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‘Mango Moon’ | Atlantic Ocean moon-rise. | Atlantic Beach, North Carolina | September2024 | theSTORYistheTHING.com photo
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
~ WENDELL BERRY, from The Peace of Wild Things And Other Poems (Penguin, 2018)
1. Watery Abstractions
by douglas john imbrogno | thestoryisthething.com | september16.2024
‘FACE-OFF’ | The primordial ocean confronts the upstart developments of the humanoids, who a short while ago began building countless rectangular habitations along its shore, obscuring the night. | Atlantic Beach, North Carolina | september2024 | theSTORYistheTHING.com photo
The ocean is never still, so coming into its presence is an auditory encounter, as well as a vast visual one. Late one recent night, the Atlantic beach empty but for a fellow with a headlamp down by the tidal wash, I rested in its grace, the tide’s whoosh and companionable whitecaps a soundscape to a few days’ vacation for my wife and me.
Do I find myself as free as Wendell Berry, with his wood drake and heron consorts? My restless thoughts turn addictively to the national election four fortnights away. I am filled with a sprawling fear of how my life and my children’s lives may turn out. The ever surging and withdrawing ocean, the day-blind stars sprinkled around a slice of mango-colored moon, do break the spell, that incantatory over-thinking of an American era when every other notice on the din-filled media timeline seems to begin with ‘BREAKING NEWS.’
‘MASTER OF ALL TIDES’ | The Moon roils the Atlantic, the waves beckoned by its gravitational attraction ever falling back to sand and sea. | Atlantic Beach, North Carolina | september2024 | theSTORYistheTHING.com photo
The exceptional U2 song “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” became such a worldwide hit, and then a classic rock anthem, because the song’s refrain and the anguished pleading in Bono’s soaring vocals spoke to an aspect of every human life. American Songwriter interprets the tune as rock gospel-ish yearning for connection with the ineffable divine, struggling to maintain faith when the singer finds himself ‘cold as a stone …’
So, yeah — me, too. And the rest of us, too. What we’re looking for? No, still haven’t found it. Even after writing, producing and publishing maybe 10,000 stories, songs, videos, poems and assorted screeds in my time, this post being yet another, I feel that dogged, urgent push to keep at it because I am not quite there, yet. I’m also teased, tickled, and taunted by the middle-of-the-night notion that maybe there’s no there there.
Here, then, is a bit of ‘right here, right now‘ in my life.
‘SEA SEARCH’ | Lighting up the ocean surf, a man searches for something. | Atlantic Beach, North Carolina | September2024 | theSTORYistheTHING.com photo
But, wait. What’s that guy with the headlamp strapped around his noggin doing down at the tide line? A bone-colored triangle of illumination sweeps the boisterous incoming tide. Now, he’s pointing the cone of light at the dark-brown sand. He bends at the knees, digging into its thick wetness. Some minutes later, the man — who has a truly jumbo, bare protruding belly overflowing his swim trunks — enters the darkness of the gazebo where I have been shooting long-exposure smartphone shots of the Atlantic. Of the moon. Of the stars. Of him.
The man drops something onto the wooden bench where I sit. It clatters to a stop. In the yellow light cast by my phone, I examine the tan and orange forearm and pincers of a small crab, long as a pencil, minus the rest of its body. He grunts in what I take to be some expression of triumph or achievement. “Nice,” I say, not having a ready response queued up for the presentation of crustacean parts from a stranger after midnight. He gathers up the forearm — I hope he has found what he was looking for and hasn’t just displayed the spoils of an after-dark crab slaughter — and leaves me to the ocean’s rustle and purr.
2. The Black-and-White of It
NOTE: CLICK ARROWS TO ADVANCE SLIDE SHOW | ‘SURF STROLL’ | Atlantic Beach, North Carolina | September2024 | theSTORYistheTHING.com photo
“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?”
~ Dr. Seuss
I suppose you cannot help it when reunited with the sea, especially when you and it have been parted for the better part of a decade. You stroll and ponder, listen and muse. It’s so much bigger and longer-lasting than our puny spate of years, stretching from my wet toes to some unseen beyond on the other side of the pelican-traced horizon. What’s over there? I imagine the cathedral-tall cliffs of the craggy, Druid-haunted Aran Islands off the western Irish coast. Or the Normandy beaches of France where so many lives were cast down in early June of 1942, by son-and-father soldiers, grunts to captains, from America, Canada, the United Kingdom and other lands. Not to mention the desperate, soon-to-die German defenders, the last gasp of the Third Reich.
Or seen the other way ’round, how many pre-Columbian Indian peoples looked out upon the toiling Atlantic for untold, uninterrupted ages, confident this bounteous continent was their interconnected, interwoven motherland in perpetuity? Did the Great Spirit mumble darkly in their dreams as the tall sails began to appear from the East, one after the other, decade after century? Change — great, unfathomable change — is coming with these white sails and the white people who pilot them, darker skinned ones chained cruelly in the holds of other ships, come to work the terrible, magnificent transformation to be.
3. At the Sea’s Side
‘WATER WAYS’ | My longtime, ocean-going partner peers out upon a long pier out into the ocean. | Atlantic Beach, North Carolina | September2024 | theSTORYistheTHING.com photo
My wife Laurie and I spent many a summer week seaside through the years of our kids growing up. We had friends who lived within a short walk or drive of the Atlantic. The place names are iconic in our family history: Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, Nag’s Head, Duck, Manteo. We body surfed, tossed and tumbled like corks, eating underwater sand and coming up gasping when the ride went awry. Celebrated the one-out-of-ten tries when we made it home to shore on the back of a wave-ridden boogie-board, thrilled to our bones and glad we’d not broken any. I recall one hired session of son-and-cousin surfing instruction which didn’t take. Surfing seems like Skull-and-Bones to the itinerant, occasional ocean-goer: a secret fraternity.
Our friends were married at a then-remote beach house in Whalehead. My wife and I lingered for days after their lovely surf-washed bethrothal. It’s one of those cherished memories we store away in a special box where we keep the coolest seaside shells we kick up. An unobligated time of hanging out, fresh seafood, red wine and homemade margaritas, hanging out. More seafood. Lying in bed at night, slipping into sleep with the aged ocean whispering stories to us through the window in a language we feel deeply, even if we don’t know the words.
4. An Oceanic Gallery
Words can convey only so much, and the hour grows late here upon my porch in the land-locked Appalachian hills. My cigar has burned down to a stogie stump, and I must soon feed the cats who’ll gallop across the living room, their body-clocks ringing with — ‘Hallelujah!’ — news of their approaching dinner. Below, then, are some last looks over my shoulder at the sea, where I hope to be, again and again, before I pass over that far horizon one last time.
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Thanks to Jeff Seager for his editing mojo and insights on this piece.
P.S.
Now, that you’ve accompanied me to the ocean and back in word and image, I petition you to return to the ‘BREAKING NEWS‘ and free subscribe to my weekly, hypershort video Election2024 series, ‘NotesBeforeYouVote’. Nothing less than the future of this dream we call ‘America’ is at stake on Nov. 5, 2024. The series is not meant to preach to the choir of Harris-Walz voters. It goes out to those who haven’t yet decided or are thinking of voting Third Party (thus likely assisting a Trump Victory). And to friends, family, and acquaintances locked into Trump-supporting families or communities, who cannot stomach his views and persona and may feel freer to vote their conscience in the voting booth. Free subscribe at ‘NotesBeforeYouVote.com‘ or click the image below.
