Wasting Time

Low tide has come round again, as it always does,
The very bottom of tide-breath exhaled,
A winter solstice of water.
The great wheel turning and returning again
To the same shore, home again.

The tide table shows low tide coming just a little later, twice each day, about an hour later from day to day.  This morning it came round again to 9:40 a.m., so it was a good time to walk on the beach, and it will also be an opportunity to run on the beach tomorrow and Sunday. 

Many of the people who were here for Thanksgiving have left, perhaps only a dozen or so units occupied out of 90.  So it is pleasant to have the walkway and dune-top deck to ourselves (and safer, too) as well as the beach.  It was wide and flat and nearly deserted, even mid-morning.  Martha noticed these unusual markings here and there a few feet from where the surf was breaking.

The mystery was solved in a little while.  This man was waving a metal detector back and forth, and digging when he found something interesting.  What could he have been finding?  I would have asked him, but he had thick earphones on and was listening intently.  

This man was out digging, too, not in the sand but the ocean, standing in the surf in waders, his little red wagonful of supplies by his side – bait and cooler and rods and reels.  Again I marvel at the patience of these surf fishermen, who seem content to spend an entire day standing in the surf.  I wrote this in a poem years ago:

Fishing:
What a glorious
Waste of time.

This huge colony of gulls was even more patient than the fisherman, assembled down by the Picnic Area’s beach and the rock jetty, waiting to see what the tide brings in.

It was a good day for a walk on the beach.  Wasting time, as Otis Redding said:

Now I'm just gon' sit, at the dock of the bay
Watchin' the tide roll away, ooh yeah
Sittin' on the dock of the bay
Wastin' time