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"Tell me about it."
Louise sat next to me just at the edge of the shoreline, where the sand takes a big dip, and gestures sharply down to the oncoming rush of waves, unfettered, and unimpeded by landlocked masses or sandbars. She had slipped off her flip flops, the ones with the lil flower on each strap, and had begun to dig her toes into the white, wet sand as she briefly coughed and passed the blunt in my direction. I plucked it from her manicured hands and put it between my lips to take a pull.
"Well, what you wanna know?"
"Well, you always talk about your beach. I wanna know about it."
"You don't got beaches in Scotland."
"Yeah, I live in Glasgow. There's no beaches in Glasgow. "
"Aight, no doubt."
"I took another pull and passed it back in her direction. She spit on her index finger and stopped the side of the el from canoeing.
"What's it like?"
I looked down at the sand, using my fingers as a sieve to find some, if any, thin rocks to chuck across the water. I came across one; a smooth, yellow tinged rock. I stood up, squared my stance, and hurled the stone in the direction of the oncoming tide. The stone struck the top of the wake of some previous large wave, splashing briefly yet sharply at the exact moment when the wave and wake created a smooth liquid surface at complete equilibrium with one another, just until the stone interuppted an otherwise peaceful co-existence. With continued high velocity, it leaped up again and flew inches above an oncoming wave, striking its backside as if to slap its ass in good sportsmanlike manner, as it continued its joyride for 8 more glorious stops along the Atlantic waters, until it met the water and joined it for one final time, slowly dropping to the dark sandy bottom ten feet below.
"There's rocks better than that one everywhere on my beach."
I swiped the sand off my hands, and retreated to the side of Louise, where she sat in a transfixed gaze as she held the blunt in her fingers, awaiting my return. I took it from her hand once again, and held it to my lips, inhaled, and pulled back.
"Slate, granite, soapstone, alabaster, clay, concrete, glass, coal."
She hicupped, and drew her hand in a fist towards her mouth to hold back and threaten another oncoming hiccup from disturbing her sentance.
"Those aren't all rocks."
I took a pull, and passed it back. She waved me off, so I just held to blunt in my hand as I stared at the smoke coming off the end of it as I moistened my finger tips and repaired any tears or damage that our current cipher had caused to Louise's first masterpiece that had just thrity minutes before been a cinnamon flavored White Owl and some of the finest haze I had ever had the pleasure to inhaled and scorch the insides of my lungs with.
"I know. I mean, any other place, if you had that collection of crap sitting around, it's probably loose pavement or the artifacts of a bad urban accident. But, the sand changes them.
"You still want this? Imma clip it."
Louise nodded, and I extinguished the red tip, and put the remains inside my pack of Newports. I then picked up a handful of wet sand, and squeezed it between my fingers.
"See, the shore around the beach, it borders the Lower New York Harbor. Sandy Hook and Brooklyn feed the ocean into the mouth of the harbour, while also returning the Hudson River back into the ocean. There's crap coming from Albany downward, from the East River, from Jersey, and the Kill van Kull, and shit coming Brooklyn and Long Island. Alot of that stuf disintergrates, or washes up soon enough; floatsam is good like that; and, being in the prime location that Staten Island is in, we get everything from everywhere."
"Anyway, alot of Rocks and bricks and pieces of concrete piers, they all fall off or find their way somehow into the ocean, The currents force them around, as long as their are light enough to be lifted, and tossed around. Now, they might move out deeper into the ocean, just to fall so deep below that no water moves with enough force to get them anywhere. But, some of them creep along the sand on the bottom, in the direction of the island. The sand up there ain't like this Wildwood sand; I mean, I'm sure that a small percentage of the sand is made up of sand like this, but, most of the sand, it's brown, and it's big. "
"Big?"
"Yeah, I mean, like, see this?"
I pick up a handful of dry sand, and let it slip through my fingers.
"See how light this is? It's almost like powder here."
"Ok."
I swipe my hands clean.
"Ok, our sand it bigger than this. The actual pieces of sand themselves. Each piece is heavy, and sharper, with larger facets, and they're all mixed in with microscopic pieces of coal, seashells, and dirt."
"Dirt?"
"Yeah. Dirt's coming from storm run-off, new landfill, new construction. Earth is always being disturbed somewhere in New York City, and if so, there's always a way for that dirt to find its way to the shore.
"But, it's that brown tinge of the sand that makes it so, I dunno, weird, to anyone else who didn't grow up with this New York City sand. I mean, just about every other place along the Atlantic, you don't have brown, dirty looking sand."
I had lit up a cigarette,which I shared with Louise, as she leaned her head against my shoulder.
"So, why is it brown."
"I dunno, really. Perhaps the Pre-Cretaceous darker strata hasn't acquired the upper Cretaceous rock of latter millenii, or the pollution of the last two centuries of the Industrial era in the United States has left our sands a scarred, worn, and beaten mess of tiny pieces of sillica."
I took a puff from the cigarette.
"So what of the stones?"
I exhaled.
