"I see at last... the great wild aviary, the sea as gullible as a bind-weed."... My shoulder can now go to sleep, my youth come running. It is this alone that should furnish immediate and working riches. For there is one pure day every year, a day that digs its marvelous show in the foam of the sea, a day that rises to the eyes to crown noon. Yesterday... the shark and the gull did not talk to each other....
"... Make every assumed end be... a feverish forward for those who stumble through the morning's heaviness."
--René Char, "Le requin et la mouette"
A great horde of belles-turning-punk arrives at the ocean. The ocean contrasts sharply with their 'dos, velveteen and attitudes of benevolence, with each feature in a different way. There is something profound about this, notes a parent on the boardwalk. There is something notably important about this, thinks a boy on the boardwalk: something I will want to remember long, long from now, when I have my own belle-turning-punk surely charging similarly along a similar path as any one of these belles-turning-punk in a horde arriving at the ocean. That is the boy's first thought about this.
The belles have arrived from Des Moines.
They break into a fisty gallop. The ocean is very much there, licking the punctilio from the belles' upbringing, rampaging also in a certain way, buffing the sweat of their voyage into a sheen hardly distinguishable from the standard lacquer of walnut or fine oak, welcoming them to its unusual clutch.
The belles' particular frenzy is so extreme that their legs have surpassed the gripping function of sand and begin to enjoin upon it a very convincing rendition of dig, so that with every split-second step the horde goes deeper and deeper into this lip of the wild sea. Wild sea, ever an only slightly lessening distance from the horde of belles! Wild sea, not hosting at all the bathing extravaganza perhaps envisioned by each of the belles in turn somewhere between Des Moines and the sea, thinking "Sea, wild sea, what will you hold for me? Huh?"
The hole gets deeper, and with it the belles, who are charging at high romp ever higher, going deeper and deeper into the beach, that beach of a different constitution from the dirt of Des Moines, o dirt fled from wrathfully, dirt. The sand has enveloped the fastest of the belles so that nothing of them shows save puffs from their dynamo enthusiasm, puff puff into the soles of the next fastest belles, who are also churning into the sand, much faster than the belles behind them, who are also, of course, helping to make this hole in the beach now fifty yards deep.
O deep!
The parents on the boardwalk are somewhat surprised, but see this as all in the plan, perhaps of physics. Many have cameras and shoot with an anticipation of futures that is roughly commensurate with the belles'. Many of the parents' other offspring have disdainful, jealous looks, but many, like the thoughtful boy, look towards a future full of cycles and elemental repetition.
In the sea, beyond the trench of belles-turning-punk, are an army of shadow punks, bobbing in the surf, one wave after another taking them up, down. Many have fixed their bobbing gazes on the parents beyond the trench, who photograph them along with their daughters. Remarkable column! one parent will exclaim at home in Des Moines, much later, noting the grey mass of rebellion in the sea. Much like a part of our own history! another will exclaim.
Yikes, the thoughtful boy will think. Yikes, and not unlike something terrific, grey and deathly, bobbing up and down in the sea. I am very afraid, and yet intrigued. Perhaps, the boy will think, there is some way to contact that mass from a flying machine, perhaps a helicopter, and perhaps I will do so, will be one of the ones who do so. Perhaps I shall one day speak with punk, the real grey mass of punk, out there in the sea, in the surf, in the waves, bobbing. Perhaps in the meantime I shall study the great science of oceanography. I have heard it is good!