Moraines

I can hear the buoyant salt water pounding against the resilient sands 200 yards to my south. A steady, rhythmic kush and roar. The Pleistocene droppings, stuck a touch too far out to sea for so many houses, are home to pitch pine and an overload of Russian olive trees, with dune grass sticking up from the sand showing in all of the open places in between. The paved road must need to be regraded often, there is nothing below us but sand for meters. I hear mockingbird and red wing blackbird and see small birds with black crowns on their heads. Seagulls loft through the air far above and plovers play tag with the lapping tides. This is valuable sand, sought-after. The oceanfront itself is gated and reserved only for community members. I am a member, temporarily, and I found my way to the edge of the continent this morning. Gulf Stream waters, more tolerable to the flesh than Gulf of Maine currents carry a heavy load of swells slowly up the steep incline of sands, rolling giants, compared to Cape Cod Bay beaches - the waves and the sand. We can excavate and wait, within minutes the sand has been leveled by roiling rising water. Small white crabs live just below the surface in the highest parts of the beach below the high tide line. The crabs are a thriving creature adapted to salty sand and able to avoid death by pounding by digging themselves deeper through the sand. And people, with dogs and children, boogey boards and books, slowly creep out onto the beach, during the hottest part of the day, this seemingly harmless overcast day now burning into a sunlit afternoon. We talk about relationships and celebrate the newly expected member of our extended family of fellow travelers. Out here on this spit of sand left by icy waters some ten millennia ago.

The uglier cohorts of our current Presidential malady showed themselves last night, driving a truck dragging chains across the mock gravesites, white crosses, put up to symbolize the dead already counted in Iraq. Chains hanging off the back of pick up trucks evoke horrible memories; these thugs, the product, no doubt, of W's education system in Texas, want protestors to remember another era when violent torture was a weekend's fun in the racist, bigoted south. Not too long ago, a black man was killed again in this way - for the crime of lust. These thugs were not merely destroying the visible signs of the folly in Iraq, and desecrating the memories of our already dead soldiers, they intended to drive fear into the heart of the protestors, rallying around a mother, whose son paid with his life for W's war. A mother who simply wants an apology. They wanted her to be frightened, to believe they might haul her off as well, to force her to succumb to their cowardice. This is the subtext of W's United States, intolerance, violence, and impetuous anger. This is the response of a culture built on shifting sands too far out to sea to be safe. We live atop the terminal moraine of the Middle Ages, now manifest as a global cult.