“Santa Cruz Shore”

“In the flats, the water was uniformly shallow and the foam residue of the waves extended for hundreds of yards, like suds in the bottom of a huge drained bath tub. Lanes formed behind the waves in this area, straight long-line streamers stretching out behind them as they broke towards shore. Auburn kelp fronds, swept by the movement of the rushing waters, swung from side to side like locks of drowned sea goddesses chained to the sandy bottom. As waves first formed, they were solid-seeming and nickel green. As they began to peak in intensity and prepared to break, frothy spume formed at their tops. Once they burst in full force toward their imminent demise, they showed dull-green swaths, almost opaline but more saturated in intensity and duller, then furious, racing gyrations of whipped, milky essence, then even spreads of verdigris, and finally the wide-flung ejaculation of aerated spittle spun in counter- and cross-currents, spreading out as it moved up the beach, pulling back together down toward the sea and drifting sideways into the rotting kelp, before being sucked into non-existence, down into the thirsty sands where the fates of both great and small waves are stored.”