DAWN ON AN EASTERN BEACH by Maria Grech
“The woman sat on the sand at the far end of the long, windswept beach, just above the point where the crashing surf expended the last of its energy. The horizon, barely visible just a few moments ago, was now aglow with a strong pink light that spread through the layers of cloud and was reflected in the sea beneath. Behind her, in the salty marsh, the harsh grating cry of a bird brought back memories of the prints she had seen the night before. Three-toed, deep imprints in the sand, that meandered along the line of brown seaweed edging the high water mark and circled the place at the back of the beach where the nest of a leatherback turtle had recently hatched. She wondered if any of the hatchlings had escaped the predator’s beak to make the tortuous journey over the uneven sand down to the sea. Around the perimeter of the nest faint traces could be seen of several tracks meandering away in the direction of the sea. None, as far as she could tell, had reached the water’s edge. Perhaps the waves had already obliterated them. She hoped that this was so. The odds against the turtles’ survival were high enough and the possibility that every single one might have been picked off by crabs or birds before they made it off the beach was surely loading the already weighted scales too far.
She stood up, slapping the sand from the seat of her damp jeans and rubbing at her legs to get the circulation going again. Then, arms stretched high above her head as if in silent prayer to some goddess of the elements, she filled her lungs with the tangy air. The seaweedy smell reminding her of another morning on another beach, many miles and many, many years away. A beach covered with small, smooth stones that knocked and clattered against each other as they were lifted by the rising tide, bruising bare feet that were numbed and reddened by the icy water. The cold wind had whipped her face until the tears came and the heaving sea was the dull grey-green of the water in some stagnant pool. Above her head gulls wheeled against a leaden sky, filling her ears with their harsh discordant screeching. Shaking herself she banished the memory of gull cries and the hard pebbles of a cold and distant shore, remembering instead the fantastic images from last night’s vigil that had still held her enthralled when she woke at dawn.
In the early hours of the morning, by the pale of the moon’s last quarter, she had seen a giant leatherback ride the waves ashore. She had seen her drag her gleaming black bulk up the sandy beach to dig a nest and fill it with dozens of chalk-white eggs. When she was finished, she covered them over, carefully pattering and smoothing the sand back in place. Then, moving around in ever widening circles, she camouflaged the next site by scattering the surface sand far and wide with sweeping movements of her large flippers. After making her way slowly back down the beach, she lay exhausted at the water’s edge waiting motionless, like a smooth black rock, until a stronger wave than the rest lifted her bodily and dragged her back with it into the surf. The small group of watchers remained until her angular head was no more than a dark speck moving surely and steadily further and further out from shore. Then they had returned to their tents and the makeshift beds in the back of the pick-up, to sleep away the few hours that were left. The woman had remained on the beach, promising to rouse them should another turtle come up to lay, but her only companions had been the pale yellow ghost crabs who scuttled past her feet to disappear down their burrows in a flurry of sand.
In the pale dawn light, the turtle’s nesting place at the back of the beach was hard to see, but the two tracks made by the leviathan as she heaved her land clumsy body up and back, were as clear and wide as the marks of a tractor. The woman picked up a palm frond and tried vainly to brush them away, but she soon realized the futility of her task. Throwing the makeshift broom away she moved down toward the line of tangled weed at the water’s edge, hoping the sea would do a better job. Her bare feet washed by the foaming waves, she paddled back along the shore in toward the camp where she could see the others already preparing to depart. The bright pink of the early morning had settled down to a pearly grey and there was a line of heavy cloud moving in from the northeast. She unzipped the jacket that had kept her warm during the night and pushed the salty, tangled hair from her eyes. In the water she saw a flash of purple and stopped to look closer thinking that it might have been the sail of the beautiful but deadly man-o-war. For a while it disappeared from sight, but then it was suddenly swept back, close to her feet by an incoming wave and carried past her to be dropped with a splattering of foam onto the dank seaweed beyond.
It was a purple sea snail, eater of jellyfish although not of the man-o-war variety. Blind, hermaphrodite wanderer of the Atlantic, it roamed the surface of the ocean on its bubble raft of self-fertilized eggs, seldom coming ashore unless blown there by vagrant winds. The float which had carried it for so long over so many miles of turbulent sea was now deflated, like a scrap of purple plastic waste. But the sea snail, still attached to it, glistened in the morning light, as if its fragile, purple shell was studded with diamonds. Gently, the woman picked it up, turning it in her hand to wonder at the beauty of its shape and colour, ranging from deepest violet on the inner whorls to palest lilac at its outer rim. Dropping it carefully into the pocket of her jacket she walked on.
This was not a beach for shells. From a pile of seaweed and shipboard garbage she retrieved a large brown feather and the tiny hand of a discarded doll. But, apart from the pearly gleam of an occasional worm shell she saw nothing else. Nearing the place where the turtle watchers had camped for the night, she felt around in her pocket for the purple sea snail so that she might bring it out to admire its beauty once again. But the fragile shell that had withstood the buffeting of waves far out at sea, and the driving force of wind and surf that had flung it onto the sandy shore, shattered at her touch. When she opened her hand it held nothing but a scatter of purple fragments.”
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