UD as she returned to her rented beach chair yesterday afternoon. She’d been away from it for two hours, first cooling down in her building’s nearby pool, then having lunch with her sister, and she’d worried that someone might have snatched the chair.

Or, far worse, someone might have lifted the big black hardback she’d set on its seat: Hitch-22, the memoirs of Christopher Hitchens.

But no, everything was here, including the book, its yellow spine blazing away in the sunlight as a high tide nipped its heels.

Having carried a headful of Hitchens to lunch, she’d burbled to her sister (who would have preferred to discuss Morrissey) about his virtues… “Dismal. Why don’t Americans much use that word? Hitchens uses it all the time, and it’s a great word… Recondite. An absurd word! I don’t use it because it sounds pretentious. But he uses it and it’s fine… Grog-blossom!

I once had a drink with an Express veteran, his face richly veined and seamed with grog-blossom…

Phrases too: One cannot be just a little bit heretical… And endless hilarious invective which always feels accurate — unlike Gore Vidal’s, which is also hilarious but feels vindictive…”

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I didn’t go into the deeper affinities I feel reading a man who adores Auden and Larkin (“I think that if I take, say, my two favorite English poets,” he said in an interview a couple of days ago, “the ones I most often recur to, are Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden. Both of them have a great understanding of tragedy, and a keen feeling of, you know, in some ways, the absurdity of the human condition. But it’s also from the absurdity that they draw things that are quite mordantly funny as well. I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.”) and quotes Cesare Pavese…

Actually there’s a striking and immediate affinity there, because my first week on the beach I’d reread A. Alvarez’s book about suicide, The Savage God… Beach reading à la UD… and Hitchens not only begins his narrative talking about that book (his mother killed herself); he even pulls some of its quotations from Pavese (“No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.”). If you’ve read my latest Inside Higher Ed post about burqas, you know that I begin with a Pavese quotation pulled from last Saturday’s Alvarez reading. (“Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.”)

UD and Christopher Hitchens: Two literary-minded children of suicides.

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To be sure there are more obvious things to interest me in Hitch-22 — people we know in common, like Peter Galbraith, praised on page 300; a love of obscene limericks; a love of Dylan and Peter Paul and Mary and the Mamas and the Papas; Jewishness; a slightly louche interest in the outer edges (“I think I wish I had not been introduced so early to the connection between obscure sexual excitement and the infliction – or the reception -of pain.”) — but what rivets UD is this odd life-and-literature affinity.

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Well, let’s bring it all together. It’s far from my favorite Larkin poem (I think the last line is weak), but anyway.

To the Sea

The rocks, the rusting soup-tins, till the first
Few families start the trek back to the cars.
The white steamer has gone. Like breathed-on glass
The sunlight has turned milky. If the worst
Of flawless weather is our falling short,
It may be that through habit these do best,
Coming to the water clumsily undressed
Yearly; teaching their children by a sort
Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.