The Link

 

My head is filled with the deafening roar of shingle being dragged back’n’forth, helpless and willing, in the raging surf slapping and sliding towards my feet. And as the pull of the deep contracts, I could sink into the glistening and dazzling sparkles of the thousand shiny black and opal agates. 

But while I’m transfixed on the rolling and crashing, Buster has locked his eyes onto something moving, a dark shadow lurching through the waves, breaking the surface of the water only some thirty feet away. Smooth and proud and powerful. 

It disappears and we are left searching the white, greens and turquoise blues of the waves. Buster is barking, noiseless in an even louder chorus of chattering shingle, his eyes have seen it before mine. And there it is. A sheen of grey flashes in the sunlight and then a playful flip of a darker tell-tale tail. A humpback whale.

He’s inviting us, teasing us and we are such easy prey. I follow Buster and break into a run along the water’s edge. Buster is bouncing, springing and leaping, diving through the air. He’s barking and I’m laughing but we are mute in the din of the crashing waves. We are united in our excitement as we chase the grey rhythm, the silver grey enigma undulating through the dark water.

100 yards along the beach I’m breathless and Buster stops, staring hard into the waves, his body stiff and statuesque with anticipation. I join him. Our giant has gone into hiding. Our giant has vanished. The search widens, looking far out to the left, to the right, but there’s only a gull riding the breeze and the spray from the waves that are too eager and break too soon.

Then he erupts. Only twenty or thirty feet from us a massive monolith of ancient knowing, the whale shoots straight up into the air, pushing itself toward the sky. And somehow this giant hangs in the air, suspended for what seems an eternity. I don't know if a dog can gasp but it felt as if both Buster and I inhaled at exactly the same moment, with this sudden eruption of natural superiority. My heart thumped in my chest as I realised the whale had crafted its launch into the air so as to be able to look directly at us. I was drawn to the small dark eye full of curiosity, taking me and the dog in, making a connection I would never have dreamed possible before this moment.

We watched as the mountain of grey slid gently back into the water, as straight as it had shot up, but so much slower and in a manner that recognised the moment of linking and acknowledged its importance. Saying goodbye in much the same way we do when it’s painful but inevitable, unstoppable. Gone.

Buster and I glance at one another. Eyes meeting in the familiar way we do every morning.  That was that. Now onwards and back to the day. We turn away from the sea that is making me desperate to step into it, to step down into it, fall into it, step off the shelf into the depths where I could glide with huge creatures staring at the sky through the lens of the water’s surface. We turn away for another day and make our way back to the land that is fed by the salty air. 

Among the light green succulents, the amber brown bracken and sharp pink blush thorns to my surprise there’s a poppy that has somehow fixed itself to the brittle sandy soil and, with its whiskered feathery leaves dancing in the sea breeze; it is now pushing its plump burgeoning head up towards the sky, colour about to burst from the plump pouch. Another moment of beautiful struggle and determination preparing to launch its red purple petals onto the canvas of the sky.

The struggle. Always ongoing. Pushing forward. 

Forgiving.   

Colin Stevens