Jetsam

Tide rises. A long swell approaching land lifts the kelp forests and comes lightly to shore. The breadth of sky-reflecting water and the wind’s last energy hide the sea-world from our own. Piece by piece, fragments of each fall or rise and, on the rippled surface, drift to rock and stone beaches, to pebble-shallows and bright pools of mermaid’s hair.

In the sluggish waves today, shuttering beams liberated from another shoreline by yesterday’s flood tide now return, low in the water, salt-caked and soaking, drowning slowly. The carcase of a seal, shot dead, propeller-scarred, floats its bloated way in to wallow among mottled boulders. Discarded remnants of the turning tide wash up, a fish-crate, flecks of foam, a net, rope-tangles, half-submerged in the eddies.

In the hour of slack water, living fish scatter in shoals. Weed-fragments, shell-shards and egg-cases shift in the undertow, shift and return. Wisps of plastic and shattered canisters join the seaweed fronds’ idle dance as the tide begins to ebb beneath them.

Farther up the beach, sand reverts to pebble, to graded stones in storm-surge mounds and the spoil of a hundred seasons. Grey, weathered timber stripped from the decks of cargo-boats, booms and stanchions, the wreck of pipe work, metal tanks, litter the long beach curve. In the distance, land and sea merge in the haze of a slow front’s rain.

And where the rocks of the headland lean down to the water’s edge, pools shelter tiny creatures. The sea gives back our useless overboard things for small lives to crawl inside. All the worn-out leavings of our kind, all the dead and dying creatures torn in our wakes, fetch up on this beach or that; to be ground down, like stone to glass, like mountain to seabed sand. Life to bones, to dust and bedrock; time wears out everything and beaches it, brings it to rest. Or back to life. Time’s choosing, not ours.

© BH 2012

---

This was published in The Wee Seashore Book -Book Two. It followed Flotsam.

Lagan and Derelict continued the theme, becoming more and more remote from the shore, in distance and in time.

For your information, Lagan refers to what is lost at sea but still capable of being recovered. Derelict is that which is beyond salvage. Jetsam is that which is thrown into the sea and Flotsam the floating remains of circumstance, of wreck and ruin. All consigned, I suppose, to the deep.