We’re really not in Rehoboth anymore.
I’m on a boardwalk near Pier House, and the ocean beyond the ropes and poles is aquavelva.
The sky, divided from it by a thin line, is a weaker, more conventional, blue. Sky blue.
Pelicans and gulls rest on pilings. The pilings are graywhite against the aquavelva.
“Try to get it away from the pelicans and near the barracuda.”
A guy fishing off the pier gives advice to another guy who, having caught a small fish, drags it back and forth in the water in hopes of catching a barracuda with it.
“Fastest fish in the water,” the first guy says to me. “Had a big mackerel the other day and I’m reeling it in and here comes a barracuda and just grabs it.”
But I’m trying to get across the beaming fantasy, the crayola storyboard, of UD‘s current setting. Such a cotton candy concoction. Nature can’t be serious.
The cotton is the clouds, stretched out and using just enough of the sky to be picturesque. Seaplanes buzz beneath them.
“The gloss the sun puts on the surroundings – the triumph of life, so to speak, the flourishing of everything makes me despair.” This is Saul Bellow’s narrator in Ravelstein, describing a peak moment in Paris in June. “I’ll never be able to keep up with all the massed hours of life-triumphant.”
You feel that about the people around you along the water in Key West. There’s an unhappy assurance of their inability to keep up.