"Well, that's the thing. Like, this sand, it's been having to deal with whatever the water brings in, ever since Long Island, and Jersey decided to start moving apart as this fissue in the northern land is feeding glacial flow right in between the two of them. This sand's probably seen so much, well, not seen, but, been struck, or rested upon, by so many different fragments of things the planet has churned out over the past billion years or so, and for all that time, the sand's brushing over these things, these rocks, taking bits and pieces of them as they strike upon their surface; it's like the sand wants to remember everything that as ever crossed its path, so, the sand evolved to take these tiny nibbles out of everything. "
I take one last pull from the cigarette, and stomp the butt out on the sand.
"So, what you do is, you walk down from my house, I'm like on this tiny side street, that's like perpendicular to the shore, you walk down, and you're looking right into the face of this huge 38 acre forest. Well, not even a forest, more of an overgrowth. Maple trees have overtaken the once-cedar grove beach park, rooting up around the remains of all these old foundations and asphalt paths. It takes about 10 years or so of total neglect for trees to start growing within the cracks of the asphalt formed by the huge roots coming from all the older trees. And when the younger trees finally take root, they strangle the roots of all the older trees and overtake them in height, starving them of light, until, when the winter storms come, the old tree falls over, its roots been lifted up out of the ground by all the new younger trees coming from years of generations after their time when they sat alone in the yards of vactioners, they fall over, and finally die. They rot quickly, and feed the young."
At this point, I had lit another cigarette, but Louise had shot up from my shoulder, and began to look at me with a sneer of digust in my general direction.
"That's fucking revolting."
I motion my hand down in a calm and soothing gesture.
"Baby, bitch please. This is just ground that I must cover to make the tale all that more impressive and intruiging for you. Just let me do my magic, baby girl.
"The trees don't grow, however, in any place where paths are still used, or traversed, riden upon, whatever. In these places, sunlight gets down far enough to feed the field grass and ivy that grows uncontrolled amongst the ragweed that has taken over most of the under developed property. And, it all just stops once it sense that the ground is too hard to grow anything, and where any new growth gets stomped down immediatly. So, just when it's about this time, early summer, when it's realy wet, and everything is green and growing vividly; they form these wals, that almost looked as those they had been pruned by some old bastard of a woman who had nothing better to do but prune the fucking preferred smoking location of the 13-31 year old pot smoking demographic. Anyway, I'm getting off track here. What I'm saying is, the plants, the life that remains, while it's taken over most of the forest, and taken advantage of what the city decided it could not use, they still allow someone inside, and guide their way towards the heart of my neighborhood. The beach.
Unfortunatly, just as you reach the threshold of the woods, when the ragweed turns to beach grass and the dirt turns to sand, there sits this huge dune, built of the brown sand and the large floatsam, which were pieces of creosol soaked wooden logs, still bolted together, but that had sheared off of various coastal docks, bulkheads, and piers around North Jersey and Brooklyn; of course. To protect the rest of the neighborhood from flooding, this was what the city decided to do, very cheap, and probably at a much high cost than the work provided. Anyway, so, you have to climb this dune, this steep wall of sand, about twenty feet above the forest floor, and the beach itself. You reached the top, and must make sure to hold your footing square along the top, where the beach sand has been able to maintain a level surface for one to travel upon, if one so desried. In the winter, when everything is covered in snow, it's truely a sight to see, sledding down along the snow on the dunes, towards the icy water ten to fifteen feet away. "
Louise, still with an attentive ear, had finally realized that I wasn't quite done wth my tale just yet, so she had conjured up another white owl and had begun to roll up the rest of the haze.
"In the summer, the shores just sparkle. Thousands upon thousands of these tiny pebble and stones sit in these massive piles upon the shore. Any you go down towards them and bend down to see what is in there. Amongst the broken mussel and clam shellsand the corpses of tiny rotting crabs, well, it's what I consider to be one of the most beautiful occurances within realm of planet Earth."
She motions to use my lighter, which I remove from my shirt pocket and hand to her.
"What is it?"
"It's brick, it's coal, it's granite, it's glass, it's marble, it's anything that's hard enough to withstand the constant nibbling of the local sands, light enough to push along the currents, and yet so conscious of its own indviduality that, in the end, it had given up to the sand every other piece of itself that gave it superflourous definition. A hardened piece of molten sand, a piece of glass, falls apart in Brooklyn, and refuse is tossed into the river. And, you know, all a glass really wants to be is just be a rock, or to be a stone. It doesn't mind being anything, really, but ultimately, a glass is a stone; we've made sand into a stone. The jagged brown sand takes that piece of glass, the bottom of a clear soda bottle, and kicks it around the harbour and ocean floor for decades, just like any other stone or beach pebble; and it's the water and the jagged brown sand around my beach that gets to take a piece of glass and make it a stone. A perfect stone. Every stone in the pile is worn smooth, and reflects the light even when the water is not rushing upon it. To the sand, it doesn't matter what it meets, strikes, and nibbles out of. The sand has just been around so long, that, it's just unwilling stop trying to remember every little thing that drifts on by."
"Is that why you think it's brown?"
I took the blunt from her fingertips, and held it to my lips.
"Nah, I just think it's because all the fucking spics and Mexicans shit on the beaches when they come on the weekends."
Edited By The Jays on 1116922695
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