“We have to leave early,” my granddaughters insisted the day before we left for Cape Cod, “so we can get there in time to go to the beach.” And so we did, the first day of our visit, not for a swim, but for a long walk with plenty of shells and seaweed and the thrilling smell of low tide. The temperature had barely reached 40 back in Vermont when we packed a car and a truck with luggage, bicycles, and three generations of family. Later that afternoon it had risen only into the mid-70s when we pulled into Chatham, so we were content to wait a day for swimming if we could just get out onto the sand that starts just a few hundred yards from the house where we were staying, guests of my wife’s twin and her husband.
Our second day was no warmer, the wind so strong that flags looked like they had been starched and ironed flat. We filled the day with inland fun until late afternoon and then returned to the beach. The sky was gray with clouds that promised rain, but three of us were determined to get into the water, the rest content to walk the beach, collecting shells. Once in the water my son and I needed some bravado for the next step, but my older granddaughter saw the plunge as a natural conclusion to a day of joy. Given our differences, I was surprised by how long we all stayed in the water once we were wet.
Half a mile across the water from where we stood, an island acted as a buffer between us and open ocean. Ten years ago in this spot there was no island, just a sand bar that steadily grew until today it is a mile long, crowned with vegetation and populated by animals that have swum the channel in search of food and adventure. In a world where we date mountains in millions of years and stars in the billions, a world where I stare with wonder and doubt about how I fit into the plan, an island, that first appeared roughly the same time as my shivering granddaughter and grew with her in scale for the next nine years, is something I can relate to.
At moments like this I feel so close to my flesh and blood, remembering earlier days when my son was a child or I a child myself standing knee-deep in the Atlantic. Surely my son is thinking the same as he watches his daughter wade deeper, and for a flash he’s a child again just as I am. The spell vanishes and I’m back to being a grandfather, an old man now, forever reconstructing his past sentimentally, philosophically, never in the moment so much as thinking about it.
This is the essence of being old, a plunge into cold water or the cry of a seagull overhead rarely just that, but instead a madeleine to take me somewhere else where there is meaning to be weighed, analysis to be performed, perspective to be established. This phenomenon is neither good nor bad, just comfortably somewhere in between. I’m long beyond ruing lost youth, and I’m learning to accept the aches in my joints. There is a richness to be felt when personal history keeps butting in.
My two granddaughters — the younger barely visible down the beach and delighted by each new shell she picks up, her sister wrapped in a towel but already talking about going back into the water — aren’t troubled by meaning although they are surrounded by it. They know how to live in the moment, the younger one so focused on color and shape as she flips a dead crab over with her toe that she has no thoughts on mortality, the older seeing her father and grandfather laughing and chest deep in water, can ignore the probability that before long one of us will be gone.
This island is a bit of a conundrum to me: a dramatic change in ecology that seems neither entirely bad nor good. Yes, you may have to sail around the island to get to the stiffer winds of open sea, but now you can take a charter boat from harbor to island for a day of surf or snorkeling. It’s true that big waves no longer crash on this particular beach, but the dunes have grown dramatically in the last decade. There may be fewer seals to entertain you as you walk in the lee of the island, but you can bob in the water without a single thought about sharks. How rare it is for change to feel so benign.
The sky to the northeast darkened with rainclouds. We gathered our things and headed for the house, first through dunes that rose and fell, then through a maze of brush that at night is home to rabbits and coyotes, they too beneficiaries of this windfall of sand. My immediate goal was a warm shower and dry clothes, and after that no more thinking than what I would need to keep pace in a card game designed for children.