There’s nothing like watching dawn break
over Goose Rocks Beach in Maine. The first sign of light on the horizon is as thin as the
white line you see in the crack under a door. Darkness and desolation yield to
the emerging outlines of an ocean teeming with life and alive in its own right,
coming into focus like an old TV only our parents would remember. This morning
the clouds seem to rise out of the ocean toward the sky: fierce, dark and with
the jagged edges of uncombed hair.
The seals are happy to have the place to
themselves. They bob in front of the house, venturing closer than we ever see
in summer.
We took a walk yesterday during the
brief period when the mercury made it to 34 degrees. The sun was out and it was
pleasant so long as the wind was at our backs. Rosemary and I were bundled from head
to toe. Nate frolicked as joyfully as the seals, wearing only a t-shirt
and relishing the sensation.
The wrack line of dried seaweed was filled
with moon snail shells and we collected half a dozen for the bowl that serves
as our dining table’s centerpiece.
The moon snail has always fascinated me,
for the meticulous manner in which it deposits and protects its eggs, and for
the brutality of its predatory behavior, all but invisible above the surface of
the sand. It’s able to wrap its expandable foot around a clam and then
use its radula, a kind of biological Swiss army knife, to drill a hole into the
bivalve’s shell, and insert a tube to suck out and digest the clam. (To see
them in all their grandeur go to @ http://ow.ly/say4B
)
A nature writer named Barbara Hurd who
teaches at the University of Southern Maine writes about the moon snail as an
example of how “beauty recedes when hunger intensifies.” I like this
discovery of a new way of thinking for the New Year: the work of Share Our
Strength as protecting and preserving nature’s beauty. Recalling the
faces of first graders we’ve seen eating breakfast from Baltimore to Los Angeles,
I can’t think of a better way to describe what we do.
