Sunrise
TARA K. SHEPERSKY
YOU WOULDN’T know how to get down here without someone to point out the path. You wouldn’t know there was a public beach at all. From the road, signs are few. An eclectic scatter of homes, distorted wave-speak rumbling from thick rainforest. No words for a waymark.
We emerge from the path just as the moon fades, before sun strikes the far peninsula. The sky pearls, smooth and clear as a clamshell’s lustrous lining.
My partner and I are renting a one-room house just off Vancouver Island’s one-lane West Coast Road. The weather this last week of November has been clear and cold and dry: short days sparkling, long nights soaked in the pallid brilliance of a full-term moon.
Last winter a black bear crossed the road here in front of our car. This morning I’m on the lookout from my feet, my limbic system treading water in an unresolved churn of fear and hope.
The beach is dark when we arrive, a slim crescent of rounded gray stones, not much sand. East, the sun swells behind a headland. I keep glancing back to check if it’s cleared, but I needn’t: the moment is unmissable. In one breath, the rocks repaint themselves in kindled shades of amber, quartz, green, and—yes, still—gray. Just like that, I’m almost warm, bundled in layers of wool and cupped by the sun’s bright fingers. Piles of kelp glitter with sunstruck geometries of frost.
There are no bears on the beach. No humans either, though they’ll come out of the woodwork later, building their bonfires before sunset. Still, we’re surrounded by animal life. Gull squadrons cruise overhead, chattering whitecaps freed from their watery crests. The rising sun flashes on their backward-canted wings. It’s distinctly orange-gold, but I think of the elusive green flash, an emerald-colored atmospheric phenomenon sometimes briefly visible at these liminal hours. I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen the aurora either, or a wolf in the wild, or that still small place in my soul. But in these things I hold the faith of possibility, of attentive watch.
Gulls are not properly “sea gulls,” I learned recently. Plenty of them fish inland waters (and pick inland garbage dumps). But their calls always usher a whisper of waves through my mind. The rhythmic echo off the strait is no whisper this morning, and our gulls are screaming to be heard. Their vocalizations have gathered endless adjectives—“plaintive” is my favorite—associated with loneliness and sadness. To me, they speak of freedom. Which is sad and lonely too, sometimes.
A raft of sea lions is playing or hunting leisurely, just offshore. Flippers and tawny backs glisten as they roll and dive. They’re traveling gradually westward at about our pace. If they notice us they haven’t acknowledged it.
For once, we are the quietest beasts about. The pebbled wash of water speaks at
